Though I speak, my grief is not asswaged: and though I forbear, what am I eased?
Job 16:6 stands within Job's reply to his three friends in their debate concerning his afflictions. In that reply he maintains his innocence and desires death, and the verse expresses his grief as part of that protest. It states that speaking of his grief does not assuage it, and forbearing to speak leaves him without easing.
His unrelieved condition belongs to the book's treatment of human affliction, in which his failure to comprehend God's dealings does not signify loss of integrity. Nor does his suffering prove divine displeasure against him. The book's meaning and force are grasped better by reading it as a whole than by taking it in fragments, to which this verse belongs.
Job 16:6 stands within Job's reply to his three friends in their debate concerning his afflictions. In that reply he maintains his innocence and desires death, and the verse expresses his grief as part of that protest. It states that speaking of his grief does not assuage it, and forbearing to speak leaves him without easing.
His unrelieved condition belongs to the book's treatment of human affliction, in which his failure to comprehend God's dealings does not signify loss of integrity. Nor does his suffering prove divine displeasure against him. The book's meaning and force are grasped better by reading it as a whole than by taking it in fragments, to which this verse belongs.