Drought and heat consume the snow waters: so doth the grave those which have sinned.
Job 24 belongs to Job's defense against the charges of his friends and vindication of his own righteousness, where he describes evildoers who remove landmarks, violently take away flocks and feed on them, drive away the donkey of the fatherless, take the widow's ox as a pledge, and turn the needy out of the way. He contrasts their lives with his own, which had not been so, because he delivered the poor who cried and the fatherless and the helpless who had none to help him, caused the widow's heart to sing for joy, was eyes to the blind and feet to the lame, and was a father to the poor. The verse stands among the statements made by Job's friends, whose words were generally true but misapplied to Job, so its statement that the grave consumes sinners does not prove that a person's suffering shows divine displeasure or that the sufferer has sinned.
The verse uses sheol, rendered here as grave, one of thirty-one Old Testament occurrences so rendered, while the word is elsewhere translated as hell or pit, and here it means the grave, the pit, or the state of the dead. In the verse sheol consumes those who have sinned as drought and heat consume snow waters, and sheol is the common receptacle of the dead, righteous and wicked alike.
As heat consumes snowmelt, so the grave consumes those who have sinned, teaching that the wicked meet their final doom. The comparison conveys a violent taking of the snow waters, while ordinary death does not uniquely or consistently take the wicked violently, so the grave here means the future destruction of the wicked and not merely temporal or ordinary death. That destruction occurs when wickedness is broken like a tree, when sin and sinners are swept from the earth and righteousness has supreme sway and rule, at the ushering in of the new-earth state. The worm feeding on the wicked belongs to the same time as the worm in Isaiah 66:24, at the ushering in of the new-earth state.
Job 24 belongs to Job's defense against the charges of his friends and vindication of his own righteousness, where he describes evildoers who remove landmarks, violently take away flocks and feed on them, drive away the donkey of the fatherless, take the widow's ox as a pledge, and turn the needy out of the way. He contrasts their lives with his own, which had not been so, because he delivered the poor who cried and the fatherless and the helpless who had none to help him, caused the widow's heart to sing for joy, was eyes to the blind and feet to the lame, and was a father to the poor. The verse stands among the statements made by Job's friends, whose words were generally true but misapplied to Job, so its statement that the grave consumes sinners does not prove that a person's suffering shows divine displeasure or that the sufferer has sinned.
The verse uses sheol, rendered here as grave, one of thirty-one Old Testament occurrences so rendered, while the word is elsewhere translated as hell or pit, and here it means the grave, the pit, or the state of the dead. In the verse sheol consumes those who have sinned as drought and heat consume snow waters, and sheol is the common receptacle of the dead, righteous and wicked alike.
As heat consumes snowmelt, so the grave consumes those who have sinned, teaching that the wicked meet their final doom. The comparison conveys a violent taking of the snow waters, while ordinary death does not uniquely or consistently take the wicked violently, so the grave here means the future destruction of the wicked and not merely temporal or ordinary death. That destruction occurs when wickedness is broken like a tree, when sin and sinners are swept from the earth and righteousness has supreme sway and rule, at the ushering in of the new-earth state. The worm feeding on the wicked belongs to the same time as the worm in Isaiah 66:24, at the ushering in of the new-earth state.