New English Translation

Job 21:1-16

1 1Then Job answered:

2“Listen carefully to my words; let this be the consolation you offer me.

3Bear with me and I will speak, and after I have spoken you may mock.

4Is my complaint against a man? If so, why should I not be impatient?

5Look at me and be appalled; put your hands over your mouths.

6For, when I think about this, I am terrified and my body feels a shudder.

7“Why do the wicked go on living, grow old, even increase in power?

8Their children are firmly established in their presence, their offspring before their eyes.

9Their houses are safe and without fear; and no rod of punishment from God is upon them.

10Their bulls breed without fail; their cows calve and do not miscarry.

11They allow their children to run like a flock; their little ones dance about.

12They sing to the accompaniment of tambourine and harp, and make merry to the sound of the flute.

13They live out their years in prosperity and go down to the grave in peace.

14So they say to God, ‘Turn away from us! We do not want to know your ways.

15Who is the Almighty, that we should serve him? What would we gain if we were to pray to him?’

16But their prosperity is not their own doing. The counsel of the wicked is far from me!

Notes

1. Job 21:1 In this chapter Job actually answers the ideas of all three of his friends. Here Job finds the flaw in their argument – he can point to wicked people who prosper. But whereas in the last speech, when he looked on his suffering from the perspective of his innocence, he found great faith and hope, in this chapter when he surveys the divine government of the world, he sinks to despair. The speech can be divided into five parts: he appeals for a hearing (2-6), he points out the prosperity of the wicked (7-16), he wonders exactly when the godless suffer (17-22), he shows how death levels everything (23-26), and he reveals how experience contradicts his friends’ argument (27-34). ↩