Job 16 explained: Job Looks for a Witness in Heaven

Miserable comforters (vv. 1-5)

His friend Eliphaz had just called Job's words empty wind, and Job throws the charge back: their speeches are long, repetitive and no help at all. If the roles were reversed, he says, he could pile up words and mock them too, but he would try to ease their pain instead.

Nothing brings relief (vv. 6-8)

Talking does not ease his pain and staying quiet does not either. God has worn him out and wiped out his household, and his wasted, bony body is now treated by his friends as evidence that he must be guilty.

God pictured as an attacker (vv. 9-14)

Job uses raw images: God as a wild animal tearing him, an enemy glaring at him, an archer whose arrows pierce his vital organs, a warrior smashing through a city wall again and again. Meanwhile people jeer and slap his face, an old gesture of contempt, and he feels handed over to cruel people.

Grief, yet innocent (vv. 15-17)

He has sewn on sackcloth, a rough garment worn in mourning, and laid his head low in the dust, a picture of his former strength and standing brought down. His face is raw from crying, yet he insists he has done no violence and his prayers are sincere.

A witness on high (vv. 18-19)

Like a murder victim whose spilled blood cries out from the ground, as Abel's does in Genesis, Job asks the earth not to hide what has been done to him. Even now, he says, his witness is in heaven; scholars are unsure whether he means God himself or another heavenly figure, and Christians have often read it as pointing to Jesus.

Pleading and running out of time (vv. 20-22)

Verse 20 is hard to translate, so some versions say his friends mock him and others say his go-between is his friend, but either way Job weeps toward God and longs for someone to plead his case as one pleads for a friend. He expects to die within a few years, on a road no one comes back from, so he wants his name cleared soon.

Key verse: Job 16:19

Where Christians differ

Christians differ on who Job's heavenly witness is: some see God himself defending Job against his own suffering, others a separate heavenly advocate, and many read it as a foreshadowing of Jesus pleading for people before God.

Something to think about

Have you ever needed someone to vouch for you when the people around you had already made up their minds, and what did that feel like?