Job 14 Bible study: Hope for a tree

Every word of this chapter is Job's. His answer began, "Then Job answered" (12:1), and this chapter is its end; the next heading is "Then Eliphaz the Temanite answered" (15:1). Since 13:20 he has been speaking to God: "Only don’t do two things to me, then I will not hide myself from your face" (13:20). He goes on, "Man, who is born of a woman, is of few days, and full of trouble" (14:1) (tap trouble), and "He grows up like a flower, and is cut down. He also flees like a shadow, and doesn’t continue" (14:2). Eliphaz had said, "but man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward" (5:7). In Hebrew man is the same word in 5:7 and 14:1, and born is from the same verb, but trouble is not: 14:1's trouble is the last word of Job's speech in chapter 3, "but trouble comes" (3:26). Then Job asks, "Do you open your eyes on such a one, and bring me into judgment with you?" (14:3), and "Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one" (14:4). Since "you have appointed his bounds that he can’t pass" (14:5) (tap bounds), he asks, "Look away from him, that he may rest, until he accomplishes, as a hireling, his day" (14:6) (tap Look away). He had asked it before: "How long will you not look away from me" (7:19), the same verb. And hireling is the word of "Aren’t his days like the days of a hired hand?" (7:1).

Job 14:14→leads toJohn 11:25-26

Job asks, "If a man dies, will he live again?" (14:14), after saying, "so man lies down and doesn’t rise" (14:12). After Lazarus had died, Jesus said to his sister Martha, "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will still live, even if he dies" (John 11:25), and "Whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?" (John 11:26). John doesn't name Job, so setting the two side by side is a reading, resting on a shared subject: whether one who dies will live, which Job asks and Jesus speaks to in his own words about himself. Some read the two together: the question Job leaves open in this chapter is one Jesus answers. Others read each in its own setting: Job's question stands in his own speech, and the book comes back to it in chapter 19; Jesus spoke to Martha about her brother and said nothing of Job. Neither reading makes Job a picture of Jesus, or says what Job himself believed.

תִּקְוָהtiqvahsay tik-VAH

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "hope". Strong's: "figuratively, expectancy". Job gives it first to a tree: "For there is hope for a tree if it is cut down" (14:7). Then he says to God, "So you destroy the hope of man" (14:19). In the Hebrew of Job it comes thirteen times. Bildad had said, "The hope of the godless man will perish" (8:13), where perish is the verb of 14:19's destroy. Later Job puts the tree and the hope together: "He has plucked my hope up like a tree" (19:10).