Job continues to describe what wicked men had done to him, saying: “Terrors are turned upon me: they pursue my soul as the wind: and my welfare passes away as a cloud” (Job 30:15; KJV). The word ‘soul’ (H5082) is used only here in scripture. The normal word for soul, nephesh (H5315): “…man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7), isn’t used in verse-15, but it is used in verse-16. So, what does Job mean to say in verse-15? The ‘terrors’ are what the young wicked men had brought upon Job, and the term soul (verse-15) refers to his character, his reputation, his willingness to do good. These wicked men attacked Job’s largeness of spirit, and in doing so, his sense of safety dissipated like a cloud in the sky (Job 30:15), as did also his personal peace in the sense that grief poured out of him (his soul; nephesh, H5315). Under these circumstances, then, the time of Job’s physical suffering took hold (Job 30:16; cp. 2:7), as he was gripped in the jaws of unimaginable pain, leaving him no rest (Job 30:17).
Job describes his disease as a great force (Job 30:18), which had taken his garment, or his skin and changed its nature. Instead of a covering for his body, it bound him or gripped him, caged him in pain. Job describes it as an enemy grabbing the collar of his coat. Similarly, as he says in Job 16:12, where he describes God as taking him by the neck and shaking him to pieces, setting him up as a mark, so his disease has done too. Thus, according to Job, God had grabbed him by the collar of his coat (Job 30:18; cp. Genesis 3:21, referring to Job’s skin), as it were, teaching (H3384) him what it was like to be a lump of clay, without strength, mourning in dust and ashes (verse-19).
Job stood up to pray, crying out to God for mercy, but to no avail (verse-20). He describes the Lord as treating him cruelly (Job 30:21), using his almighty power against him. Some scholars wonder if cruel is the intent Job wishes to convey, and others modify the sense by saying the Lord appears to treat Job cruelly. Nevertheless, the word is used in Lamentations 4:3 to express the merciless cruelty of the Jews toward their children. So, on the face, Job is saying, while formerly God had treated him with great mercy and honor, now he had turned very stern with him, showing no mercy. In fact, Job uses a winnowing phrase to describe what the Lord had done, saying he had cast him up to the wind, as though he were the chaff that was carried away. In other words, God was actively destroying Job’s very being (Job 30:22). Thus, Job says he knows the Lord was bringing him to his death, yet he mercilessly refused to complete the act, or to act upon his dying cry for mercy (Job 30:23-24).
In contrast, Job says that he had been merciful to the poor and helped those who were in trouble. Nevertheless, when Job looked for good, he was given, as it were, a stone (cp. Luke 11:11), and when he desired an explanation or grasped for understanding, he received nothing but silence and was left in the dark (Job 30:25-26). It is clear that Job was suffering inscrutable pain, but it would be wrong to assume he blames God for his troubles, or concludes that he, Job, was more merciful to others than the Lord had been with him. This is what the friends assumed Job was saying. Job believed God was, indeed, behind his calamities, but he also believed in a righteous God. Job didn’t know what was going on, but God was still righteous. Job submitted to the Lord and was merciful to others, but in his confused state, he had trouble seeing the mercy of God in his own life, but he, nevertheless, believed the Lord was righteous and merciful.
Finally, Job tells the friends that he couldn’t help but be surprised over the fact that his worldview had been overturned by the suddenness and the extent of his affliction. He became depressed over the fact that he simply couldn’t understand why such a thing would occur. When he looked for the light of understanding, he stumbled in the dark (Job 30:27-28). So, he had become like the jackal and the ostrich in that his cries of mourning resembled theirs, and his skin had scabbed and blackened and his body burned in pain (Job 30:29-30). Thus, Job’s song of joy had changed to that of mourning (Job 30:31; cp. Lamentations 5:14; Isaiah 30:29, 32).
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