Today’s Passage: Job 17
Chapter 17 is one of the darkest in the book. Job’s spirit is broken and his days are spent, mockers surround him, and he has become a byword among the people. He cannot find a single wise man among the friends who came to comfort him, so he turns and asks God to stand surety for him, because no one else will. Then he asks the question the chapter cannot answer, “Where then is my hope?” The chapter ends in the dark, and the question still stands.
As you read, hold this: Where then is my hope?
Context The world of Job 17
In ancient law a defendant often needed a third party to strike hands and guarantee his debt, and Proverbs warns more than once against doing such a thing lightly. Job has no such person to stand for him, so he turns to God and asks, “Who else will be my guarantor?” The plea names his isolation, and it also names his faith, because he still thinks God is the kind of God you ask.
To be made a mashal, a byword, and to have people spit in your face was to reach the very bottom of honor. The greatest man of the east has become the man people spit at, and his wealth, his family, his health, and his honor are all gone.
Verse 12 is difficult. Most readers hear in it Job’s complaint that the friends keep calling the night “day,” offering him false dawns, and he will not pretend the dark is light.
Job 17:1–5 (BSB)
¹ “My spirit is broken; my days are extinguished; the grave awaits me. ² Surely mockers surround me, and my eyes must gaze at their rebellion. ³ Give me, I pray, the pledge You demand. Who else will be my guarantor? ⁴ You have closed their minds to understanding; therefore You will not exalt them. ⁵ If a man denounces his friends for a price, the eyes of his children will fail.
He names his condition without flinching, a broken spirit and spent days, and then he turns, not away from God but toward Him, and asks God to post the bond. In that world a guarantor put up his own security for a man who could not back himself, and Job asks God to do exactly that. The God who seems to be against him is the only One who can stand for him, and even broken, his instinct is Godward. He has no human being willing to strike hands with him, and he will not go to no one at all.
Job 17:6–9 (BSB)
⁶ He has made me a byword among the people, a man in whose face they spit. ⁷ My eyes have grown dim with grief, and my whole body is but a shadow. ⁸ The upright are appalled at this, and the innocent are stirred against the godless. ⁹ Yet a righteous one holds to his way, and the one with clean hands grows stronger.
The humiliation is total. He is a byword and spat upon, his eyes are dim and his body is a shadow, and he has fallen from the greatest man of the east to the man people spit at. And then, against every line around it, comes verse 9: “Yet a righteous one holds to his way, and the one with clean hands grows stronger.” It is a flash of defiant perseverance in a chapter of ruin, and Job is, perhaps without fully seeing it, describing himself. Stripped of everything, he holds on. This is not a man who never broke; this is a man who, broken, has not let go. That single word yet is the whole witness of the chapter.
Job 17:10–16 (BSB)
¹⁰ But come back and try again, all of you. For I will not find a wise man among you. ¹¹ My days have passed; my plans are broken off—even the desires of my heart. ¹² They have turned night into day, making light seem near in the face of darkness. ¹³ If I look for Sheol as my home, if I spread out my bed in darkness, ¹⁴ and say to corruption, ‘You are my father,’ and to the worm, ‘My mother,’ or ‘My sister,’ ¹⁵ where then is my hope? Who can see any hope for me? ¹⁶ Will it go down to the gates of Sheol? Will we go down together into the dust?
He dismisses the friends, finding no wisdom among them, and his plans are broken off until he is ready to call the grave his home and the worm his mother. They have turned night into day, offering him a dawn he will not fake, and then comes the question that names the whole crisis, “Where then is my hope? Who can see any hope for me?” He cannot find it, and it seems to be descending with him into the dust. The chapter ends, like chapter 14 before it, in the dark, and yet verse 9 still stands. The tiqvah, pronounced tik-VAH. Strong's H8615, hope, expectation (from a root picturing a cord stretched taut). It means hope and expectation, and underneath the word lies the picture of a cord stretched out toward the future.
We met tiqvah back in chapter 14, where a felled tree had it and a man seemed not to. Now Job asks the question directly, “Where then is my hope (tiqvah)?” He cannot see it, and it seems to him headed down to the gates of Sheol. Yet the asking is not nothing, for a man with no hope at all does not go looking for it. He is feeling in the dark for a cord he cannot yet grasp. is asked for, not located, and Yahweh has not yet spoken. We will not invent a dawn he cannot see.
Study notes Going deeper
Job 17 is a chapter of collapse, and verse 15 is the question the collapse asks.
"Where then is my hope? Who can see any hope for me?" Job 17:15 (BSB)
He cannot answer it. The church would one day come to hear a name for the God of hope, but that is not yet this chapter’s possession.
"Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you believe in Him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit." Romans 15:13 (BSB)
Job asked where his tiqvah had gone, and he asked it into the dark. The first cycle of speeches ended that way, and the second is not kinder. Let the chapter end where it ends. The book is not over, and the question still stands.