Today’s Passage: Job 19
Job 19 goes to the loneliest place in the whole book before it begins to rise. God, Job says, has wronged him and drawn a net around him, and every human circle has failed him at once: his brothers and kinsmen, his friends and servants, his own wife, and even the children in the street. He begs them, “Have pity on me, my friends,” and they will not. And then, out of that very pit, comes the confession the book is famous for: “I know that my goel, pronounced go-ALE. Strong's H1350, kinsman-redeemer, one who redeems or avenges on behalf of a relative. The goel is not first of all a metaphor. He is a relative with a duty laid on him. In Leviticus 25 he is bound to buy back land that has slipped from the family, and to buy back a kinsman who has had to sell himself into servitude. In Numbers 35 he is bound to avenge a kinsman’s blood, and in Deuteronomy 25, under the levirate law, to keep a dead brother’s name alive. Ruth 4 shows us the office at work in a field and at a town gate, where Boaz steps in because he is near of kin and because he is willing. lives… and in my flesh I will see God.” Stripped of everyone, he lays hold of a living goel. He does not yet have a name for Him. What he has is the word.
As you read, hold this: I know that my Redeemer lives.
Context The world of Job 19
Just before the confession, Job wishes his words could be cut with an iron stylus, filled with lead, and engraved in rock, a record that would outlast his own skin. There is a large irony in the wish, because the words were in fact kept, and we are reading them still.
The goel was not a mood or a feeling. It was a legal office. If a man fell into debt, or lost the family land, or was wronged with no one to speak for him, the nearest kinsman was bound to step in and act: to buy back, to avenge, to vindicate, to carry the family name. For Job to call God his goel is to claim God as his nearest of kin, bound by that kinship to rescue him, and he does it in the very chapter where he feels God has become his enemy.
He also says that he will see God in his own flesh, after the skin is gone. Hope of a body beyond death is rare in the Old Testament and comes only in seed form, and this is one of those seeds. He is reaching for something he cannot yet see clearly, because he has not stood at an empty tomb.
Job 19:1–12 (BSB)
¹ Then Job answered: ² “How long will you torment me and crush me with your words? ³ Ten times now you have reproached me; you shamelessly mistreat me. ⁴ Even if I have truly gone astray, my error concerns me alone. ⁵ If indeed you would exalt yourselves above me and use my disgrace against me, ⁶ then understand that it is God who has wronged me and drawn His net around me. ⁷ Though I cry out, ‘Violence!’ I get no response; though I call for help, there is no justice. ⁸ He has blocked my way so I cannot pass; He has veiled my paths with darkness. ⁹ He has stripped me of my honor and removed the crown from my head. ¹⁰ He tears me down on every side until I am gone; He uproots my hope like a tree. ¹¹ His anger burns against me, and He counts me among His enemies. ¹² His troops advance together; they construct a ramp against me and encamp around my tent.
Two sources of pain are named here. First the friends, whose words have become their own kind of violence, and then God Himself. Job feels besieged, as though the Almighty has laid military siege against his tent. God has “uprooted my hope like a tree,” the felled-tree image from chapter 14 now turned back on Job himself. This is the ground on which verse 25 will stand. The confession that is coming is not the easy optimism of a man whose troubles are lifting. It is faith spoken from inside the siege.
Job 19:13–22 (BSB)
¹³ He has removed my brothers from me; my acquaintances have abandoned me. ¹⁴ My kinsmen have failed me, and my friends have forgotten me. ¹⁵ My guests and maidservants count me as a stranger; I am a foreigner in their sight. ¹⁶ I call for my servant, but he does not answer, though I implore him with my own mouth. ¹⁷ My breath is repulsive to my wife, and I am loathsome to my own family. ¹⁸ Even little boys scorn me; when I appear, they deride me. ¹⁹ All my best friends despise me, and those I love have turned against me. ²⁰ My skin and flesh cling to my bones; I have escaped by the skin of my teeth. ²¹ Have pity on me, my friends, have pity, for the hand of God has struck me. ²² Why do you persecute me as God does? Will you never get enough of my flesh?
Every circle gives way at once: his brothers and acquaintances, his kinsmen and friends, his guests and servants, his own wife, the boys in the street, and the people he loves most, all of them turned away. Verse 20 gives us the phrase that entered our own language, that he has escaped by the skin of his teeth, barely escaping with his life. Then comes the plea, “Have pity on me, my friends, have pity,” and he is asking only for compassion, which they withhold. The very kinsmen who should have been goel to him have forgotten him, and it is out of that pit that the next verses rise.
Job 19:23–29 (BSB)
²³ I wish that my words were recorded and inscribed in a book, ²⁴ by an iron stylus on lead, or chiseled in stone forever. ²⁵ But I know that my Redeemer lives, and in the end He will stand upon the earth. ²⁶ Even after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God. ²⁷ I will see Him for myself; my eyes will behold Him, and not as a stranger. How my heart yearns within me! ²⁸ If you say, ‘Let us persecute him, since the root of the matter lies with him,’ ²⁹ then you should fear the sword yourselves, because wrath brings punishment by the sword, so that you may know there is a judgment.
This is the summit. He longs to have the words cut in stone, and then he speaks the very words that were kept: “I know that my Redeemer lives.” He does not say that he hopes, but that he knows. There are three claims here, and every one of them stands against the evidence in front of him. His goel lives, when all around him is death. His goel will stand upon the earth at the last. And he himself, after the skin is gone, will see God in his flesh, with his own eyes, and not as a stranger. The man who felt that God had counted him an enemy now claims that same God as his nearest of kin. This is faith at its most defiant, and it is still a reaching, because he does not have the name and he does not have the empty tomb. He has a living Redeemer and a yearning heart, and we will leave him there.
Job has just finished saying that his own flesh-and-blood kinsmen have failed him (19:13–14), and then he says that he has a goel anyway. He has One who lives, חַי (ḥay, Strong’s H2416), One who goes on living while everything around Job is dying, One who will stand upon the earth at the last, and One whom Job himself will see in his own flesh and not as a stranger. The word gathers up the older longings of the book into itself: the mediator Job wished for in 9:33, the witness he appealed to in 16:19, and now a family redeemer, bound by kinship to take up the case and set it right.
Job does not unpack a later fulfillment, and he cannot, because he does not yet have it. What he has is the office, the living, and the seeing, and a heart that yearns. “How my heart yearns within me,” he says, and the words mean, quite literally, that his innermost being is consumed. That is the hinge of the day. He is not preaching a sermon he could not yet know. He is simply laying hold of a living kinsman.
Study notes Going deeper
Job 19:25 is the mountaintop of the book, and Job is still on the ash heap when he says it.
"But I know that my Redeemer lives, and in the end He will stand upon the earth." Job 19:25 (BSB)
The church would come to hear what a goel like this one would finally cost. That fuller knowledge is not yet the possession of this chapter. It is the later filling of a word that Job had already spoken in the dark.
"For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life you inherited from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or spot." 1 Peter 1:18–19 (BSB)
A kinsman-redeemer pays a price, and the goel whom Job trusted from the bottom of the pit is the very office that the later church would come to name in Christ. Job himself does not yet have the empty tomb. He has the word, the living, and the yearning, and it is enough to let the day hold. Yahweh has still not spoken, and the seeing that Job longs for has not yet come.