12 From out of the populous city, men groan. The soul of the wounded cries out, yet God doesn't regard the folly.
*Minor differences ignored. Grouped by changes, with first version listed as example.
Men groan from out of the city - The evident meaning of this is, that the sorrows caused by oppression were not confined to the deserts and to solitary places; were not seen only where the wandering freebooter seized upon the traveler, or in the comparatively unfrequented places in the country where the poor were compelled to labor in the wine presses and the olive presses of others, but that they extended to cities also. In what way this oppression in cities was practiced, Job does not specify. It might be by the sudden descent upon an unsuspecting city, of hordes of freebooters, who robbed and murdered the inhabitants, and then fled, or it might be by internal oppression, as of the rich ever the poor, or of masters over their slaves. The idea which Job seems to wish to convey is, that oppression abounded. The earth was full of violence. It was in every place, in the city and the country, and yet God did not in fact come forth to meet and punish the oppressor as he deserved. There would be instances of oppression and cruelty enough occurring in all cities to justify all that Job here says, especially in ancient times, when cities were under the control of tyrants. The word which is translated "men" here is מתים mathı̂ym, which is not the usual term to denote men. This word is derived from מוּת mûth, "to die"; and hence, there may be here the notion of "mortals," or of the "dying," who utter these groans.
And the soul of the wounded crieth out - This expression appears as if Job referred to some acts of violence done by robbers, and perhaps the whole description is intended to apply to the sufferings caused by the sudden descent of a band of marauders upon the unsuspection and slumbering inhabitants of a city.
Yet God layeth not folly to them - The word rendered "folly" תפלה tı̂phlâh means "folly"; and thence also wickedness. If this reading is to be retained, the passage means that God does not lay to heart, that is, does not regard their folly or wickedness. He suffers it to pass without punishing it; compare Acts 17:30. But the same word, by a change of the points, תפלה tephı̂llâh, means "prayer;" and many have supposed that it means, that God does not regard the prayer or cry of those who are thus oppressed. This, in itself, would make good sense, but the former rendering agrees better with the connection. The object of Job is not to show that God does not regard the cry of the afflicted, but that he does not interpose to punish those who are tyrants and oppressors.
Men groan from out of the city - This is a new paragraph. After having shown the oppressions carried on in the country, he takes a view of those carried on in the town. Here the miseries are too numerous to be detailed. The poor in such places are often in the most wretched state; they are not only badly fed, and miserably clothed, but also most unwholesomely lodged. I was once appointed with a benevolent gentleman, J. S., Esq., to visit a district in St. Giles's London, to know the real state of the poor. We took the district in House Row, and found each dwelling full of people, dirt, and wretchedness. Neither old nor young had the appearance of health: some were sick, and others lying dead, in the same place! Several beds, if they might be called such, on the floor in the same apartment; and, in one single house, sixty souls! These were groaning under various evils; and the soul of the wounded, wounded in spirit, and afflicted in body, cried out to God and man for help! It would have required no subtle investigation to have traced all these miseries to the doors, the hands, the lips, and the hearts, of ruthless landlords; or to oppressive systems of public expenditure in the support of ruinous wars, and the stagnation of trade and destruction of commerce occasioned by them: to which must be added the enormous taxation to meet this expenditure.
Yet God layeth not folly to them - He does not impute their calamities to their own folly. Or, according to the Vulgate, Et Deus inultum abire non patitur; "And God will not leave (these disorders) unpunished." But the Hebrew may be translated And God doth not attend to their prayers. Job's object was to show, in opposition to the mistaken doctrine of his friends, that God did not hastily punish every evil work, nor reward every good one. That vice often went long unpunished, and virtue unrewarded; and that we must not judge of a man's state either by his prosperity or adversity. Therefore, there might be cases in which the innocent oppressed poor were crying to God for a redress of their grievances, and were not immediately heard; and in which their oppressors were faring sumptuously every day, without any apparent mark of the Divine displeasure. These sentiments occur frequently.
Men (m) groan from out of the city, and the soul of the wounded crieth out: yet God (n) layeth not folly [to them].
(m) For the great oppression and extortion.
(n) Cry out and call for vengeance.
Men groan from out of the city,.... Because of the oppressions and injuries done to them, so that not only the poor in the country that were employed in the fields, and oliveyards, and vineyards, were used exceeding ill; but even in cities, where not only are an abundance of people, and so the outrages committed upon them, which made them groan, were done openly and publicly, with great insolence and impudence, but where also courts of judicature were held, and yet in defiance of law and justice were those evils done, see Ecclesiastes 3:16;
and the soul of the wounded crieth out; that is, the persons wounded with the sword, or any other instrument of vengeance, stabbed as they went along the public streets of the city, where they fell, these cried out vehemently as such persons do; so audacious, as well as barbarous, were these wicked men, that insulted and abused them:
yet God layeth not folly to them; it is for the sake of this observation that the whole above account is given of wicked men, as well as what follows; that though they are guilty of such atrocious crimes, such inhumanity, cruelty, and oppression in town and country, unheard of, unparalleled, iniquities, sins to be punished by a judge, yet are suffered of God to pass with impunity. By "folly" is meant sin, not lesser sins only, little, foolish, trifling things, but greater and grosser ones, such as before expressed; all sin is folly, being the breach of a law which is holy, just, and good, and exposes to its penalty and curse; and against God the lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy; and as it is harmful and prejudicial, either to the characters, bodies, or estates of men, and especially to their immortal souls; and yet God that charges his angels with folly did not charge these men with it; that is, he seemed, in the outward dealings of his providence towards them, as if he took no notice of their sins, but connived at them, or took no account of them, and did not take any methods in his providence to show their folly, and convince them of it, nor discover it to others, and make them public examples, did not punish them, but let them go on in them without control; and this Job observes, in order to prove his point, that wicked men are not always punished in this life.
Men--rather, "mortals" (not the common Hebrew for "men"); so the Masoretic vowel points read as English Version. But the vowel points are modern. The true reading is, "The dying," answering to "the wounded" in the next clause, so Syriac. Not merely in the country (Job 24:11), but also in the city there are oppressed sufferers, who cry for help in vain. "From out of the city"; that is, they long to get forth and be free outside of it (Exodus 1:11; Job 2:23).
wounded--by the oppressor (Ezekiel 30:24).
layeth not folly--takes no account of (by punishing) their sin ("folly" in Scripture; Job 1:22). This is the gist of the whole previous list of sins (Acts 17:30). UMBREIT with Syriac reads by changing a vowel point, "Regards not their supplication."
It is natural, with Umbr., Ew., Hirz., and others, to read מתים like the Peschito; but as mı̂te in Syriac, so also מתים in Hebrew as a noun everywhere signifies the dead (Arab. mauta), not the dying, mortals (Arab. matna); wherefore Ephrem interprets the praes. "they groan" by the perf. "they have groaned." The pointing מתים, therefore, is quite correct; but the accentuation which, by giving Mehupach Zinnorith to מעיר, and Asla legarmeh to מתים, places the two words in a genitival relation, is hardly correct: in the city of men, i.e., the inhabited, thickly-populated city, they groan; not: men (as Rosenm. explains, according to Genesis 9:6; Proverbs 11:6) groan; for just because מתים appeared to be too inexpressive as a subject, this accentuation seems to have been preferred. It is also possible that the signification fierce anger (Hosea 11:9), or anguish (Jeremiah 15:8), was combined with עיר, comp. Arab. gayrt, jealousy, fury (= קנאה), of which, however, no trace is anywhere visible.
(Note: Wetzstein translates Hosea 11:9 : I will not come as a raging foe, with ב of the attribute = Arab. b-ṣifat 'l-‛ayyûr (comp. Jeremiah 15:8, עיר, parall. שׁדד) after the form קים, to which, if not this עיר, certainly the עיר, ἐγρήγορος, occurring in Daniel 4:10, and freq., corresponds. What we remarked above, p. 483, on the form קים, is cleared up by the following observation of Wetzstein: "The form קים belongs to the numerous class of segolate forms of the form פעל, which, as belonging to the earliest period of the formation of the Semitic languages, take neither plural nor feminine terminations; they have often a collective meaning, and are not originally abstracta, but concreta in the sense of the Arabic part. act. mufâ‛l. This inflexible primitive formation is frequently found in the present day in the idiom of the steppe, which shows that the Hebrew is essentially of primeval antiquity (uralt). Thus the Beduin says: hû qitlı̂ (הוּא קטלי), he is my opponent in a hand-to-hand combat; nithı̂ (נטחי), my opponent in the tournament with lances; chı̂lfı̂ (חלפי) and diddı̂ (צדּי), my adversary; thus a step-mother is called dı̂r (ציר), as the oppressor of the step-children, and a concubine dirr (צרר), as the oppressor of her rival. The Kamus also furnishes several words which belong here, as tilb (טלב), a persecutor." Accordingly, קים is derived from קום, as also עיר, a city, from עור (whence, according to a prevalent law of the change of letters, we have עיר first of all, plur. עירים, Judges 10:4), and signifies the rebelling one, i.e., the enemy (who is now in the idiom of the steppe called qômâni, from qôm, a state of war, a feud), as עיר, a keeper and ציר, a messenger; עיר (קיר) is also originally concrete, a wall (enclosure).)
With Jeremiah., Symm., and Theod., we take מתים as the sighing ones themselves; the feebleness of the subject disappears if we explain the passage according to such passages as Deuteronomy 2:34; Deuteronomy 3:6, comp. Judges 20:48 : it is the male inhabitants that are intended, whom any conqueror would put to the sword; we have therefore translated men (men of war), although "people" (Job 11:3) also would not have been unsuitable according to the ancient use of the word. נאק is intended of the groans of the dying, as Jeremiah 51:52; Ezekiel 30:24, as Job 24:12 also shows: the soul of those that are mortally wounded cries out. חללים signifies not merely the slain and already dead, but, according to its etymon, those who are pierced through those who have received their death-blow; their soul cries out, since it does not leave the body without a struggle. Such things happen without God preventing them. לא־ישׂים תּפלה, He observeth not the abomination, either = לא ישׂים בלבו, Job 22:22 (He layeth it not to heart), or, since the phrase occurs nowhere elliptically, = לא ישׂים לבו על, Job 1:8; Job 34:23) He does not direct His heart, His attention to it), here as elliptical, as in Job 4:20; Isaiah 41:20. True, the latter phrase is never joined with the acc. of the object; but if we translate after שׂים בּ, Job 4:18 : non imputat, He does not reckon such תפלה, i.e., does not punish it, בּם (בּהם) ought to be supplied, which is still somewhat liable to misconstruction, since the preceding subject is not the oppressors, but those who suffer oppression. תּפלה is properly insipidity (comp. Arab. tafila, to stink), absurdity, self-contradiction, here the immorality which sets at nought the moral order of the world, and remains nevertheless unpunished. The Syriac version reads תּפלּה, and translates, like Louis Bridel (1818): et Dieu ne fait aucune attention leur prire.
Groan - Under grievous oppressions. Soul - The life or blood of those who are wounded to death, as this word properly signifies, crieth aloud to God for vengeance. Yet - Yet God doth not punish them.
*More commentary available at chapter level.