27:11-23 Job's friends, on the same subject, spoke of the misery of wicked men before death as proportioned to their crimes; Job considered that if it were not so, still the consequences of their death would be dreadful. Job undertook to set this matter in a true light. Death to a godly man, is like a fair gale of wind to convey him to the heavenly country; but, to a wicked man, it is like a storm, that hurries him away to destruction. While he lived, he had the benefit of sparing mercy; but now the day of God's patience is over, and he will pour out upon him his wrath. When God casts down a man, there is no flying from, nor bearing up under his anger. Those who will not now flee to the arms of Divine grace, which are stretched out to receive them, will not be able to flee from the arms of Divine wrath, which will shortly be stretched out to destroy them. And what is a man profited if he gain the whole world, and thus lose his own soul?

Verse 15. - Those that remain of him shall be buried in death. Not simply "shall die," but shall "be buried," i.e. lost sight of, and forgotten, "in death." And his widows shall not weep (scrap. Psalm 78:64). The deaths of his offspring shall not be lamented by their widows - a very grievous omission in the eyes of Orientals.

Those that remain of him,.... Of the wicked man after his death; or such that remain, and have escaped the sword and famine:

shall be buried in death: the pestilence, emphatically called death by the Hebrews, as by us the mortality, see Revelation 6:8. This is another of God's sore public judgments wicked men, and is such a kind of death, by reason of the contagion of it, that a person is buried as soon as dead almost, being infectious to keep him; and so Mr. Broughton translates the words,

"his remnant shall be buried as soon as they are dead;''

or the disease of which such die being so very infectious sometimes, no one dares to bury them for fear of catching it, and so they lie unburied; which some take to be the sense of the phrase, either that they shall be hurried away to the grave, and so not be embalmed and lie in state, and have an honourable and pompous funeral, or that they shall have none at all, their death will be all the burial they shall have: or else the sense is, they shall die such a death as that death shall be their grave; and they shall have no other, as the men of the old world that were drowned in the flood, Genesis 7:23; and Pharaoh and his host in the Red sea, Exodus 15:4; and Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, who were swallowed up in the earth, Numbers 16:27; and such as are devoured by wild beasts; and if this last could be thought to be meant, we have all the four sore judgments of God in this verse and Job 27:14, sword, famine, pestilence, and evil beasts, see Ezekiel 14:21,

and his widows shall not weep; leaving more than one behind him, polygamy being frequent in those times; or else these are his sons' wives, left widows by them, as Bar Tzemach thinks, they being the persons immediately spoken of, dying by various deaths before mentioned; but whether they be his widows, or theirs, they shall weep for neither of them; either because they themselves will be cut off with them; or their husbands dying shameful deaths, lamentation would be forbidden; or they would not be able to weep through the astonishment and stupor they should be seized with at their death; or having lived such miserable and uncomfortable lives with them, they should be so far from lamenting their death, that they should, as Jarchi interprets it, rejoice at it; the Septuagint version is,

"no one shall have mercy on their widows.''

15. Those that escape war and famine (Job 27:14) shall be buried by the deadly plague—"death" (Job 18:13; Jer 15:2; Re 6:8). The plague of the Middle Ages was called "the black death." Buried by it implies that they would have none else but the death plague itself (poetically personified) to perform their funeral rites, that is, would have no one.

his—rather, "their widows." Transitions from singular to plural are frequent. Polygamy is not implied.

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