Job 29:1

JOB 29

JOB'S MEMORY OF PAST GLORY

This chapter is the first of a trilogy addressed to God.

"This chapter is part of Job's continuing recourse to God, a reiteration of his first complaint. It is the first of a trilogy that consists of: (1) a description of Job's former exaltation (Job 29), (2) a description of his present humiliation (Job 30), and (3) a final protestation of his innocence (Job 31)."[1]

"In the whole circle of Job's lamentations this is perhaps the most affecting."[2] It cannot fail to touch the heart of any person who ever tasted the sorrows of being suddenly reduced from happiness, health, honor and glory to a status of disease, distress, dishonor and misery.

"We may only imagine what kind of an impression these last words of Job may have made upon his friends. Although obliged to be silent, they would not have admitted that they were vanquished, although the drying up of their thoughts and their involuntary silence was the proof of it."[3]

Job 29:1-6

JOB REMEMBERS HIS FELLOWSHIP WITH GOD

"And Job again took up his parable, and said,

Oh that I were as in the months of old,

As in the days when God watched over me;

When his lamp shined above my head,

And by his light I walked through darkness;

As I was in the ripeness of my days,

When the friendship of God was upon my tent;

When the Almighty was yet with me,

And my children were about me;

When my steps were washed with butter,

And the rock poured me out streams of oil."

In these verses, Job remembers particularly the fellowship with God, to whom he attributed all of the happiness and prosperity which he had enjoyed in those blessed days then gone forever.

"In the days when God watched over me" (Job 29:2). "The pathos of the whole book is in these words."[4] Job recognized God as the source of all of his prosperity and happiness; and the misery that Job was experiencing at the time of this speech was due to his feeling that God was no longer watching over him.