Job 2:8

8. Potsherd The Septuagint renders, “And he took a shell to scrape away the ulcerous discharge, and sat upon a dung heap outside the city.” As the sores were too loathsome to touch, he took a piece of earthenware, (potsherd, or shard Old English for fragment.) that he might remove the filth of the sores, and allay the extreme itching.

Among the ashes In the Hauran, dung being unneeded for agricultural purposes, is burned from time to time in an appointed place outside the town. The heaps of ashes and filth soon attain a height greater than that of the highest buildings of the village. Wetzstein. Something of this kind the Septuagint may have had in view. This act of Job was, among the Orientals, a common symbol of extreme distress. Ulysses, after suffering shipwreck, placed himself mourning on a heap of ashes. Odyssey, 5:153, 160. (See note, Job 16:15.) Job, not unlike his divine Saviour, is the smitten of God. (Isaiah 53:4.) Leprosy was regarded by the ancients as a divine visitation. The Hebrews named it, “The stroke of the scourge,” a meaning that our own word plague (“stroke”) originally bore. Hence Jerome translates Isaiah, (chapter Isaiah 53:4,) “We did esteem him smitten ” by leprosus, or the leprous one, a name the Messiah bears also in the Talmud. Christ “bare our sins in his own body,” and on this account “there was a hiding of faces from him,” as from a leprous person. (Isaiah 53:3, margin.) Job, a type of Christ, is to all appearance rejected of God. The ban of God and man alike rests upon him. “If a Persian has the leprosy he is not allowed to enter into a city, or to have any dealings with the other Persians; he must, they say, have sinned against the sun.” Herodotus, 1:139. (See note, Job 19:21.)