Job 10:22

A land of darkness, as darkness [itself],.... Not merely like it, but truly so; as gross thick darkness, like that of Egypt, that might be felt; even blackness of darkness, which is as dark as it

A land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness. A land of darkness, as darkness itself.

A land of darkness; either in things, without any succession of day and night, winter and summer; or among persons, where great and small are in the same condition, . Where the light is as darkness; where there is no difference between light and darkness, where the day is as dark as the night, where there is nothing but perpetual and uninterrupted darkness.

Job 10:22 A land of darkness, as darkness [itself; and] of the shadow of death, without any order, and [where] the light [is] as darkness.Ver. 22. A land of darkness, &c.] This is not a description of hell, and of the state of the damned (as some would have it), for Job never meant to come there, no more than Jacob did, Genesis 37:35; Genesis 42:38; but it is such an elegant description of the grave, as exceedeth the phantasy of poet, and the rhetoric of all heathen orators. There is something like it in David’ s Psalms, especially Psalms 88:11-12, where the grave is called a place of perdition, a land of forgetfulness, and of darkness, whereinto they who descend praise not God, Psalms 115:17. In respect of their bodies they do not, they cannot, Isaiah 38:18. Hell, indeed, is much more a land of darkness as darkness itself; it is that outer darkness, a darkness beyond a darkness, as the dungeon is beyond the prison; and the pains of hell are the chains of darkness. Now death is hell’ s harbinger to the wicked, and hence it is so dreadful in the apprehension and approach of it, that men’ s hearts do even die within them, as Nabal’ s did, through fear of death; and they tremble thereat as the trees of the wood, or leaves of the forest, with Ahaz, Isaiah 7:2. Darkness, we know, is full of terror: the Egyptians were sorely frightened by their three days’ thick darkness, insomuch as that none stirred off his stool all that while, Exodus 10:23, and it was the more terrible, doubtless, because they had no warning of it, as they had of other plagues. How oft do men chop into the chambers of death (their long home, the grave) all on the sudden, as he that travelleth in the snow may do over head and ears into a clay pit! Death of any sort is unwelcome to nature, as being its slaughterman: but when sudden, it is so much the more ghastly; and those that desperately dare death to a duel cannot look it in the face with blood in their cheeks: only to those that are in Christ the bitterness of death is past, the sting of it pulled out, the property altered, as hath been already noted. Christ, the Sun of righteousness, saith a learned expositor here (Mr Caryl), lay in the grave, and hath left perpetual beams of light there for his purchased people. The way to the grave is very dark, but Christ hath set up lights for us, &c. And of the shadow of death] The shadow is the dark part of the thing, so that the shadow of death is the darkest side of death, death in its most hideous and horrid representations; the shadow of death is the substance of death, or death with addition of greatest deadliness. Without any order] Heb. And not orders. What then?

Verse 22. Where the light is as darkness.] A palpable obscure: it is space and place, and has only such light or capability of distinction as renders "darkness visible." The following words of Sophocles convey the same idea: Ιωσκοτοςεμοιφαος; "Thou darkness be my light." It is, as the Vulgate expresses it, Terra tenebrosa, et operta mortis caligine: Terra miseriae et tenebrarum, ubi umbra mortis, et nullus ordo, sed sempiternus horror inhabitat: "A murky land, covered with the thick darkness of death: a land of wretchedness and obscurities, where is the shadow of death, and no order, but sempiternal horror dwells everywhere." Or, as Coverdale expresses this last clause, Wheras is no ordre but terrible feare as in the darknesse. A duration not characterized or measured by any of the attributes of time; where there is no order of darkness and light, night and day, heat and cold, summer and winter. It is the state of the dead! The place of separate spirits! It is out of time, out of probation, beyond change or mutability. It is on the confines of eternity! But what is THIS? and where? Eternity! how can I form any conception of thee? In thee there is no order, no bounds, no substance, no progression, no change, no past, no present, no future! Thou art an indescribable something, to which there is no analogy in the compass of creation. Thou art infinity and incomprehensibility to all finite beings. Thou art what, living, I know not, and what I must die to know; and even then I shall apprehend no more of thee than merely that thou art E-T-E-R-N-I-T-Y!

22. without any order] There Chaos reigns; cf. the beautiful description of the effect of light upon the earth, ch. Job 38:12-14. the light is as darkness] The light in that region is No light, but rather darkness visible. Job’s three friends, strong in their traditional theory and unobservant of facts or indifferent to them, maintained that God’s rule of the world was righteous, by which they meant that He rewarded the righteous with outward good and dispensed severe suffering only to the great sinner. Job agreed with them that this ought to be the way in which God governed the world, and would be the way in which a just ruler would govern it. But his own experience and much that he could perceive taking place in the world convinced him that the world was not governed in this way in fact. This feeling not only disturbed but threatened to transform Job’s whole idea of God. His unbearable sufferings and this thought of God’s injustice together suggested to his mind the conception of the supreme Power in the world as an omnipotent, cruel Force, that crushed all, good and evil, alike, and mocked at the despair of the innocent. This is the tone of Job’s mind in ch. 9, in which he does not address God but speaks of Him in a kind of agitated soliloquy, as if fascinated by the omnipotent unmoral spectre which his imagination has conjured up. The difference between Job’s ways of thinking and those prevailing in our own day can readily be seen. In our day we have reached an ideal of God, to which, if there be any God, he must correspond. And even if we took the same pessimistic view of the world as Job did we should hesitate to believe that the conception was embodied in any Being; we should probably conclude that there was no God. But such a conclusion could not suggest itself to an Oriental mind. God’s existence and personality were things which Job could not doubt. Hence he had no help but invest God with the attributes of evil which he thought he saw reflected in the world. It might seem that Job is now on the high road to renounce God, as Satan had predicted he would do. But Job does not find renouncing God quite so easy a thing. And he enters upon a course in ch. 10 which, though at first it appears to take him a step further in this direction, is really the beginning of a retreat. He endeavours to set before his mind as broad a view of God as he is able, in order that by thinking of all that he knows of God he may catch the end of some clue to his calamities. This makes him realize how much he is still sure of in regard to God. And first, he cannot doubt that He is all-knowing and omnipotent (Job 10:3-7). But he goes further.

A land of darkness - The word used here (עיפה ‛êyphâh) is different from that rendered “darkness” השׁך chôshek in the previous verse. That is the common word to denote darkness; this seldom occurs.

22. Darkness itself — Ophel. Darkness particularly thick. (Furst.) The spectacle that the interior of the dark and gloomy sepulchre presented, evidently tinged Job’s views of the state of the dead.