And Zophar tells Job to hope, to pray to God, and that he will yet escape: 

“16.  Because thou shalt forget thy misery, and remember it as waters that pass away.

“17.  And thine age shall be clearer than the noonday; thou shalt shine forth, thou shalt be as the morning.”

“Thou shalt shine forth” Gesenius renders, “though now thou art in darkness thou shalt presently be as the morning”; that is, the storm will pass and the light return.  Umbreit gives it, “Thy darkness shall be as the morning; only the darkness of morning twilight, not nocturnal darkness.”  That is, Job will return to that dim light which followed the Drift Age.

“18.  And thou shalt be secure, because there is hope; yea, thou shalt dig about thee, and thou shalt take thy rest in safety.”

That is to say, when the waters pass away, with them shall pass away thy miseries; the sun shall yet return brighter than ever; thou shalt be secure; thou shalt dig thy way out of these caverns; and then take thy rest in

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safety, for the great tempest shall have passed for ever.  We are told by the commentators that the words “about thee” are an interpolation.

If this is not the interpretation, for what would Job dig about him?  What relation can digging have with the disease which afflicted Job?

But Job refuses to receive this consolation.  He refuses to believe that the tower of Siloam fell only on the wickedest men in the city.  He refers to his past experience of mankind.  He thinks honest poverty is without honor at the hands of successful fraud.  He says (chap. xii): 

“5.  He that is ready to slip with his feet is as a lamp despised in the thought of him that is at ease.”

But—­

“6.  The tabernacles of robbers prosper, and they that provoke God are secure; into whose hand God bringeth abundantly.”

And he can not see how, if this calamity has come upon men for their sins, that the innocent birds and beasts, and even the fish in the heated and poisoned waters, are perishing: 

“7.  But ask now the beasts,” ("for verily,” he has just said, “ye are the men, and wisdom will die with you,”) “and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: 

“8.  Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee:  and the fishes of the sea shall declare it unto thee.

“9.  Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this?”

Wrought what?  Job’s disease?  No.  Some great catastrophe to bird and beast and earth.

You pretend, he says, in effect, ye wise men, that only the wicked have suffered; but it is not so, for aforetime I have seen the honest poor man despised and the villain

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prosperous.  And if the sins of men have brought this catastrophe on the earth, go ask the beasts and the birds and the fish and the very face of the suffering earth, what they have done to provoke this wrath.  No, it is the work of God, and of God alone, and he gives and will give no reason for it.