and have also no need for supposing that Job 19:20 is a proverbial phrase for “I have with great care and difficulty escaped the extreme.” The declaration perfectly corresponds to the description of the disease; and it is altogether needless with Hupfeld, after Job 13:14, to read עור בשׁני, vitam solam et nudam vix reportavi, which is moreover inappropriate, since Job regards himself as one who is dying. Symm. alters the position of the בּ similarly, since he translates after the Syriac Hexapla: καὶ ἐξέτιλλον (ותלשׁת) τὸ δέρμα τοῖς ὀδοῦσιν μου, from מלט = מרט, Arab. mllṭ, nudare pilis, which J. D. Michaelis also compares; the sense, however, which is thereby gained, is beneath all criticism. On the aoristic ואתמלּטה, vid., on Job 1:15. Stickel has on this passage an excursus on this ah, to which he also attributes, in this addition to the historic tense, the idea of striving after a goal: “I slip away, I escape;” it certainly gives vividness to the notion of the action, if it may not always have the force of direction towards anything. Therefore: with a destroyed flesh, and indeed so completely destroyed that there is even nothing left to him of sound skin except the skin of his teeth, wasted away to a skeleton, and become both to sight and smell a loathsome object; - such is the sufferer the friends have before them, - one who is tortured, besides, by a dark conflict which they only make more severe, - one who now implores them for pity, and because he has no pity to expect from man, presses forward to a hope which reaches beyond the grave.
Verses 21-25
Job 19:21-25 21 Have pity upon me, have pity upon me,
O ye my friends, For the hand of Eloah hath touched me. 22 Wherefore do ye persecute me as God,
And are never satisfied with my flesh? 23 Oh that my words were but written,
