Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Job 3:14
With kings and counselors of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves;
14. which built desolate places ] The expression seems to be that which occurs several times in Scripture, e.g. Isa 58:12; Isa 61:4; Eze 36:10; Eze 36:33; Mal 1:4, and means to build up or rebuild ruins, i. e. cities or habitations desolated or abandoned, and make them again inhabited. If this be the meaning the phrase must be used in a general way to indicate the greatness of those kings and counsellors when they were alive and the renown they won. To this idea the words in Job 3:15, princes who had gold, form a parallel. The speaker wishes to indicate that instead of lying in squalor and being the contempt of the low-born race of men as he now is (ch. 30), if he had died he would have been in company of the great dead who played famous parts in life. This appears to be the general idea of the words, but the phrase “built desolate places for themselves” is too vague in such a connexion, and the words “for themselves” suggest something definite and well-known as that which they built, as does the parallel expression “who filled their houses with silver.” The Hebrew word “desolate places” has a distant resemblance in sound to the Egyptian word Pyramids, and some adopt this sense here. There may be some corruption of the Text.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
With kings – Reposing as they do. This is the language of calm meditation on what would have been the consequence if he had died when he was an infant. He seems to delight to dwell on it. He contrasts it with his present situation. He pauses on the thought that that would have been an honorable repose. He would have been numbered with kings and princes. Is there not here a little spice of ambition even in his sorrows and humilation? Job had been an eminently rich man; a man greatly honored; an emir; a magistrate; one in whose presence even princes refrained talking, and before whom nobles held their peace; Job 29:9. Now he was stripped of his honors, and made to sit in ashes. But had he died when an infant, he would have been numbered with kings and courtsellers, and would have shared their lot. Death is repulsive; but Job takes comfort in the thought that he would have been associated with the most exalted and honorable among people. There is some consolation in the idea that when an infant dies he is associated with the most honored and exalted of the race; there is consolation in the reflection that when we die we shall lie down with the good and the great of all past times, and that though our bodies shall moulder back to dust, and be forgotten, we are sharing the same lot with the most beautiful, lovely, wise, pious, and mighty of the race. To Christians there is the richest of all consolations in the thought that they will sleep as their Savior did in the tomb, and that the grave, naturally so repulsive, has been made sacred and even attractive by being the place where the Redeemer reposed.
Why should we tremble to convey
Their bodies to the tomb?
There the dear flesh of Jesus lay,
And left a long perfume.
The graves of all his saints he blessed,
And softened every bed:
Where should the dying members rest
But with the dying Head?
And counsellors of the earth – Great and wise men who were qualified to give counsel to kings in times of emergency.
Which built desolate places for themselves – Gesenius supposes that the word used here ( chorbah) means palaces which would soon be in ruins. So Noyes renders it, Who build up for themselves – ruins! That is, they build splendid palaces, or perhaps tombs, which are destined soon to fall to ruin. Dr. Good renders it, Who restored to themselves the ruined wastes; that is, the princes who restored to their former magnificence the ruins of ancient cities, and built their palaces in them But it seems to me that the idea is different. It is, that kings constructed for their own burial, magnificent tombs or mausoleums, which were lonely and desolate places, where they might lie in still and solemn grandeur; compare the notes at Isa 14:18. Sometimes these were immense excavations from rocks; and sometimes they were stupendous structurcs built as tombs. What more desolate and lonely places could be conceived than the pyramids of Egypt – reared probably as the burial places of kings?
What more lonely and solitary than the small room in the center of one of those immense structures, where the body of the monarch is supposed to have been deposited? And what more emphatic than the expression – though so nearly pleonastic that it may be omitted (Noyes) – for themselves? To my view, that is far from being pleonastic. It is full of emphasis. The immense structure was made for them. It was not to be a common burial-place; it was not for the public good; it was not to be an abode for the living and a contributor to their happiness: it was a matter of supreme selfishness and pride – an immense structure built only run themselves. With such persons lying in their places of lonely grandeur, Job felt it would be an honor to be associated. Compared with his present condition it was one of dignity; and he earnestly wished that it might have been his lot thus early to have been consigned to the fellowship of the dead. It may be some confirmation of this view to remark, that the land of Edom, near which Job is supposed to have lived, contains at this day some of the most wonderful sepulchral monuments of the world; comp the notes at Isa 17:1.
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
Verse 14. With kings and counsellors of the earth] I believe this translation to be perfectly correct. The counsellors, yoatsey, I suppose to mean the privy council, or advisers of kings; those without whose advice kings seldom undertake wars, expeditions, &c. These mighty agitators of the world are at rest in their graves, after the lives of commotion which they have led among men: most of whom indeed have been the troublers of the peace of the globe.
Which built desolate places] Who erect mausoleums, funeral monuments, sepulchral pyramids, &c., to keep their names from perishing, while their bodies are turned to corruption. I cannot think, with some learned men, that Job is here referring to those patriotic princes who employed themselves in repairing the ruins and desolations which others had occasioned. His simple idea is, that, had he died from the womb, he would have been equally at rest, neither troubling nor troubled, as those defunct kings and planners of wars and great designs are, who have nothing to keep even their names from perishing, but the monuments which they have raised to contain their corrupting flesh, mouldering bones, and dust.
Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible
With kings; I had then been as happy as the proudest monarchs, who after all their great achievements and enjoyments go down into their graves, where I also should have been sweetly reposed.
Which built desolate places for themselves; which, to show their great wealth and power, or to leave behind them a glorious name, rebuilt ruined cities, or built new cities and palaces, and other monuments, in places where before there was mere solitude and wasteness.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
14. With kings . . . which builtdesolate places for themselveswho built up for themselves whatproved to be (not palaces, but) ruins! The wounded spirit of Job,once a great emir himself, sick of the vain struggles of mortal greatmen, after grandeur, contemplates the palaces of kings, now desolateheaps of ruins. His regarding the repose of death the most desirableend of the great ones of earth, wearied with heaping up perishabletreasures, marks the irony that breaks out from the black clouds ofmelancholy [UMBREIT]. The”for themselves” marks their selfishness. MICHAELISexplains it weakly of mausoleums, such as are found still, ofstupendous proportions, in the ruins of Petra of Idumea.
Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
With the kings and counsellors of the earth,…. From whom he might descend, he being a person of great distinction and figure; and so, had he died, he would have been buried in the sepulchres of his ancestors, and have lain in great pomp and state: or rather this he says, to observe that death spares none, that neither the power of kings, who have long hands, nor the wisdom of counsellors, who have long heads, can secure them from death; and that after death they are upon a level with others; and even he suggests, that children that die as soon as born, and have made no figure in the world, are equal to them:
which built desolate places for themselves; either that rebuilt houses and cities that had lain in ruins, or built such in desolate places, where there had been none before, or formed colonies in places before uninhabited; and all this to get a name, and to perpetuate it to posterity: or rather sepulchral monuments are meant, such as the lofty pyramids of the Egyptians, and superb mausoleums of others; which, if not built in desolate places, yet are so themselves, being only the habitations of the dead, and so they are called the desolations of old,
Eze 26:20; and this is the sense of many interpreters q; if any man desires, says Vansleb r, a prospect and description of such ancient burying places, let him think on a boundless plain, even, and covered with sand, where neither trees, nor grass, nor houses, nor any such thing, is to be seen.
q Pineda, Bolducius, Patrick, Caryll, Schultens, and others. r Relation of a Voyage to Egypt, p. 91.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
(14) Desolate placesi.e., gorgeous tombs and splendid sepulchres, which, being tenanted only by the dead, are desolate; or it may mean that the places so built of old are now ruined and desolate. In the former sense it is possible that the Pyramids may here be hinted at.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
b. This rest he would have shared with all grades of conscious existence, not only the most prosperous in life, but the mere excrescences of being, Job 3:14-16.
14. Desolate places . Michaelis translates temples; Umbreit, ruins; Renan, mausolea; the Vulgate and Targum, solitudes. The word cannot mean ruins, in the proper sense of the term. Hitzig well remarks, that “such work is not characteristic of kings, and if it were, it is here unsuitable to the sense.” Nor is the idea of ruins applied proleptically to palaces and other structures they may have built, as some (Umbreit, Hahn, Noyes, etc.) have thought. To turn aside and speak of buildings that in time should become ruins, would not only be an unreasonable interruption of the thought, but introduce “a sense which does not magnify, but minishes, the reputation of the great dead.” If the idea of desolation be accepted, which is certainly one of the root meanings of the word, it must be applied to the purpose of the structure. This can be none other than the voidness, the desolation, of death. The context unquestionably points to some kind of burial structure. The sentence itself indicates the same: they built for themselves ( ) the house of desolation. Compare the “sepulchre for thyself;” three times repeated, Isa 22:16. With this (if we may accept the views of Ewald, Dillmann, and Delitzsch) agrees the derivation of the word horaboth. They regard it as kindred with hiram or ahram, the Arabic, and pi-chram, the Coptic, for pyramids. For the possible transition of the word, consult Dillmann in loc. Job’s frequent allusions to Egyptian matters justify us in presuming that he must have known of the pyramids as burial places of the mighty dead. They built for themselves They strove to transfer the aristocracy of life into the sad regions of the grave. They separated themselves from “the common herd” of the unknown dead, and by various devices strove to hide their sarcophagus in safety forever from human eye. It is a ghastly pre-eminence to which power and wealth lifted them, that of “lying in state” alone in the grave. These pyramidal and protective structures for the dead do not necessarily, as Sharpe maintains, speak of a resurrection, but of the foreboding, if not despair, under which their builders bent to the behest of death. For their hope was to a great extent, and perhaps entirely, wrapped up in the continued identity of the mummified body. Its destruction entailed a vague but sure calamity upon the soul. In the eighty-ninth chapter of the Egyptian “Book of the Dead,”
the body prays that “the guardians of heaven may not be ordered to destroy it so as to send away my soul from my corpse,” in allusion to the expected re-union of the two. “Fully acknowledging the immortality of the soul,” says Osburn, ( Mon. Egypt, 1:446,) “the inventors of the idolatry of Egypt debased this doctrine by teaching that it was closely linked with, and contingent upon, the indestructibility of the lifeless body.” In contrast to the proud isolation of these, the great ones of earth, how simple the God’s-acre where rest the humble and pious dead.
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
Job 3:14. Which built desolate places The Hebrew word charaboth rendered desolate places, comes from an Arabic root, denoting buildings of the pompous kind; and so may signify apartments of great elegance, or the place where a monarch sits apart from the rest. This, when applied to a dead king, will denote the pompous sepulchral monuments by which monarchs, and other mighty men, in the early ages, endeavoured to preserve their memories, as the pyramids of Egypt, the Mausoleum, and others; and indeed the manner of expression seems to glance at the former of these; as the pyramidal figure is not altogether unlike a sword, which is the common signification of chereb. Heath.
Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke
Job 3:14 With kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves;
Ver. 14. With kings and counsellors of the earth ] q.d. Those that here have been most negotious, and (as the nobles of the earth) have had greatest matters in hand, with those should I have been coupled in the grave, that congregation house of all living ( ), as it is called, Job 30:23 . That long or old home, Ecc 12:5 . Heaven is called the congregation house of God’s firstborn, Heb 12:23 , and their house not made with hands, 2Co 5:1 . But not many kings or nobles meet here, 1Co 1:26 , because strait is the gate and narrow the way that leadeth to it; there must be stripping and stopping, which great men cannot frame to. It was a poor comfort to Henry VIII to be told upon his death bed, that he should now go to the place of kings. And a small commendation to Henry II, that some few hours before he died, seeing a list of their names who had conspired against him, and finding therein two of his own sons, he fell into a grievous passion, both cursing his sons, and the day wherein himself was born; and in that distemperature departed the world, which himself had so often distempered. He went indeed to his grave, and slept with his fathers; yea, he was royally interred under a stately monument, meant here, haply, by building desolate places for themselves: Absalom had erected a pillar for this purpose; and the Egyptian kings their pyramids, to perpetuate their memories. The Spanish friar was wont to say, there were but few princes in hell; for why? because there were but few in all. Confer Eze 26:20 . With these Job, had he died prematurely, or never seen the light, might have been fellowed: for death is the only king against whom there is no rising up, Pro 30:31 , and the mortal since his master of the royal sceptre, mowing down the lilies of the crown as well as the grass of the field, Sceptra igonibus aequat. The unknown scepter makes equal.
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
desolate places = ruins: i.e. places (tombs or monuments) already going to ruins.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
kings: Job 30:23, 1Ki 2:10, 1Ki 11:43, Psa 49:6-10, Psa 49:14, Psa 89:48, Ecc 8:8, Isa 14:10-16, Eze 27:18-32
which built: Who erect splendid mausoleums, funeral monuments, etc. to keep their names from perishing, while their bodies are turned to corruption. Job 15:28, Isa 5:8, Eze 26:20
Reciprocal: Isa 22:16 – hewed
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
3:14 With kings and counsellors of the earth, which built {k} desolate places for themselves;
(k) He notes the ambition of them who for their pleasure as it were change the order of nature, and build in most barren places, because they would by this make their names immortal.