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Zophar's lecture is demeaning. Job is becoming resentful towards his friends for their presumptive prescription. “I am not inferior unto you” (13:2), Job says with bitterness. Matthew Henry's Commentary notes that Job has become angry, “the heart unhumbled before God, never meekly receives the reproofs of men” (Henry, notes to chapter 13). The dialogue is getting increasingly more tense, the three friends are judging Job unfairly, and Job is taking it badly.
Zophar has leveled a curse against Job: “Oh that God would speak, and open His lips against thee” (11:5). Job is rightfully angry, but does not return a curse. His answer is calm and terse: “Surely I would speak to the Almighty” (13:3). He reminds his friend that he is seeking to speak with God.
Job chides his friends for their reckless speech. “ye are forgers of lies, ye are all physicians of no value” (13:4). Here is a translation difficulty noted by Clarke: “The Chaldee says: ‘Ye are idle physicians; and, like the mortified flesh which is cut off with the knife, so are the whole of you.’ The imagery in the former clause is chirurpical [surgical], and refers to the sewing together, or connecting the divided sides of wounds” (Clarke, note on 13:4). The Hebrew term for ‘forgers’ is ‘tâphal’ meaning to stick, as a patch (Strong, H2950). While this may seem a stretch, I do rather like the conjunction of this inability to patch, with the insight of 14:17 that God will patch.
Job suggests it would be wiser to keep silent (13:5-6). “Hold your peace... that I may speak, and let come on me what will” (13:13). Disgusted, Job suggests that the best course of action for his friends is to be silent. “Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding” (Prov. 17:28). By arguing God's side without wisdom or discernment, Job tells his friends they risk the judgment of God (13:9-11). Or do they suppose they can hide from God when they contend on His behalf using wickedness and lies (13:7-8). Your wise sayings are made of ashes, and your arguments are made of clay (13:12) challenges Job.
While, Clarke sees the language of surgeons, Barnes on the other hand suggests that the language is that of court proceeding (Barnes, note to 13:7-8). Either way there is something terribly mechanical about the discussion at this point, as if the strain of it is forcing them to discuss very real circumstance in the abstract.
Job is comfortable enough with his legal brief that he wishes to present it to the high throne of heaven. Job is sure of his own righteousness and is willing to stake his life on it: “I take my flesh in my teeth” (13:14). Perhaps you have seen a dog or a cat do this, I have even seen a vulture parade with a freshly killed chick, any prized food will do. Job's own life is the flesh, the prize, which he holds in his teeth before the throne. The King James seems to imply that Job feels he must proclaim himself: “if I hold my tongue, I shall give up the ghost” (13:19). We will see Elihu proclaim this same sense of the necessity to speak (32:18-19). Barnes suggests the real sense of the Hebrew is that he is proclaiming himself, but if he is proved wrong he will accept death willingly (Barnes, note to 13:19).
Job is equally sure of God's character: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” (13:15). Job's belief system is not working, but he still knows God's heart hasn't changed. Oswald Chambers tells us, “Job 13:15 is the utterance of a man who has lost his explicit hold on God, but not his implicit hold: ‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.’ That is the last reach of the faith of a man. Job's creed is gone; all he believed about God has been disproved by his own experiences, and his friends when they come say, in effect, ‘You are a hypocrite, Job, we can prove it from your own creed.’ But Job sticks to it–‘I am not a hypocrite, I do not know what accounts for all that has happened, but I will hold to it that God is just and that I shall yet see Him vindicated in it all’” (Chambers 1990, 17). Job concludes: “He also shall be my salvation” (13:16). This is a remarkable thought: ‘Despite everything, I know that God will not let injustice stand against me, even if He slays me!’
Job addresses God directly, asking for two things before the start of his imagined trial: stop the punishment and take the terror from my heart (13:20-22), ‘then we can talk about my sins, and why I have been treated as an enemy of God’ (13:23-27). The terror that Job speaks of here is the fear of affliction. There is another terror which he will yet experience: God's ‘perfect hatred’ of sin.
Verse 27 invokes the images of a prisoner. “Thou puttest my feet also in the stocks” (13:27). ‘Stocks’ probably refers to shackles given the context (NET Bible, footnote 62). “Thou settest a print upon the heels of my feet” (13:27) may refer to a practice of marking the heal so to make tracking an escaped prisoner easier or alternatively it could be meant to read “you set a boundary to the soles of my feet” (NET Bible, footnote 64; also: Barnes, note to 13:27). In either reading the meaning is clear: God has made Job His prisoner.
Verse 28 begins with ‘he’–“as a rotten thing, consumeth, as a garment that is moth eaten.” Job has been addressing God. Clearly the ‘he’ is not God. This verse makes more sense attached to chapter 14, which is a general statement of the lamentable condition of man. Chapter divisions appeared very much later; this one is misplaced.
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