Job 16:2
I have often heard such things as these: you are all troublesome comforters.
Open Job 16:2 in the Motif Searcher, word by word across all five texts →Show on the spiral →The verse in its languages
- Vulgate (Clementine)
- Audivi frequenter talia : consolatores onerosi omnes vos estis.
- Septuagint (Swete)
- Ἀκήκοα τοιαῦτα πολλά· παρακλήτορες κακῶν πάντες.
- Hebrew (WLC)
- שָׁמַ֣עְתִּי כְאֵ֣לֶּה רַבּ֑וֹת מְנַחֲמֵ֖י עָמָ֣ל כֻּלְּכֶֽם
Haydock's commentary
Comforters. "Job's friends or comforters," are become proverbial, to denote people who do the contrary to what they seem to promise. (Haydock)
Never did men sustain worse the character of comforters. They all magnify their knowledge and piety, and make the most absurd application of their principles to Job's condition. (Calmet)
He was not ignorant that tyrants and wicked men were often, nay generally till the age in which he lived, visited with visible judgments. (Haydock)
From Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary, 1859, in the transcription made by Todd Easton and kept online by John Paul Wohlschied at johnblood.gitlab.io/haydock.
The Fathers on this verse
St John Chrysostom The Homilies of St. John Chrysostom on Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians, Philippians 2:12-16
Wherefore then murmur? Because thou art poor? Yet think of Job. Or because sickness is thy lot? What then if, with the consciousness of as many excellencies and as high attainments as that holy man, thou hadst been so afflicted? Again reflect on him, how that for a long time he never ceased to breed worms, sitting upon a dunghill and scraping his sores; for the account says that “(after a long time had passed) then said his wife unto him, How long wilt thou persist, saying, Yet a little while I bide in expectation? Speak some word against the Lord, and die.” ( Job ii. …
St Gregory Nazianzen On the Great Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria
17. His acts of insolence towards the saint you all know in full detail. Often were the righteous given into the hands of the wicked, not that the latter might be honoured, but that the former might be tested: and though the wicked come, as it is written, to an awful death, nevertheless for the present the godly are a laughing stock, while the goodness of God and the great treasuries of what is in store for each of them hereafter are concealed. Then indeed word and deed and thought will be weighed in the just balances of God, as He arises to judge the earth, gathering together counsel and works, and revealing what He had kept sealed up. …