Job 11:20 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

The eyes of the wicked shall fail Either through grief and tears for their sore calamities, or with long looking for what they shall never attain. Failing of the eyes is one of those expressions in Scripture to be admired for its beauteous simplicity. It represents a very eager and passionate desire to obtain that which we are in pursuit of: and, at the same time, the great uneasiness which must unavoidably follow from a disappointment. One of the appeals which Job makes, in vindication of his integrity, is, that he had not caused the eyes of the widow to fail, chap. Job 31:16; that he had not frustrated her expectations when she applied to him for relief and assistance in her distress. The psalmist writes, Mine eyes fail while I wait for my God, Psalms 69:3. They shall not escape Hebrew, מנושׂ אבד, manos abad, flight perishes from them, or safety leaves them. This is another of those elegant Scripture phrases which suggests to us the strongest efforts made by a guilty person to escape punishment; but fainting and sinking by the way, through fatigue and weariness, and failing of attaining his purpose. The Prophet Jeremiah uses the same phraseology with regard to the shepherds, or principal men among the Jews, Jeremiah 25:35; which is literally, Flight shall perish from the shepherds. Compare Amos 2:14, where the exact and literal translation of the Hebrew is given: Flight shall perish from the swift. Their hope shall be as the giving up of the ghost Shall be as vain and desperate as the hope of life is in a man when he is at the very point of death. Shall be as a puff of breath, as the margin reads it; gone in a moment without any hope of recovery. Or their hope shall perish, as a man doth with respect to this world, when he gives up the ghost; it will fail them when they have most need of it; and, when they expected the accomplishment of it, it will die away and leave them in utter confusion.