Job 15:34,35 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

For the congregation of hypocrites Their children, servants, friends, and dependants; shall be desolate That is, utterly destroyed; and fire Some eminent and terrible judgment of God, often expressed by fire: see Isaiah 9:19; Isaiah 26:11; shall consume the tabernacles of bribery Which were either built or maintained by extortion and bribery, or such unrighteous practises, of which they thought Job guilty, Job 22:8. They conceive mischief They devise and contrive pernicious enterprises against others; and bring forth vanity They execute what they had contrived. They produce iniquity, injury, or trouble, either to others, or rather to themselves: for the mischief they designed for others falls upon their own heads, and they reap what they sowed. And their belly That is, their inward parts, their hearts and minds; prepareth deceit For others, whom they design to cheat; and especially for themselves, who, while they seek to deceive others, shall find that they themselves are most deceived, as being deprived of all their desires and hopes wherewith they fed themselves, and cast into all those calamities which they thought to prevent by these artifices. This whole description is evidently pointed at the situation of Job. His prosperity was become vanity; his children were all cut off before their time; his family become solitary; and his hopes, to all appearance, an illusion. All the fine prospect with which the wicked man entertained himself, and for which he endured all the anguish here described, produced only a deceit. He hath imposed on himself.