So they sat down with him upon the ground In the same mournful posture wherein they found him, which indeed was the usual posture of mourners, condoling with him. Sitting on the ground, in the language of the eastern people, signifies their passing the time in the deepest mourning. Seven days and seven nights Which was the usual time of mourning for the dead, Genesis 50:10; 1 Samuel 31:13, and therefore proper, both for Job's children, who were dead, and for Job himself, who was in a manner, dead while he lived: not that they continued in this posture so long together, which the necessities of nature could not bear: but they spent a great, or the greatest, part of that time in sitting with him, and silent mourning over him. And none spake a word to him
About his afflictions or the cause of them, or, perhaps, about any thing. “A long silence,” says Dr. Dodd, “is a very natural effect of an extraordinary grief, which overwhelms the mind, and creates a sort of stupor and astonishment. Thus we find the Prophet Ezekiel 3:15, sitting with his brethren of the captivity by the river Chebar, for seven days, astonished, silent among them, as the Chaldee renders it; struck dumb, as it were, at the apprehension of their present miseries, and the still greater calamities coming on his country.” And thus were Job's friends affected on this occasion; their long silence arising from the greatness of their grief for him, and their surprise and astonishment at the condition in which they found him. They probably, also, thought it proper to give him some further time to vent his own sorrows; and might, as yet, not know what to say to him: for though they had ever esteemed him to be a truly good man, and came with a full purpose to comfort him; yet the prodigious greatness of his miseries, and that hand and apparent displeasure of God which they perceived in them, made them now question his sincerity, so that they could not comfort him as they had intended, and yet were loath to grieve him with reproofs.