Job 2:8 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

And he took a potsherd, &c. His children and servants were all dead, his wife unkind, and none of those whom he had formerly befriended had so much sense of honour and gratitude as to minister to him in his distress, to furnish him with linen clothes, or lend a hand to cleanse or dress his running sores; either because the disease was loathsome and offensive, or because they apprehended it to be infectious. Being therefore deprived of other relief, he laid hold on what was next at hand, a piece of a broken pot, or tile, to press out, or remove, the purulent matter which was under his ulcers, or flowed from them, and was the great cause of his pain; or to rub them, and allay the itching, which, as they began to die away, probably became intolerable. The Hebrew word להתגרד, le-hithgared, here used, which we translate to scrape himself, occurs nowhere else in the Bible, but is said to be frequently used in Chaldee and Arabic in the sense of pulling off bark or leaves from trees, and is here rendered by the LXX. ινα τον ιχωρα ξυη, that he might wipe off, or cleanse away, the corrupt matter. And sat down among the ashes Επι της κοπριας εξω της πολεως, upon the dung-hill without the city, say the Seventy. Here he would easily find a potsherd at hand, but not any clean and soft linen clothes, much less any ointments, salves, or plasters, proper for the healing of his sores. But it is probable, if he had had such things at hand he would not have used them; for as he sat down in this place, in dust and ashes, as mourners used to do, humbling himself under the mighty hand of God, so, in the same spirit of self-abasement and humiliation, he would have declined all things that savoured of tenderness and delicacy, and have still used his potsherd.