Job 24:12 - Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible

Bible Comments

Men groan under the burden of injuries and grievous oppressions. From out of the city; not only in deserts or less inhabited places, where these tyrants have the greater opportunity and advantage to practise their villanies; but even in cities, where there is a face of order and government, and courts of justice, and a multitude of people to observe and restrain such actions; whereby they plainly declare that they neither fear God nor reverence man. The soul of the wounded; either,

1. Properly, their soul sympathizing with the body, and being grieved for its insupportable miseries, crieth to God and men for help. Or rather,

2. The life or blood (which oft cometh under that name) of those who are there wounded unto death, as this word properly signifies, Ezekiel 30:24, crieth aloud unto God for vengeance, Genesis 4:10 Revelation 6:9,10, whereby God might seem in some sort obliged to punish them; and yet he did not, as the next words declare. Yet God layeth not folly to them: so the sense is, yet God doth not impute or lay to their charge this folly or wickedness, which in Scripture is commonly called folly; i.e. he takes no notice of these horrid oppressions, nor hears the cries of the oppressed, nor punishes the oppressors. Or, yet God (who seeth and permitteth all this) disposeth, or ordereth, or doth, (for all these things this Hebrew verb signifies,) nothing which is absurd, or foolish, or unsavoury, i.e. doth nothing in this permission and connivance unworthy of himself, or which a wise and considerate man cannot relish or approve, or which is not in itself righteous and reasonable, though we do not always discern the reasonableness of it.

Job 24:12

12 Men groan from out of the city, and the soul of the wounded crieth out: yet God layeth not folly to them.