Job 10:15 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

If I be wicked, woe unto me! &c.— i.e. "I cannot, will not hope for any temporal deliverance upon account of my righteousness, as you, my friends, are endeavouring to persuade me, from a mistaken principle; and according to which, if no such deliverance should happen, you are still resolved to condemn me as a wicked man." The latter clause of this verse, I am full of confusion, &c. should be rendered thus, I am full of ignominy; and those who are spectators of my affliction even pride themselves against me, and insult me; Job 10:16. Thou huntest me as if I were a lion, and repeatest thy marvellous assaults upon me: that is, in short, "Thou sufferest my friends to attack and worry me in their turns, as the hunters usually do a stout lion when they surround him on all sides, and attack him one after another." See ch. Job 16:11; Job 16:13. I am persuaded that we should be very sensible of the beauty of this comparison had we lived in Job's days, and been with him at the hunting down of a lion. This circumstance of his friend's haughty behaviour towards him, their even priding themselves against him, and insulting him, was so insupportable, that he proceeds, Job 10:18 addressing himself to God: Wherefore then, &c.?—I should have expired, and no eye had seen me; "I should neither have undergone the reproaches which I now suffer, nor would these spectators of my affliction have incurred the guilt of this their hard usage of me; Job 10:19. I should have been as though I had never been; a mere abortion, carried directly from the womb to the grave, Job 10:20. Are not my days few? cease then."—The Hebrew is, יחדל ימי מעט הלא halo meat iamai iachadal, Will not the little of my days cease? Is it not a very short time that I have to live? In the next verses we have a gloomy prospect indeed: but it should be remembered, that the Easterns in general, and the Hebrews in particular, took their ideas of death, for the most part, from their places of sepulchre, which were large caves in rocks, where no light was admitted, except through the entrance. See Bishop Lowth's Prelections, Lect. 7. Heath renders the last verse of this chapter, A land, the darkness of which is as the thick darkness of the shadow of death; where there are no constellations, but its brightest ray is as the thick darkness.