Job 13:24 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

Wherefore hidest thou thy face, &c.?— This expression, among some others, has been charged upon Job by a learned writer as very improper and unbecoming. Now, though we might admit that there is something faulty in the expostulation, yet it is very much alleviated by those expressions of humility and self-abasement which immediately precede and follow it. Read the 23rd and 25th verses. Scarcely ever were the feelings of the human heart, burdened with such a load of grief, expressed in a more natural or less blameable way; and I could almost recal the concession that I have made, of any thing at all wrong in it: for, if it be a rule of equity to put upon words and things the best construction that they will bear, Job seems, in the first part, to wish that God would discover to him the particular sins, if any, for which he thus afflicted him, and he was ready to deplore them, and to correct his errors for the future: in the second, the exceptionable part, he seems nevertheless to account it the greatest of his calamities, that God should hide his face from him, and deal with him as an enemy; on whose friendship and favour he had always set the highest value; had endeavoured to preserve it by the integrity of his life, and was resolved never to depart from that integrity. In the last part he confesses his own meanness, or rather nothingness, in comparison of God; and that in a manner so ingenuous and simple, as to shew that his complaints, however passionate and moving, had but a small mixture (for I must not venture to say none) of pride or stubbornness at the bottom of it. Peters.