“The womb shall forget him; the worm shall feed sweetly on him; he shall be no more remembered; and wickedness shall be broken as a tree.”
The womb forgets him; the worm feeds on him sweetly; he is remembered no more; wrongdoing breaks like a tree, establishing that the wicked will be utterly obliterated from memory and existence, their wrongdoing ultimately producing nothing of substance. The forgetting by the womb suggests that even the most fundamental human connection—the maternal relationship—will not sustain memory of the wicked in perpetuity. The worm feeding sweetly presents a grotesque inversion of the image of the poor's suffering: the wicked's death becomes food for vermin, their bodies consumed in the same way they consumed the living poor. The breaking of wrongdoing like a tree suggests that injustice, despite its apparent strength, ultimately shatters under the weight of its own nature.
Church Fathers on Job 24:20
Let him pass to excessive heat from the snow waters. Iniquity is on this account likened to cold, because the mind that sins it binds up with insensibility. Hence it is written; As a fountain has made her waters cold, so she has made her wickedness cold. Contrariwise charity is ‘heat,’ in this respect that it fires the soul it fills. Of which ‘heat’ is written, Because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. And there are some who while they shun the cold or…
Nicene & Post-Nicene / Ante-Nicene Fathers translations · public domain
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