“Desire not the night, when people are cut off in their place.”
Elihu warns Job not to 'long for the night when people are cut off in their place,' which might suggest warning against either desiring death or wishing for divine judgment. This verse is cryptic, yet it seems to warn against some form of longing for judgment or death, perhaps suggesting that Job wishes for death or for some decisive judgment by God. The verse acknowledges that Job is experiencing a desire for something—whether for death, for judgment, for relief—that Elihu views as spiritually dangerous. Yet the verse also raises questions: is longing for death itself wicked, or is it an understandable response to suffering? The verse demonstrates how Elihu's moral framework leaves no legitimate space for expressions of desire for relief from unbearable suffering.
Church Fathers on Job 36:20
Prolong not the night, that people should go up for them. For the night is indeed prolonged, when the sorrow, that springs from temptation, is not ended by the rising up of consolation. The night is protracted, because the sorrow of the mind is prolonged by confused thoughts. For whilst the mind, placed in temptation, considers that it is driven away from the former solidity of its virtue, it is blinded by superinduced sorrows, as by a kind of gloom. And its eye is closed to…
Nicene & Post-Nicene / Ante-Nicene Fathers translations · public domain
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