“What time they wax warm, they vanish: when it is hot, they are consumed out of their place.”
Job states that when the path is hot, the streams dry up and when it is warm, they disappear from their places, suggesting that the friends' comfort evaporates precisely when the heat of suffering is greatest. The cycle of the seasons becomes a metaphor for the rhythm of human need and human support: they fail to align. The metaphor suggests that the friends are present in times of ease but absent in extremity.
Church Fathers on Job 6:17
What time they be dissipated they shall perish. For all persons that are ruled by concern for the present life, are brought to nought by the loss of it, and then they are undone without, who have for long been undone within by disregarding the things of eternity. Concerning whom it is rightly added, When they have become hot, they shall be dissolved from their place. For every wicked man when he ‘has become hot is dissolved from his place,’ in that, in drawing near to the…
Nicene & Post-Nicene / Ante-Nicene Fathers translations · public domain
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