Who can bring out clean from unclean? No one!
Parallel translations
- WEB Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one.
- KJV Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one.
- NKJV Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? No one!
- NASB “Who can make the clean out of the unclean? No one!
- NLT Who can bring purity out of an impure person? No one!
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. lockman.org
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
Quick answer
Job acknowledges no one can produce purity from impurity. Human beings are born unclean and cannot cleanse themselves.
Overview
Job's rhetorical question, 'Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one,' confesses humanity's inborn corruption. No person can make himself clean before a holy God. This points directly to the gospel's answer: only God, through the cleansing work of Christ, can make sinners pure, doing what no human effort can achieve.
Cross-references & the web
Cross-references · 10
- John 3:6Flesh is born of flesh, but spirit is born of the Spirit.
- Job 15:14What is man, that he should be pure, or one born of woman, that he should be righteous?
- Eph 2:3All of us also lived among them at one time, fulfilling the cravings of our flesh and indulging its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature children of wrath.
- Rom 8:8–9Those controlled by the flesh cannot please God.
- Ps 51:5Surely I was brought forth in iniquity; I was sinful when my mother conceived me.
- Job 25:4–6How then can a man be just before God? How can one born of woman be pure?
- Luke 1:35The angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God.
- Rom 5:12Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, so also death was passed on to all men, because all sinned.
- Ps 90:5You whisk them away in their sleep; they are like the new grass of the morning—
- Gen 5:3When Adam was 130 years old, he had a son in his own likeness, after his own image; and he named him Seth.
Themes, concepts, people & topics
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Christ at the center
Job's cry for a mediator who can lay his hand on both God and man, and his confidence that 'my Redeemer lives' and will stand on the earth, reaches forward to Jesus the living Redeemer.
How Job 14:4 points to him is part of the one story that runs through all Scripture — meet Jesus at the heart of the web, or follow a trail that traces him from Genesis to Revelation.
Original language
Each word below is tagged with its Strong’s number — tap one to see the underlying Hebrew word, its meaning, and every verse that uses it.