You would even send an orphan into slavery or sell a friend.
Parallel translations
- WEB Yes, you would even cast lots for the fatherless, and make merchandise of your friend.
- KJV Yea, ye overwhelm the fatherless, and ye dig a pit for your friend.
- BSB You would even cast lots for an orphan and barter away your friend.
- NKJV Yes, you overwhelm the fatherless, And you undermine your friend.
- NASB “You would even cast lots for the orphans, And barter over your friend.
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 accuses them of being so heartless they would cast lots for an orphan and barter away a friend. He charges them with cruelty that exploits the vulnerable.
Overview
In sharp rebuke, Job says their treatment of him is like gambling over orphans or selling a friend, the height of callousness. He exposes how their failure of compassion betrays a deeper hardness. Such exploitation of the helpless is precisely what God condemns and what Christ overturns, for he defends the orphan and the friendless and gives himself for those the world would discard.
Cross-references & the web
Cross-references · 19
- 2 Pet 2:3In covetousness they will exploit you with deceptive words: whose sentence now from of old doesn’t linger, and their destruction will not slumber.
- Nah 3:10Yet was she carried away. She went into captivity. Her young children also were dashed in pieces at the head of all the streets, and they cast lots for her honorable men, and all her great men were bound in chains.
- Jas 1:27Pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.
- Joel 3:3and have cast lots for my people, and have given a boy for a prostitute, and sold a girl for wine, that they may drink.
- Job 24:3They drive away the donkey of the fatherless, and they take the widow’s ox for a pledge.
- Ps 7:15He has dug a hole, and has fallen into the pit which he made.
- Job 22:9You have sent widows away empty, and the arms of the fatherless have been broken.
- Job 24:9There are those who pluck the fatherless from the breast, and take a pledge of the poor,
- Mal 3:5I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, and against the perjurers, and against those who oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, and the fatherless, and who deprive the foreigner of justice, and don’t fear me,” says Yahweh of Armies.
- Ezek 22:7In you have they treated father and mother with contempt. Among you they have oppressed the foreigner. In you they have wronged the fatherless and the widow.
- Job 29:12Because I delivered the poor who cried, and the fatherless also, who had no one to help him,
- Prov 23:10–11Don’t move the ancient boundary stone. Don’t encroach on the fields of the fatherless:
- Jer 18:22Let a cry be heard from their houses, when you shall bring a troop suddenly on them; for they have dug a pit to take me, and hidden snares for my feet.
- Ps 82:3“Defend the weak, the poor, and the fatherless. Maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed.
- Jer 18:20Shall evil be recompensed for good? For they have dug a pit for my soul. Remember how I stood before you to speak good for them, to turn away your wrath from them.
- Job 31:17or have eaten my morsel alone, and the fatherless has not eaten of it
- Ps 57:6They have prepared a net for my steps. My soul is bowed down. They dig a pit before me. They fall into the middle of it themselves. Selah.
- Exod 22:22–24“You shall not take advantage of any widow or fatherless child.
- Job 31:21if I have lifted up my hand against the fatherless, because I saw my help in the gate,
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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 6:27 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
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