Bible Strands
Job 14:1
“Man, who is born of woman, is short of days and full of trouble.
Berean Standard Bible
Follow its threads on the canvas →
Study note
Setting — Job addresses his three friends (Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar) in the third cycle of debate, arguing that the human condition itself—birth, brevity, distress—vitiates any simple equation of suffering with sin.
The words — רֹגֶז (rōgez, "turmoil") is a rare noun denoting violent agitation or commotion, not the more common עֶצֶב ("pain") or צָרָה ("affliction"); the BSB's "trouble" softens what the Hebrew conveys as a kind of internal upheaval.
The thread — Job 5:7 (man born to trouble as sparks fly upward), Job 25:4 (one born of woman, purity), and Ecclesiastes 2:23 (days filled with grief) all press the same point: birth into the human frame is birth into a condition of limitation and distress, not an exception to be explained away.
Why it lands — It removes the reader's default assumption that a life is a success story by default and forces the question: if the baseline is shortness and turmoil, what is the actual claim being made about meaning, justice, or redemption?
Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.
The Hebrew words
King James Version
Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.
Cross-references
- Job 5:7 Yet man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward.
- Job 25:4 How then can a man be just before God? How can one born of woman be pure?
- Ecclesiastes 2:23 Indeed, all his days are filled with grief, and his task is sorrowful; even at night, his mind does not rest. This too is futile.
- Job 7:1 “Is not man consigned to labor on earth? Are not his days like those of a hired hand?
- Matthew 11:11 Truly I tell you, among those born of women there has risen no one greater than John the Baptist. Yet even the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.
- Job 7:6 My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle; they come to an end without hope.
- Job 9:25 My days are swifter than a runner; they flee without seeing good.
- Job 15:14 What is man, that he should be pure, or one born of woman, that he should be righteous?
- Genesis 47:9 “My travels have lasted 130 years,” Jacob replied. “My years have been few and hard, and they have not matched the years of the travels of my fathers.”
- Psalms 51:5 Surely I was brought forth in iniquity; I was sinful when my mother conceived me.