Bible Strands
Job 4:20
They are smashed to pieces from dawn to dusk; unnoticed, they perish forever.
Berean Standard Bible
Follow its threads on the canvas →
Study note
Setting — Eliphaz speaks to Job during a theological exchange about human mortality, arguing that fragile people are destroyed as rapidly as moths. He addresses Job in the midst of a discourse on the inevitability of divine judgment.
The words — יֻכַּ֑תּוּ (yu.Ka.tu) means “they are crushed to pieces,” and מִ/בֹּ֣קֶר לָ/עֶ֣רֶב (mi./Bo.ker la./'E.rev) marks the uninterrupted span from morning to evening.
The thread — The motif of sudden ruin and permanent disappearance recurs in Job 20:7, where the wicked vanish like dung, and in 2 Chronicles 15:6, where nations and cities are crushed by mutual adversity.
Why it lands — The verse states that human existence is violently brief and leaves no enduring trace, requiring the reader to confront absolute human fragility without appeal to personal merit or longevity.
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
They are destroyed from morning to evening: they perish for ever without any regarding it.
Cross-references
- Job 20:7 he will perish forever, like his own dung; those who had seen him will ask, ‘Where is he?’
- 2 Chronicles 15:6 Nation was crushed by nation, and city by city, for God afflicted them with all kinds of adversity.
- 2 Chronicles 21:20 Jehoram was thirty-two years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem eight years. He died, to no one’s regret, and was buried in the City of David, but not in the tombs of the kings.
- Job 14:2 Like a flower, he comes forth, then withers away; like a fleeting shadow, he does not endure.
- Job 14:14 When a man dies, will he live again? All the days of my hard service I will wait, until my renewal comes.
- Job 14:20 You forever overpower him, and he passes on; You change his countenance and send him away.
- Job 16:22 For when only a few years are past I will go the way of no return.
- Job 18:17 The memory of him perishes from the earth, and he has no name in the land.
- Psalms 37:36 yet he passed away and was no more; though I searched, he could not be found.
- Psalms 39:13 Turn Your gaze away from me, that I may again be cheered before I depart and am no more.”