Bible Strands
Job 6:26
Do you intend to correct my words, and treat as wind my cry of despair?
Berean Standard Bible
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Study note
Setting — Job speaks to his three friends during his acute physical agony and social abandonment. He confronts them at the moment their theological rebuttals deepen his isolation.
The words — The Hebrew verb תַּחְשְׁבוּ (tachshəvû) literally means "do you plan" or "do you intend," while ר֫וּחַ (rûach) translates directly to "wind" or "breath." Job asks whether his companions plan to dismiss his lament as meaningless air.
The thread — The wind metaphor for empty speech recurs in Job 8:2, where Bildad echoes the same dismissal. Scripture later contrasts this with Matthew 12:37, which ties words to final judgment, and Ephesians 4:14, which warns against doctrinal instability.
Why it lands — The text requires readers to distinguish between genuine correction and rhetorical dismissal. It demands that responses to suffering address the speaker’s actual condition rather than substituting empty formulas.
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
Do ye imagine to reprove words, and the speeches of one that is desperate, which are as wind?
Cross-references
- Job 8:2 “How long will you go on saying such things? The words of your mouth are a blustering wind.
- Matthew 12:37 For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.”
- Ephesians 4:14 Then we will no longer be infants, tossed about by the waves and carried around by every wind of teaching and by the clever cunning of men in their deceitful scheming.
- Job 2:10 “You speak as a foolish woman speaks,” he told her. “Should we accept from God only good and not adversity?” In all this, Job did not sin in what he said.
- Job 3:3 “May the day of my birth perish, and the night it was said, ‘A boy is conceived.’
- Job 4:3 Surely you have instructed many, and have strengthened their feeble hands.
- Job 6:4 For the arrows of the Almighty have pierced me; my spirit drinks in their poison; the terrors of God are arrayed against me.
- Job 6:9 that God would be willing to crush me, to unleash His hand and cut me off!
- Job 10:1 “I loathe my own life; I will express my complaint and speak in the bitterness of my soul.
- Job 34:3 For the ear tests words as the mouth tastes food.