Bible Strands
Job 9:17
For He would crush me with a tempest and multiply my wounds without cause.
Berean Standard Bible
Follow its threads on the canvas →
Study note
Setting — Job speaks to his friends and to God during his discourse on divine justice, describing how God would crush him with a tempest and multiply his wounds without cause. He positions his current affliction as an arbitrary divine assault rather than a judicial response.
The words — The verse highlights יְשׁוּפֵ֑נִי (yeshufeni), meaning "he crushes me," and חִנָּֽם (chinam), meaning "without cause." The text states that the crushing and wound multiplication occur arbitrarily, before interpreters assign this to divine hiddenness or pedagogical suffering.
The thread — The text's pattern of relentless, unmerited affliction runs through Job 16:14, where God breaks him with wound upon wound and rushes him like a warrior, and echoes in Job 34:6, which asserts an incurable wound despite a lack of transgression.
Why it lands — The text asks a reader to acknowledge the raw experience of suffering that defies simple moral accounting. It requires the reader to sit with the claim of innocence alongside the reality of unexplained devastation.
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
For he breaketh me with a tempest, and multiplieth my wounds without cause.
Cross-references
- Job 16:14 He breaks me with wound upon wound; He rushes me like a mighty warrior.
- Job 2:3 Then the LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered My servant Job? For there is no one on earth like him, a man who is blameless and upright, who fears God and shuns evil. He still retains his integrity, even though you incited Me against him to ruin him without cause.”
- Job 34:6 Would I lie about my case? My wound is incurable, though I am without transgression.’
- Job 1:14 a messenger came and reported to Job: “While the oxen were plowing and the donkeys were grazing nearby,
- Job 2:7 So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD and infected Job with terrible boils from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.
- Job 2:13 Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights, but no one spoke a word to him because they saw how intense his suffering was.
- Job 16:12 I was at ease, but He shattered me; He seized me by the neck and crushed me. He has set me up as His target;
- Job 16:17 yet my hands are free of violence and my prayer is pure.
- Job 30:22 You snatch me up into the wind and drive me before it; You toss me about in the storm.
- Psalms 25:3 Surely none who wait for You will be put to shame; but those who engage in treachery without cause will be disgraced.