If his children are multiplied, it is for the sword. His offspring will not be satisfied with bread.
Parallel Translations
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If his children are multiplied, it is for the sword. His offspring will not be satisfied with bread.
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If his children be multiplied, it is for the sword: and his offspring shall not be satisfied with bread.
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If his children be multiplied, it is for the sword; and his offspring shall not have bread enough.
Cross-references (13)
Passages linked to Job 27:14 in the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, ordered by reader-vote popularity; verse text shown in World English Bible.
- Deuteronomy 28:41 You will father sons and daughters, but they will not be yours, for they will go into captivity.
- Job 20:10 His children will seek the favor of the poor. His hands will give back his wealth.
- Luke 23:29 For behold, the days are coming in which they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.’
- Deuteronomy 28:32 Your sons and your daughters will be given to another people. Your eyes will look, and fail with longing for them all day long. There will be no power in your hand.
- 1 Samuel 2:5 Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread. Those who were hungry are satisfied. Yes, the barren has borne seven. She who has many children languishes.
- 2 Kings 9:7-8 You must strike your master Ahab’s house, that I may avenge the blood of my servants the prophets, and the blood of all the servants of Yahweh, at the hand of Jezebel. For the whole house of Ahab will perish. I will cut off from Ahab everyone who urinates against a wall, both him who is shut up and him who is left at large in Israel.
- 2 Kings 10:6-10 Then he wrote a letter the second time to them, saying, “If you are on my side, and if you will listen to my voice, take the heads of the men who are your master’s sons, and come to me to Jezreel by tomorrow this time.” Now the king’s sons, being seventy persons, were with the great men of the city, who brought them up. When the letter came to them, they took the king’s sons and killed them, even seventy people, and put their heads in baskets, and sent them to him to Jezreel. A messenger came and told him, “They have brought the heads of the king’s sons.” He said, “Lay them in two heaps at the entrance of the gate until the morning.” In the morning, he went out, and stood, and said to all the people, “You are righteous. Behold, I conspired against my master and killed him, but who killed all these? Know now that nothing will fall to the earth of Yahweh’s word, which Yahweh spoke concerning Ahab’s house. For Yahweh has done that which he spoke by his servant Elijah.”
- Esther 5:11 Haman recounted to them the glory of his riches, the multitude of his children, all the things in which the king had promoted him, and how he had advanced him above the princes and servants of the king.
- Esther 9:5-10 The Jews struck all their enemies with the stroke of the sword, and with slaughter and destruction, and did what they wanted to those who hated them. In the citadel of Susa, the Jews killed and destroyed five hundred men. They killed Parshandatha, Dalphon, Aspatha, Poratha, Adalia, Aridatha, Parmashta, Arisai, Aridai, and Vaizatha, the ten sons of Haman the son of Hammedatha, the Jews’ enemy, but they didn’t lay their hand on the plunder.
- Job 15:22 He doesn’t believe that he will return out of darkness. He is waited for by the sword.
- Job 21:11-12 They send out their little ones like a flock. Their children dance. They sing to the tambourine and harp, and rejoice at the sound of the pipe.
- Psalms 109:13 Let his posterity be cut off. In the generation following let their name be blotted out.
- Hosea 9:13-14 I have seen Ephraim, like Tyre, planted in a pleasant place; but Ephraim will bring out his children to the murderer. Give them—Yahweh what will you give? Give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts.
Cross-references from openbible.info (CC BY 4.0)
Explain this verse (11 sources)
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John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain Job 27:14 If his children be multiplied, [it is]…
Job 27:14 If his children be multiplied, [it is] for the sword: and his offspring shall not be satisfied with bread.
Ver. 14. If his children be multiplied, it is for the sword] As were Ahab’s seventy sons, for instance, 2Ki 10:1, whom he had begotten after God had threatened to root out his posterity. He, therefore, as it were to cross the Almighty, gives himself so much the more strenuously to the work of generation; but this was (like Ephraim) to bring forth children to the murderer, Hos 4:13. See the like of Ahaziah and his forty-two brethren slain at the shearing house. {2Ki 10:14}
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And his offspring] Heb. His issues, or egressions, his shoots or branches, his pledges: so Mercer rendereth it.
Shall not be satisfied with bread] i.e. Shall be pined and famished, which their wicked parents, by heaping and hoarding, sought to prevent, but it could not be. And this shall be a more cruel kind of death than the former, Lam 4:9. Drusus, the son of Tiberius Nero, was put to this death; so was our Richard II, at Pomfret Castle; Sanders, that traitor in Ireland; and many others.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain It is for the sword; that they may be…
It is for the sword; that they may be cut off by the sword, either of war or of justice.
Shall not be satisfied with bread; shall be starved, or want necessaries. A figure called meiosis.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain Those that remain of him,.... Of the wicked man…
Those that remain of him,.... Of the wicked man after his death; or such that remain, and have escaped the sword and famine:
shall be buried in death: the pestilence, emphatically called death by the Hebrews, as by us the mortality, see Rev 6:8. This is another of God's sore public judgments wicked men, and is such a kind of death, by reason of the contagion of it, that a person is buried as soon as dead almost, being infectious to keep him; and so Mr. Broughton translates the words,
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"his remnant shall be buried as soon as they are dead;''
or the disease of which such die being so very infectious sometimes, no one dares to bury them for fear of catching it, and so they lie unburied; which some take to be the sense of the phrase, either that they shall be hurried away to the grave, and so not be embalmed and lie in state, and have an honourable and pompous funeral, or that they shall have none at all, their death will be all the burial they shall have: or else the sense is, they shall die such a death as that death shall be their grave; and they shall have no other, as the men of the old world that were drowned in the flood, Gen 7:23; and Pharaoh and his host in the Red sea, Exo 15:4; and Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, who were swallowed up in the earth, Num 16:27; and such as are devoured by wild beasts; and if this last could be thought to be meant, we have all the four sore judgments of God in this verse and Job 27:14, sword, famine, pestilence, and evil beasts, see Eze 14:21,
and his widows shall not weep; leaving more than one behind him, polygamy being frequent in those times; or else these are his sons' wives, left widows by them, as Bar Tzemach thinks, they being the persons immediately spoken of, dying by various deaths before mentioned; but whether they be his widows, or theirs, they shall weep for neither of them; either because they themselves will be cut off with them; or their husbands dying shameful deaths, lamentation would be forbidden; or they would not be able to weep through the astonishment and stupor they should be seized with at their death; or having lived such miserable and uncomfortable lives with them, they should be so far from lamenting their death, that they should, as Jarchi interprets it, rejoice at it; the Septuagint version is,
"no one shall have mercy on their widows.''
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain Verse 14. If his children be multiplied] As numerous…
Verse 14. If his children be multiplied] As numerous families were supposed to be a proof of the benediction of the Almighty, Job shows that this is not always the case; for the offspring of the wicked shall be partly cut off by violent deaths, and partly reduced to great poverty.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain Job 27:14-15. It is for the sword — That…
Job 27:14-15. It is for the sword — That they may be cut off by the sword, either of war or of justice: and his offspring, &c. — Shall be starved, or shall want necessaries. Those that remain of him — Who survive that sword and famine; shall be buried in death — “Shall be reduced to so great a degree of misery,” says Schultens, “that where they die, there they shall rot, and no person shall bury them: they shall have death itself, (so he renders the text,) for their sepulchre.” It is put in antithesis, or by way of contrast to the monuments of the rich. And his widows — For they had many wives; shall not weep — Because they, as well as other persons, groaned under his tyranny, and, therefore, rejoice in their deliverance from it.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain If his children be multiplied, it is for the…
If his children be multiplied, it is for the sword - That is, they shall be slain in war. The first calamities which it is here said would come upon a man, relate to his family Job 27:14-18; the next are those that would come upon himself, Job 27:19-23. All the sentiments here expressed are found in the various speeches of the friends of Job, and, according to the interpretation suggested above, this is designed to represent their sentiments. They maintained that if a wicked man was blessed with a numerous family, and seemed to be prosperous, it was only that the punishment might come the more heavily upon him, for that they certainly would be cut off; see Job 18:19-20; Job 20:10.
And his offspring shall not be satisfied with bread - This sentiment was advanced by Zophar, Job 20:10; see the notes at that verse.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain Bread. Septuagint, "if they grow up to manhood, they…
CHAPTER XXVII.
Bread. Septuagint, "if they grow up to manhood, they shall beg," Psalm xxxvi 25. (Haydock)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain His family only increases to perish by sword or…
His family only increases to perish by sword or famine (Jer 18:21; Job 5:20, the converse).
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain Strophe b — Having fully established his main position,…
Strophe b — Having fully established his main position, that the virtuous may suffer, for instance as in his case, (2-10,) Job proceeds to give in detail the sufferings of a portion of the wicked in this present life. In admitting the sufferings of some of the wicked, he magnanimously proffers a ground of conciliation, with an implied condition that the friends should also admit the sufferings of the righteous, which they in the obstinacy of silence fail to do, Job_27:14-18.
14. His children — Calamity hangs over his home also; his children perish, too, some by war and some by famine. Job’s glowing description of a godless family in Job_21:8, he now qualifies by declaring their doom. It is painfully natural that desolate Job should first speak of the children of the wicked.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain 14. With the sentiment of this verse compare Job’s…
14. With the sentiment of this verse compare Job’s former words in regard to the wicked, “Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring before their eyes. They send forth their little ones like a flock, and their children dance. They spend their days in wealth,” ch. Job_21:8 seq.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain If his children be multiplied, it is for the…
If his children be multiplied, it is for the sword. Among the items of prosperity which Job had assigned to the wicked man in one of his previous discourses (Job_21:8, Job_21:11) was a numerous and flourishing offspring. Now he feels forced to admit that, frequently at any rate, this flourishing offspring is overtaken by calamity (Job_21:19) it falls by the sword, either in predatory warfare, to which it was bred up, or as the consequence of a blood-feud inherited from its progenitor. They who "take the sword," either in their own persons or in their posterity, "perish with the sword." And his offspring shall not be satisfied with bread. If they escape this fate, then, mostly, they fall into poverty, and suffer want, no one caring to relieve them, since they have an ill reputation, the memory of their parent"s wickedness clinging to them long after his decease.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.