Job 3:15

15. Their houses Meaning, their tombs; thus Rosenmuller, Hirtel, and Hitzig. In like manner Isaiah (Isaiah 14:18) and Diodorus Siculus, (i, 51,) according to whom the Egyptians called their graves houses, οικοι . The ancients buried treasures with their dead. Josephus tells us that immense wealth was interred with David, and that about nine centuries afterward Hyrcanus opened one room of the sepulchre, and took out three thousand talents, part of which he gave to Antiochus, that the siege of the city might be raised. ( Antiq., vii, chap. 15.) Canon Cook cites a papyrus from the times of Rameses III., (contemporary with the early Judges,) which contains an account of the trial and execution of robbers who broke into several Egyptian tombs, and despoiled the mummies of large quantities of gold. Job specifies three classes of the fortunate dead:

1. Those whose display is greatest in death, Job 3:14.

2. Those most successful in life, Job 3:15.

3. Those who altogether failed of conscious existence in this life, Job 3:16. They are all one in the grave, and could he only have died as soon as he was born he would have been equally at rest. The splendid successes of life take upon them a different hue when contemplated from the brink of the grave. That the repose of death should be more to be desired than gold, and silver, and brilliancy of mortal estate, bears witness, not to emotions of envious regret on the part of Job over his own lost grandeur, as some have intimated nor is it “irony,” as Umbreit would have it, “which often blazes forth from the black cloud of melancholy” it is rather the view of an enlightened soul, that sees in the rest of the grave the shadow of the eternal “rest that remaineth for the people of God.” Even the heathen philosopher Aristotle, (cited by RAWLINSON, Christianity, etc., page 238,) looked upon man’s final happiness as an “energy of rest;” one single, pure, unchanging, and perpetual energy of thought; the silent contemplation of God and Godlike things.