Job 3:21

21. Which long for death Of the sufferings of the miserable slaves anciently employed in the Egyptian mines, to whom Hitzig and others think Job refers, Diodorus Siculus gives a long and most painful description. It contains a passage strikingly similar to that of the text: “so that these miserable creatures always expect worse to come than that which they then at present endure, and therefore long for death, as far more desirable than life.” BOOTH’S Edit., 1:159.

Hid treasures Such is the instability of eastern governments, and the rapacity of monarchs, that it has ever been common for the wealthy to hide their treasures beneath the ground. There are many engaged, even at the present day, in digging for treasures supposed to have been concealed in the remote past. The fortunate finder, Dr. Thomson ( Land and the Book, 1:195) tells us, often swoons away. The digger “becomes positively frantic, digs all night with desperate earnestness, and continues to work till utterly exhausted. There are at this hour hundreds of persons thus engaged all over the country.” The figure sets before us the ardour and persistence of the search for death, and the overwhelming joy of discovery, and is one of the most powerful within the compass of literature. The antithesis of death to hidden treasures leads Ewald to remark that death, like such treasures, seems to come out of earth’s most secret womb, even as Pluto is the god of both. Dr. Evans bases upon the “Vav consecutive,” used here, the just observation that the digging for death is consequent upon waiting for it the passive waiting and longing being succeeded by the more active digging and searching for it. A terrible picture of the progress of human misery. (Compare the address of Eleazar, in JOSEPHUS, Wars of the Jews, b. vii, chap. viii, sec. 7.)