Job 14:13

Fourth strophe Job’s abiding faith in God’s deep love for his intelligent creatures illumes the regions of the dead with the hope that the time shall come when God’s wrath will “turn,” and the dead be released from sheol a hope which is immediately beclouded by the thought that God has already been preternaturally severe in punishing his transgressions, Job 14:13-17.

13. Thou wouldest hide me As men, for protection, hide treasures in the earth. The dead in the grave are God’s hidden treasures. Compare Psalms 83:3. In the grave In sheol. See Excursus, p. 72. Gloomiest life in sheol is better than extinction of being.

Wrath be past Death itself was the great wrath for whose turning ( שׁוב ) the pious dead in the earliest times were represented as waiting. (See LANGE’S Genesis, 275.) The ancients buried their dead in caverns or sepulchres of the rocks. These naturally suggested the idea of a covert from the tempest. The Hebrew hoped that a time would come for the storm to cease, and that the dominion of death, though long protracted, would have an end.

A set time In the opinion of Dr. Adam Clarke this refers to the resurrection: “for what else can be said to be an object of desire to one whose body is mingled with the dust?”