Job 36:14

14. They die Better, as in margin, their soul dieth. (Hengstenberg, Hitzig, etc.) Soul is here in contrast with life in the second clause. “Passages like it in the Proverbs would support the idea of spiritual death.” Tayler Lewis. Hypocrisy enervates, undermines, and destroys man’s moral being no less certainly than licentiousness does his physical being. The divine mind may class hypocrisy and licentiousness more closely together than we would deem possible, even as the hypocrite and catamite are here linked together in oneness of spiritual death.

The unclean Or as in margin. Literally, the word means “ those consecrated to the service of heathen deities.” It is a sad comment on idolatrous worship that it should enlist for its support the prostitution not only of women, but of men. The קדושׁים , “saints,” are those devoted to the worship of God: the קדשׁים , the unclean, are those devoted to the worship of gods. The slight divergence of the words (the difference of a vav, ו ) points back to a time when a divergence in the objects of worship took place, while still the philological link, at least, was one of consecration. The indescribable degradation developed through the worship of idols sets forth the heinousness of all vice which builds upon the perversion of true faith. Elihu introduces these degraded beings simply to point the moral that the seemingly righteous, whose true character affliction discloses, die, like these catamites, a premature and ugly death. The masculine vice referred to in the text spread its desolating blight over the most enlightened nations of antiquity, as still appears from the classics. The Persians, according to Herodotus, (i, 135,) learned it from the Greeks.