Job 5:7

"For affliction doesn’t come out of the dust, neither does trouble spring out of the ground;"

Key Reflection

In Job 5:7, Elihu is addressing the suffering of Job and his friends, emphasizing that affliction and trouble do not arise from inanimate objects like dust or the ground. For the original audience—Job’s contemporaries living in a agrarian society where the environment played a significant role—they would have understood this as a statement that calamity does not simply descend from the earth but rather originates elsewhere, perhaps from divine judgment or human actions.

From the Scholars: Barnes' Notes

Yet man is born unto trouble -All this is connected with the sentiment inJob 5:8ff. The meaning is, that “since afflictions are ordered by an intelligent Being, and since man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, therefore it is wise to commit our cause to God, and not to complain against him.” Margin, or labor. The word here (עמל‛âmâl) rather means trouble, or affliction, than labor. The sense is, that as certainly as man is born, so sure is it that he will have trouble. It follows from the condition of our being, as certainly as that unconscious objects will follow the laws of their nature - that sparks will ascend.

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