They gather their fodder in the field, and they glean the vineyard of the wicked man.
Job 24 answers the charge that suffering always follows sin. Job points instead at the world as it is. Here he watches landless men working a harvest that will never be theirs. One question drives the whole chapter: if God sees this, why does He not act?
The landless in another man's field
The people in this verse are not lazy. The wicked drove them off their land. Now they live off its edges, and off work handed out by the very men who ruined them.
William KellyThink of it — the barren sands of the wilderness, that is the only thing, and why? Because they have no land of their own. "They reap every one his own corn in the field" — that is the corn of the rich man — "and they gather the vintage of the wicked." Now they are called not "rich" but "wicked."
Kelly is using an older translation here. Where it reads "corn," the ESV reads "fodder"; where it reads "gather the vintage," the ESV reads "glean the vineyard."
Job pictures what that daily scramble looked like.
Samuel RidoutJob depicts these poor starving sufferers, driven out like animals, to gather a bare living for their children as best they can. They look for work even from their oppressors, and reap their fields and glean in their vineyards.
Work without wages
Gleaning the vineyard of a wicked man means handling the harvest and never tasting it.
Leslie M. GrantCruel men would hire them to press out oil and tread winepresses. Yet they gave them wages too small even to quench their thirst. Some were groaning in the pangs of death, and the souls of the wounded were crying out. "Yet," Job says, "God does not charge them (the oppressors) with wrong" (v.12). But Eliphaz was charging Job with wrong.
The argument Job is making
Job is not just listing misery. He is giving evidence against his friends' theory that God settles every account in this life.
Samuel RidoutIt is an awful picture of facts only too well known to them — and to us. How can Eliphaz make such facts fit his theory that evil is always punished in this life? But, oh, how can God close His eyes to these things, and afflict a faithful man instead of these wrongdoers? This is Job's great trouble, and for this he has found no solution.
Why judgment waits
Job had no answer. William Kelly argues that we now do.
William KellyThere are these times of evil. God is a moral governor, and He takes notice of all evil. So how is it that He lets evil pass as He does, and that there is no day of retribution now? Well, we can answer that fully. It is all reserved for Christ... And therefore it is reserved for the Lord Jesus to execute judgment.
The cry that reaches God
What looked to Job like silence has an answer elsewhere in Scripture. Unpaid harvest workers get a hearing, even when their employer gives them none.
William KellyTheir very wealth tempts the rich to hold back the wages of the poor. Only their own things matter in their eyes. They put off the claims of those who live from hand to mouth to a convenient time. But the debt cries aloud to Him who always feels for the poor... Yes, the cries of the reapers may never have reached the rich. But they entered the ears of the Lord of hosts, and His blow would fall when least expected.
Who the gospel came to
Job saw only their misery. Kelly points to what God would later do for people like them.
William KellyNow what a wonderful love it is to the very persons to whom the gospel is preached. It was to the "poor" the gospel was preached; they were in a special way the object of the Lord Jesus. There never was such a thing before, since the world began. Nobody ever made them his grand object, and that for eternity. But Job could not know anything of that.
Summary
- Landless. They reap and glean because they own nothing. The field and the vineyard belong to the men who drove them out.
- Wicked, not rich. Job's word for the vineyard's owner is a moral verdict, not a description of his bank balance.
- Unanswered. Open crimes go unpunished while a faithful man suffers. Job finds no solution.
- Reserved. The day of retribution has not failed. God holds it back and gives it to Christ to carry out.
- Heard. Withheld wages reach the ears of the Lord of hosts. The poor became the very people the gospel was sent to.