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After Job erupts with his cry of pain in chapter 3, he begins to express a wider range of emotions in chapters 6 and 7. Anger, bitterness and sad lament now come to the fore. He is angry at God, who has sent his arrows into Job (6:4), and Job pleads for God to finish the job (6:8-9). He is angry at the friends because he interprets their initial words as signals of treachery (6:14-21). His tone changes in 7:1 to one of lament, and he asks plaintively, "Do not human beings have a hard service ('tsaba' ') on earth, and are not their days like the days of a laborer?"

Hard ('Conscript'--NJB) Service

The word translated "hard service" is also frequently used in the Hebrew Bible of an "army" or "host." It also can be used to describe any kind of position which requires unremitting toil, as can be seen by the second half of 7:1 ("days like the days of a laborer"). Two aspects of this hard service that Job has in mind are the fact of its roughness and the sense that it goes completely unrewarded. At least the laborers receive their paycheck at the end of the day and a slave eventually can rest in the cool of the shadow (7:2), but as Job sees it, "I am allotted months of emptiness, and nights of misery are apportioned to me (7:3)."

Thus, when he says life is a 'hard service,' he is placing himself in a worse position than a hired hand or even a slave. At least they got a paycheck or lookied forward to the shade. For Job there is nothing but unrelenting misery. He might have been able to endure the first days or weeks of his misery with Stoic confidence and strength, but after a while he can only say, "What is my strength, that I should wait? And what is my end, that I should be patient (6:11)?" "Hard service" captures the extent, futility and endlessness of his agony.

**A Temporary Hard Service?**

The term stays in his mind and comes back to him when he speculates on his spectacular hope in 14:13-17. Recall that he is bothered in that passage by the seeming contradiction between a tree, which springs back to life at the merest whiff of water (v.9) and humans, who die and seemingly never come back to life. In that connection he longs for God to shield him in Sheol (itself an interesting thought!) until the divine wrath is over, and then call Job to a new relationship of intimacy (14:13-17). Job says, "All the days of my service ('tsaba' ') I would wait until my release should come (14:14)." That is, hope and release from hard service are wedded. 'Maybe,' Job thinks, 'there will be a time when God puts away his anger and that freedom from this hard and unforgiving labor of life will be mine.' This freedom would be the precondition for a restored relationship with God. "You would call, and I would answer you; you would long for the work of your hands (14:15)." Then indeed Job would experience what the Wisdom Tradition meant when it said that the life of the person who trusts God was blessed. God makes straight the paths of the trusting person (Prov. 3:5-6).

Reality Returns

As humans we have the capacity to escape from the waves of pain sweeping over us through reveries of the imagination. An image in the mind, the whiff of an odor, the sight of a person or a picture can throw us to a time and place far removed from the numbing and enervating pain of the present. But, sooner or later, reality returns. It returned for Job in chapter 14 when he tersely says, "so you (God) destroy the hope of mortals (14:19)." Sometimes there may be a seeming alteration between hard service and release (10:17--the language is difficult and the translations differ, but the literal rendering of the last clause is "releases, and then hard service, are with me). But the inescapable fate of mere humans is to labor in fruitless, unrewarded and endless tsaba'.