Job 18:10

Job 18:10 The snare [is] laid for him in the ground, and a trap for him in the way.

Ver. 10. The snare is laid for him in the ground, &c.] This heap of words, net, snare, gin, trap, cords, showeth that God hath many ways to catch the wicked with, and that nusquam et nunquam non eis impendeat exitium, destruction is ready to meet them at every turning. God cannot lack a weapon to beat a rebel.

And a trap for him in the way] He walks as it were upon a mine of gunpowder. The Hebrew hath it, His trap; such as most of the Caesars, till Constantine the Great, met with; and among the rest Maximinus, that inastive tyrant, eight feet high, who daily devoured forty pounds of flesh, and drank thereto six gallons of wine. This foul beast, after he had raised the sixth persecution against the Christians, especially against the pastors of the Church, and exercised many other great cruelties, was told to his teeth ( Mimus in Theatre),

Eleptias grandis est, et occiditur;

Leo fortis est, et occiditur:

Cave multos, si singulos non times.

And it befell him accordingly, for at the siege of Aquileia, in Italy, he was slain as he slept at noon in his tent by his own soldiers (Euseb.). Ezekiel foretelleth the degenerate sons of Josiah, that they shall be taken by the king of Babylon as beasts in a toil. So Pharaoh, that natural brute beast, was "made to be taken and destroyed," 2Pe 2:12 Exo 9:16. So Saul complaineth that God had forsaken him, and the Philistines, those savage creatures, were upon him, 1Sa 28:15 "Behold, I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them," &c., Jer 16:16.

John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

10. The snare — Literally, Hidden in the earth is his snare; and his net (is) on the foot-path. The continuation in Job_18:10 of the figure of the fowler declares that that issue of sinful life has been preparing long beforehand; the prosperity of the evildoer from the beginning tends toward ruin. (Delitzsch.)

Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Terrors shall make him afraid on every side,.... Make him a "Magormissabib", or "terror on every side", as Pashur was a terror to himself, Jer 20:3, and all his friends about him; these terrors may be either the terrors of the judges of the earth upon wicked men, who are, or should be, a terror to evildoers, and of whom wicked men are afraid, lest they should be taken and punished by them; to this sense is the note of Sephorno: or else the terrors of a guilty conscience, which drive a man to his wits' end, that he knows not what to do, nor whither to go; these terrify him night and day, and make an hell upon earth unto him; or the terrors of the righteous law of God broken by him, its menaces and curses threatening him with death and everlasting damnation; or the terrors of the judgments of God on earth, which by their forerunners appear to be coming on it, by reason of which men's hearts fail for fear of them; or terrible apprehensions of the wrath of God for sin, here and hereafter, together with the terrors of death, which fall upon them, and of an awful judgment yet to come. Now Bildad had observed, that Job had said some things concerning the terrors he was sometimes possessed of, Job 6:4; and therefore would suggest from hence that he must be a wicked man, since this is the case of such; but it is easy to observe that good men are sometimes surrounded with terrors as well as others, so that this is no proof of a man's character and state, see Psa 88:15;

and shall drive him to his feet; to take to his feet and run, in order to get rid of his terrors if possible, but in vain; these cause him not to run to God, to his feet, to the throne and footstool of his grace, but from him, to the rocks and mountains to hide him from his wrath, though there is no going from his spirit, nor fleeing from his presence; and terrors will also have such an effect upon wielded men as to cause them to flee from men, as in Cain, who not only went, from the presence of the Lord, but from the society of men, and became a fugitive and vagabond, and afraid of everyone he met with, lest he should kill him; and sometimes wicked men flee when none pursue, and even at the sound of shaking leaf, Pro 28:1; or "shall scatter him at his feet" (t), either at the feet of the robber, or cause him to fall to the ground, in the place where his feet stood. Mr. Broughton renders it, "shall press him at his feet", shall follow at his heels, and keep close to him wherever he goes, and overtake and seize him.

(t) "dispergent eum", Pagninus, Montanus, Beza, Mercerus, Piscator, Schmidt.

John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

The snare is laid - All this language is taken from the modes of taking wild beasts; but it is not possible to designate with absolute certainty the methods in which it was done. The word used here (חבל chebel) means a cord, or rope; and then a snare, gin, or toil, such as is used by hunters. It was used in some way as a noose to secure an animal. This was concealed (Hebrew) “in the earth” - so covered up that an animal would not perceive it, and so constructed that it might be made to spring upon it suddenly.

And a trap - We have no reason to suppose that at that time they employed steel to construct traps as we do now, or that the word here has exactly the sense which we give to it. The Hebrew word (מלכדת malkôdeth) is from לכד lâkad - “to take,” “to catch,” and means a noose, snare, spring - by which an animal was seized. It is a general term; though undoubtedly used to denote a particular instrument, then well known. The general idea in all this is, that the wicked man would be suddenly seized by calamities, as a wild animal or a bird is taken in a snare. Independently of the interest of the entire passage Job 18:8-10 as a part of the argument of Bildad, it is interesting from the view which it gives of the mode of securing wild animals in the early periods of the world. They had no guns as we have; but they early learned the art of setting gins and snares by which they were taken. In illustrating this passage, it will not be inappropriate to refer to some of the modes of hunting practiced by the ancient Egyptians. The same methods were practiced then in catching birds and taking wild beasts as now, and there is little novelty in modern practices. The ancients had not only traps, nets, and springs, but also bird-lime smeared upon twigs, and made use of stalking-horses, setting dogs, etc. The various methods in which this was done, may be seen described at length in Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, vol. iii. pp. 1-81. The noose was employed to catch the wild ox, the antelope, and other animals.

This seems to be a self-acting net, so constructed that the birds, when coming in contact with it, close it upon themselves.

This trap appears as if in a vertical position, although, doubtless, it is intended to represent a trap lying upon the ground.

There are other traps very similar to this, except that they are oval; and probably have a net like the former. They are composed of two arcs, which, being kept open by machinery in the middle, furnish the oval frame of the net; but when the bird flies in, and knocks out the pin in the center, the arcs collapse enclosing the bird in the net. One instance occurs, in a painting at Thebes, of a trap, in which a hyaena is caught, and carried on the shoulders of two men. It was a common method of hunting to enclose a large tract of land by a circle of nets, or to station men at convenient distances, and gradually to contract the circle by coming near to each other, and thus to drive all the wild animals into a narrow enclosure, where they could be easily slain. Some idea of the extent of those enclosures may be formed from the by no means incredible circumstance related by Plutarch, that when the Macedonian conquerors were in Persia, Philotos, the son of Armenio, had hunting-nets that would enclose the space of an hundred furlongs. The Oriental sovereigns have sometimes employed whole armies in this species of hunting. Picture Bible.

Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

In the ground; where he doth not expect nor discern it. The former snare he laid for himself, but this was laid for him by another.

Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

The snare is laid for him in the ground, and a trap for him in the way; or, the noose is hid for him in the ground (see the Revised Version). Six different kinds of traps or snares are mentioned, "the speaker heaping together every word that he can find descriptive of the art of snaring." The art had been well studied by the Egyptians long before the age of Job, and a great variety of contrivances for capturing both beasts and birds are represented on the very early monuments (Wilkinson, in the authors" Herodotus," vol. it. pp. 77, 78). We may conclude from this passage that it had also been brought to an advanced stage of excellence in Syria and Arabia.

The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

hidden...in the ground under his feet.

A noose...for him The rope of his trap, with which he will be caught.

and a trap for him is hidden on the path just as they hide the noose of the trap for birds.

Rashi on the Tanakh — English translations: “The Judaica Press complete Tanach with Rashi, translated by A. J. Rosenberg” (CC BY 4.0); “Pentateuch with Rashi's commentary by M. Rosenbaum and A.M. Silbermann, 1929-1934” (public domain); “The Metsudah Tanach series, Lakewood, N.J” (CC BY 4.0); and “The Book of Joshua, Metsudah Publications, 1997” (CC BY 4.0). Text via Sefaria.