When his friends try to advise him, they only make matters worse. Job calls them “worthless physicians” and “miserable comforters” (13:4; 16:2). He doesn’t want their clichéd advice. He wants to deal with God firsthand. He complains that everyone is against him: wife, close friends, guests, servants, brothers, little children. They have all taken what they presume to be God’s side against him while he himself lives on the thin edge of existence: “I have escaped by the skin of my teeth” (19:20).
