Job 22:6

For you have extracted pledges from your kinsmen without reason,

   Stripped the naked of their clothing.

This verse starts a string of things the Eliphaz is accusing Job of doing. My guess is he is just guessing because this is what he has done. We know Job did not do these things as God called him righteous. This is what lost people in the world do: they think everyone is just as lost as they are.

‘Extracted’ was also ‘demanded’, ‘taken’, and ‘exact’. ‘Pledges’ was also ‘security’, and ‘pawn’. ‘Kinsmen’ was also ‘family’, ‘brothers’, and ‘fellows’. ‘Without reason’ was also ‘for no reason’, ‘for naught’, and ‘for nothing’.

The second verse was really only rearranged to be as I have it or ‘stripped their clothing leaving them naked’.

‘Stripped the naked of their clothing’ seems to me to represent taking everything from them who have nothing in the first place. My guess is that the normal practice was to loan people something and take their outer garment as collateral which would be given back at the end of the day. You did not do this for your family or for those that you expected to pay you back. But the ‘sin’ was to demand all the clothes someone had and make them go about naked until they could repay. Not common in our society today, but probably not uncommon in their era.

The paradigm is that the poor in our culture live in a house with air conditioning, drive a car, and even the little kids have phones, and they have plenty to eat. I didn’t have a phone since no one did back then, but this is the poor I grew up in. Across history, the poor have been homeless, with one ratty garment, having nothing, and begging to work for their next meal. Going hungry today is because your parents were too lazy to feed you, not because they have nothing to pay for food.

I had a near sleep idea of hiring someone to paint a painting that I dreamed up. It starts from a book I recently read, but hinges on the fact that I could never seem to figure out how to get the paint to look like the vision in my head. Also from our trip to Italy where I did not get to see any paintings that people through out the ages hired someone else to paint. I have seven paintings in this room and at least that many more scattered throughout the house that I have acquired over my lifetime. None are probably worth $100, but my dozing thoughts came up with $8,000 needed to hire out the kind of painting I would want. I also figured I could get AI to do it for me. Not going down that route. The key to this verse for me is without reason. Why would one take someone’s clothes, why would I pay someone $8,000 to paint a painting to hang on my wall, what would be the reason? To me the only valid reason is ‘because God told me so’. As my accountability partner asked today: How do we learn to want what God wants?

Written 7/16/26, Posted 8/19/26, Job 525/~1070