Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.
All Commentaries on Job 14:1 Go To Job 14
Gregory The Dialogist
AD 604
65. In Sacred Writ ‘woman’ is taken either for the sex, or else for ‘frailty.’ For the ‘sex,’ as where it is written, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the Law [Gal. 4, 4]. But for frailty, as where it is said by the Wise Man, Better is the iniquity of a man than a woman doing well. [Ecclus. 42, 14] For ‘a man’ is the term for every strongminded and discreet person, but ‘a woman’ is understood of the weak or indiscreet mind. And it often happens that even the discreet person suddenly falls into a fault, and that another weak and indiscreet man exhibits good practice. But he that is weak and indiscreet is sometimes lifted up the more on the score of what he has done well, and falls the worse into sin; but the discreet person even from that which he sees that he has done amiss, takes occasion to recall himself with closer application to the rule of strictness, and advances the further in righteousness from the same act, whereby he seemed to have fallen from righteousness for a time. In which respect it is rightly said, Better is the iniquity of a man than a woman doing well; in that sometimes the very fault of the strong becomes occasion of virtue, and the virtue of the weak occasion of sin. In this place then by the name of ‘a woman,’ what else but ‘frailty’ is denoted, when it is said, Man that is born of a woman? As if it were said in plainer words, ‘What strength shall he have in himself, who was born in frailty?’
66. Liveth a short time, and is full of many miseries. Observe by the holy man’s words we have the punishment of man briefly set forth, in that he is at once stinted in life and filled out in misery. For if we consider with exactness all that is done here, it is punishment and misery. For to minister to the corruption of the flesh by itself in things necessary and permitted is misery, in such measure that clothing should be sought out against cold, food against hunger, coolness against heat. That the health of the body is kept only with great care, that even when kept it is lost, when lost it is recovered not without great difficulty, and yet after being restored is always in risk; what else is this than the misery of the life of mortality? That we love our friends, mistrusting lest they may be offended with us; that we dread our enemies, and truly are not secure touching those whom we dread; that we often talk to our enemies as confidentially as to friends, and often take the sincere words of our friends, and those, perhaps, that love us very much, as the words of enemies; and that we, who wish never either to be deceived or to deceive, err the more by our caution; what, then, is all this but the misery of man’s life? That after the heavenly country has been lost, banished man is delighted with his exile, that he is weighed down with cares, and yet shuts his eyes to considering how great the burthen is, in that he is full of a multitude of thoughts; that he is deprived of the interior light, and yet in this life wishes to prolong his state of blindness; what else is this but misery, the offspring of our punishment? Yet though he desire to stay here for long, still he is driven on by the mere current of his mortal life to depart out of it.
