They that dwell in my house, and my maidservants, count me as a stranger: I am an alien in their sight.
All Commentaries on Job 19:15 Go To Job 19
Gregory The Dialogist
AD 604
We shall show this more effectively if we introduce the testimony of John, who says, “He came to his own, and his own did not receive him.” For his “brothers were put far from him,” and his “acquaintances were estranged” from him, concerning whom the Hebrews that held the law were taught to prophesy and never realized they should acknowledge when present. Thus it is rightly said, “My relatives and my close friends have failed me.” The Jews, “relatives” in the flesh, an “acquaintance” by the teaching of the law, forgot him whom they had foretold. They sang of him in the words of the law as destined to become incarnate. When he was made incarnate, they denied him with words of unbelief. The text continues, “The guests in my house have forgotten me; my serving girls count me as a stranger.” The inhabitants of God’s house were the priests, whose race was once set apart in the service of God and continued henceforth by office in that state. But the “serving girls” are not improperly taken as the souls of the Levites, servants to the hidden parts of the tabernacle, as it were, by a more familiar service to the interior of the bedchamber. Therefore, let Job say of the priests, serving with diligent care, let him say of the Levites attending in the interior of the house of God, “The guests in my house have forgotten me; my serving girls count me as a stranger.” For they refused to acknowledge and reverence the incarnate Lord, whom they had for long foretold in the words of the law. And yet, Job more plainly shows that he was not understood by their wicked will when he adds, “I have become an alien in their eyes.” This prefigures our Redeemer who, because he was not recognized by the synagogue, was rendered, “as it were, an alien” in his own house. The prophet plainly witnesses to this, saying, “Wherefore shall you be as a settler in the land and as a wayfaring man that turns aside to tarry?” When Christ was not heard as the Lord, he was not accepted as the owner but as “a settler of the land.” He only “turned aside to tarry as a wayfaring man,” in that he bore away only a few people out of Judea, and proceeding to the calling of the Gentiles finished the journey that he had begun.
