Job 14:4

The context

Job 14 is a lament on human frailty. He compares a person to a felled tree that may sprout again, and to water that evaporates from a lake, and he asks to be hidden in the grave until God's wrath passes. Verse 4 sits in the middle of that meditation on mortality and impurity.

What it establishes

The verse establishes a rhetorical impossibility: what is born of the unclean does not come out clean by its own power. In context the point is about the human condition as such, not about a particular sin, and it prepares the plea that follows for a limit to God's anger.

What it does not establish

It is a question, not a definition of inherited guilt. The verse does not name Adam, does not describe how impurity passes, and does not say that infants are guilty. Reading it as proof of original sin is a later move; the passage is a lament about mortality.

Short note, first pass, October 2026. Corrections welcome.

Cited in these answers

• Job is described as “righteous” and “blameless.” Can these descriptions be taken seriously if the Bible is said to teach the universal sinfulness of mankind?

Part of Scripture, Opened — the exegetical layer behind every citation on this site. Scripture quotations are from the ESV.