What It Means
Gōʾēl is the participle of the verb gāʾal, “to redeem,” and it names a person rather than a transaction. The gōʾēl is the next of kin: the relative whose duty it is to step in when a family member cannot help himself.
The Law gives the office its shape. If an Israelite fell into poverty and sold his land, his gōʾēl was to buy it back (Leviticus 25:25). If he sold himself into servitude, a brother, uncle, or cousin could redeem him (25:47-49). If he was killed, the gōʾēl became the avenger of blood (Numbers 35:19), which is why the cities of refuge existed at all. And in Ruth, Boaz acts as gōʾēl for Naomi’s family, buying the field and taking Ruth as his wife to raise up the name of the dead (Ruth 3-4).
Two things are always true of the gōʾēl. He is kin, and he pays. A stranger cannot redeem, and redemption is never free to the one who does it.
Where You Meet It
The word comes at the lowest point of Job’s complaint. His body is ruined, his friends have become prosecutors, and he has just listed everyone who has abandoned him: “My kinsmen have failed me; my friends have forgotten me” (Job 19:14). The people whose duty it was to stand up for him have not.
Then, out of that, comes this:
As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and that as the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God, whom I will see for myself, and whom my own eyes will behold, and not another. (Job 19:25-27)
Job’s human gōʾēl failed him. The gōʾēl he knows lives must be someone else.
Two details are worth slowing down for. The NET’s “as the last” translates ʾaḥărôn. Isaiah puts that word and this one in the same verse: the Lord, Israel’s King and gōʾēl, says “I am the first and I am the last” (Isaiah 44:6). And the Redeemer stands upon the ʿāpār, the dust: the same dust Job expects to lie down in (7:21) and the dust in which he will finally repent (42:6). The Redeemer stands where the dead lie.
What Confessional Lutherans Hear
Isaiah calls the Lord himself Israel’s gōʾēl again and again (41:14; 43:14; 44:6). That creates a problem the Old Testament does not solve on its own terms. A gōʾēl must be kin. How can God be next of kin to a man?
The incarnation is the answer. Hebrews says the Son shared our flesh and blood so that through death he might destroy the one who holds the power of death, and that he had to be made like his brothers and sisters in every respect (Hebrews 2:14-17). God became our relative so that he could redeem us lawfully, as family. And he paid, not with silver or gold, but with his own precious blood (1 Peter 1:18-19).
The Greek words the New Testament uses for this work are covered elsewhere in the Explorer: λύτρον, the ransom price; ἀπολύτρωσις, redemption; ἀγοράζω, to buy. Gōʾēl supplies what those words assume: the one who pays is family.
Job’s confession also reaches toward the resurrection of the body. Whatever else 19:26 means, 19:27 insists on seeing God “for myself” and with “my own eyes.” That is why the church has read these verses at Christian burials for centuries, and why Handel set them at the opening of the resurrection section of Messiah. See ἀνάστασις.
Where People Get It Wrong
Shrinking the Redeemer to a human relative. Some readers take the gōʾēl to be a family member who will clear Job’s name after he dies. But Job has just said his kinsmen have failed him (19:14). And the gōʾēl in these verses is connected directly to seeing God. The text points beyond anyone in Job’s family.
Loading the whole creed onto one verse. The opposite mistake is to talk as if Job had worked out the doctrine of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ. He had not. He knew less than we know, and he knew enough: a living Redeemer, and his own eyes seeing God. Honest reading also admits that 19:25-27 contains some of the hardest Hebrew in the book. In 19:26 the little word translated “in my flesh” can also be read “apart from my flesh,” and the ancient Greek translation reads the whole passage quite differently. The NET’s rendering is defensible and widely held. But the Christian hope of the resurrection does not rest on this verse alone. It rests on the risen Christ (1 Corinthians 15), and this verse is one early voice in a long chorus.
So What
Job says my Redeemer. Redemption in Scripture is personal because kinship is personal. The Son of God is not a distant benefactor who settled your account from a safe distance. He became your brother to do it.
When the people who should stand up for you do not, when your own family has failed you, or you have failed them, Job’s confession still stands. There is a gōʾēl who does not fail, and he is alive.
If You Want to Go Deeper
- Read Leviticus 25:23-55 and Ruth 4:1-12 to see the gōʾēl at work.
- Read Isaiah 43:1-7 and 44:6, where the Lord takes the title for himself.
- Read Hebrews 2:10-18 alongside Job 19:13-27.
- The NET’s translator notes on Job 19:25-27 lay out the textual questions carefully and are worth reading slowly.
- Related Explorer entries: λύτρον, ἀπολύτρωσις, ἀγοράζω, ἀνάστασις.