to make away with (specifically by swallowing) · verb, piel imperfect, 3rd person masculine singular + pronominal suffix, 3rd person masculine singular
place
מִמְּקוֹמ֑וֹmi.me.ko.Mo
H4725
properly · preposition + noun, common masculine singular construct + pronominal suffix, 3rd person masculine singular
deny
וְכִ֥חֶשׁve.Khi.chesh
H3584
to be untrue · conjunction + verb, piel sequential perfect, 3rd person masculine singular
seen
רְאִיתִֽיךָre.'i.Ti.kha
H7200
to see · verb, qal perfect, 1st person common singular + pronominal suffix, 2nd person masculine singular
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
Cross-references
Job 7:10 He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more.
Job 7:8 The eye of him that hath seen me shall see me no more: thine eyes are upon me, and I am not.
Psalms 37:36 Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not: yea, I sought him, but he could not be found.
Job 20:9 The eye also which saw him shall see him no more; neither shall his place any more behold him.
Psalms 37:10 For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be: yea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall not be.
Psalms 73:18-19 Surely thou didst set them in slippery places: thou castedst them down into destruction.
Psalms 92:7 When the wicked spring as the grass, and when all the workers of iniquity do flourish; it is that they shall be destroyed for ever:
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
Commentary
Matthew Henry on Job 8:8-19
Bildad here discourses very well on the sad catastrophe of hypocrites and evil-doers and the fatal period of all their hopes and joys. He will not be so bold as to say with Eliphaz that none that were righteous were ever cut off thus (Job 4:7); yet he takes it for granted that God, in the course of his providence, does ordinarily bring wicked men, who seemed pious and were prosperous, to shame and ruin in this world, and that, by making their prosperity short, he discovers their piety to be counterfeit. Whether this will certainly prove that all who are thus ruined must be concluded to have been hypocrites he will not say, but rather suspect, and thinks the application is easy.
I. He proves…
If He (God) tear him away (properly, "to tear away rapidly and violently") from his place, "then it [the place personified] shall deny him" (Psa 103:16). The very soil is ashamed of the weeds lying withered on its surface, as though it never had been connected with them. So, when the godless falls from prosperity, his nearest friends disown him.
John Gill on Job 8:18
If he destroy him from his place,.... If the sun when he is risen strikes the tree with such vehement heat that it withers and utterly perishes from the place where it grew; or roots it up, so the Targum and Nachmanides; or, if God destroys the hypocrite from his place, or he is by one means or another removed out of the garden, the church, being detested and rejected by good men; or from all his worldly enjoyments, his honour, credit, and esteem with men, which are all precarious, fickle, and inconstant; or out of the world, being cut down as a cumber ground:
then it shall deny him, saying, I have not seen thee; that is, either the tree shall deny that it ever was planted in such a place,…
16 He dwells with sap in the sunshine,
And his branch spreads itself over his garden.
17 His roots intertwine over heaps of stone,
He looks upon a house of stones.
18 If He casts him away from his place,
It shall deny him: I have not seen thee.
19 Behold, thus endeth his blissful course,
And others spring forth from the dust.
The subject throughout is not the creeping-plant directly, but the ungodly, who is likened to it. Accordingly the expression of the thought is in part figurative and in part literal, יחזה אבנים בּית (Job 8:17). As the creeper has stones before it, and by its interwindings, as it were, so rules them that it may call them its own (v. Gerlach: the exuberant growth twines i…
The Church Fathers
"If it is done away with, the place it occupied will no longer recognize it. If he does not show that he is the Son of God, it will be said that he is not: he must therefore declare it himself, for where he is, one does not want to recognize the works of God.
If He destroy him from his place, then He shall deny him, saying, I have not known thee. The hypocrite is 'destroyed from his place,' when he is parted from the applause of the present life, by death intervening. But the interior Witness 'denieth' him, thus destroyed, and asserts that He knows him not, in that in justly condemning the life of the pretender, 'Truth' knows him not, nor recognises the good works he has done, in that he never put them forth in a right purpose of mind. And hence when He cometh to Judgment, He will say to the foolish virgins, Verily I say unto you, I know you not. In which same whilst He sees corruptness of mind, He condemns even incorruptness in the flesh. But would that their own ruin alone were enough for hypocrites, and that their wicked pains did not vehemently urge others to a life of duplicity. For it is the way with everyone, to wish that, such as he is himself, others of a like sort should be joined with him, and to avoid difference in life, and to inculcate as a pattern for imitation the thing that he loves. Whence also according to the view of hypocrites every degree of simplicity of character is criminal. For they sit in judgment on open characters, and purity of heart they term stupidity; and all whom they desire to be attached to themselves, they turn out of the path of simplicity, and then, as though their folly were cast out, they reckon that they have enlightened those persons, in whom they force to a surrender that fortress of wisdom, purity of heart. But forasmuch as the hypocrite is condemned not for his own frowardness alone, but for the added ruin of his followers also...
The Church Fathers: public-domain translations (Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers), verse-indexed by SermonIndex (CC BY 4.0).
In this parable, a plant with roots that grow down through a pile of stones gains stability by becoming entwined with the rocks.
Rashi on Job 8:18
If one destroys him from his place the one who requites him, and this is an elliptical verse.
then it shall deny him his place [shall deny him].
‘I have not seen you,’ For neither root nor branch shall remain of him, and it will be as though he had never existed, for his fall shall not ascend like the downfall of the righteous—for the righteous will fall and rise, but this one will fall without rising.