“The skin of my teeth”
My skin and flesh cling to my bones; I have escaped by the skin of my teeth. (Job 19:20 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A familiar idiom for a narrow escape, its wording taken for granted.
The cultural key
This verse is where the English phrase 'by the skin of my teeth' was born, now a stock idiom for barely getting through. Its force is in the paradox: teeth have no skin, so Job is saying he has survived with essentially nothing, the thinnest, most nonexistent margin imaginable, his body wasted until only some impossibly slight scrap of him is left. Some read it as the thin film on the teeth, the one part disease has not yet eaten away. Either way it pictures a man reduced almost to nothing, clinging to life by a margin too slim to measure. The familiar idiom smooths over how bleak and strange the original image really is.
Recovered meaning
Job coins the picture behind 'by the skin of my teeth': an escape by a margin so thin it barely exists, since teeth have no skin. It shows a man wasted to almost nothing, only just alive.