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They mar my path - They destroy the way-marks, so that there is no safety in travelling through the deserts, the guide-posts and way-marks being gone. These may be an allusion here to a besieged city: the besiegers strive by every means and way to distress the besieged; stopping up the fountains, breaking up the road, raising up towers to project arrows and stones into the city, called here raising up against it the ways of destruction, Job 30:12; preventing all succor and support.
They have no helper - "There is not an adviser among them." - Mr. Good. There is none to give them better instruction.
They mar my path - They break up all my plans. Perhaps here, also, the image is taken from war, and Job may represent himself as on a line of march, and he says that this rabble comes and breaks up his path altogether. They break down the bridges, and tear up the way, so that it is impossible to pass along. His plans of life were embarrassed by them, and they were to him a perpetual annoyance.
They set forward my calamity - Luther renders this part of the verse, “It was so easy for them to injure me, that they needed no help.” The literal translation of the Hebrew here would be, “they profit for my ruin;” that is, they bring as it were profit to my ruin; they help it on; they promote it. A similar expression occurs in Zechariah 1:15, “I was but a little displeased, and they helped forward the afliction;” that is, they aided in urging it forward. The idea here is, that they hastened his fall. Instead of assisting him in any way, they contributed all they could to bring him down to the dust.
They have no helper - Very various interpretations have been given of this phrase. It may mean, that they had done this alone, without the aid of others; or that they were persons who were held in abhorrence, and whom no one would assist; or that they were worthless and abandoned persons. Schultens has shown that the phrase, “one who has no helper,” is proverbial among the Arabs, and denotes a worthless person, or one of the lowest class. In proof of this, he quotes the Hamasa, which he thus translates, Videmus vos ignobiles, pauperes, quibus nullus ex reliquis hominibus adjutor. See, also, other similar expressions quoted by him from Arabic writings. The idea here then is, probably, that they were so worthless and abandoned that no one would help them - an expression denoting the utmost degradation.