Luke 12:20 → Job 27:16-17

"You fool! This very night your life will be required of you. Then who will own what you have accumulated?" (Luke 12:20). The last verb is ἑτοιμάζω, to prepare (ἃ δὲ ἡτοίμασας, what you have made ready). Job 27:16-17 puts the same question: "Though he heaps up silver like dust and piles up a wardrobe like clay, what he lays up, the righteous will wear, and his silver will be divided by the innocent." The Greek of Job 27:16 uses the same verb, ἑτοιμάζω, for the piling up. Both texts fix on one absurdity: a man labours to accumulate, dies, and the goods pass intact to someone who did not labour for them. Job's version even supplies the detail Jesus leaves hanging as a question - the accumulation does not vanish; it is simply worn by somebody else. The wisdom tradition returns to this repeatedly (Psalm 39:6, "he heaps up riches not knowing who will haul them away"; Ecclesiastes 2:18-21; Jeremiah 17:11), and the parable is a narrative of it. But Jesus adds what the wisdom texts imply and never say outright: the man is a fool not because his arithmetic failed but because he was not "rich toward God" (Luke 12:21). Every verb in his interior monologue is first-person and reflexive - my crops, my barns, my grain, and finally "I will say to myself" - and God's reply seizes the one noun he assumed he owned. The verb rendered "required" (ἀπαιτέω, G523) is the ordinary word for demanding back what was lent: the soul was never property, only a deposit. What makes this good news rather than merely grim is the alternative named in the same breath. There is a way of being rich that death cannot liquidate, and it consists in treasuring God Himself - "for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Luke 12:34). The fool's tragedy is not that he wanted joy but that he settled for goods, while the One speaking to him was the treasure that is never called back in.