The Mine Reaches Treasure, but Not Wisdom

The poem opens with the Hebrew ki, usually “for”, as if it continues something before it, though it reads as a fresh start. “A vein” is motsa, a place of coming out, the mouth of a mine. Gold has its refinery just as silver has its source: each has an address.

The King James “brass” is copper or bronze; true brass was hardly known. Copper was mined in the Arabah south of the Dead Sea, near Edom, the region where the Book of Job sets its speakers, so the scene would not have been exotic to them.

“All perfection” renders takhlit, the furthest limit: the miner searches to the very end of things. He sets an end to darkness by carrying a lamp into it, and the ore he digs is literally “the stone of gloom and deep darkness”, found where no daylight has ever reached.

The verse is obscure, but its verb for “dried up”, dallu, can mean to hang or dangle, and a common reading pictures miners let down on ropes in shafts opened far from where anyone lives, in places forgotten by travellers' feet.

The contrast is between the ploughed surface and the heart of the earth. Farmers draw bread from the top of the ground; underneath, the rock is turned over as if by fire. Some take that as an allusion to fire-setting, heating rock to crack it, a known ancient mining technique.

The Hebrew sappir is most likely lapis lazuli, the deep blue stone flecked with gold-coloured pyrite, which would explain why “dust of gold” is mentioned in the same breath. The stones themselves are the setting for the treasure.

The words for bird here are birds of prey: the ayit, a raptor, and the ayyah, a falcon or kite, listed in Leviticus 11:14 among the unclean birds. Their eyes can spot a mouse from the sky, and still they have not seen the tunnel under their feet.

“The lion's whelps” is literally “sons of pride”, proud beasts, and the phrase comes back at the very end of God's speeches, where leviathan is “a king over all the children of pride” (41:34). Neither the proud beasts of the land nor the fierce lion walks this road.

Overturning mountains by the roots was said of God in 9:5: “Which removeth the mountains, and they know not: which overturneth them in his anger.” The poem gives the same act to the human miner. Man can do on a small scale what Job had described as divine power.

The word for “rivers” is ye'orim, used chiefly of the channels of the Nile, and here it means tunnels or channels cut through rock. The miner's eye finds every precious thing, succeeding where the falcon's eye failed in verse 7.

“From overflowing” is literally “from weeping”: the miner stops the trickles that seep into a shaft. “The thing that is hid” is ta'alumah, the word Zophar used in 11:6 for “the secrets of wisdom”. Man can bring hidden ore to light; hidden wisdom is another matter.

This question returns almost word for word in verse 20, and the two refrains divide the poem. Wisdom (chokmah) and understanding (binah) are the pair Proverbs uses throughout. After so much successful searching, the question asks for the one thing still unfound.

“The price thereof” is its valuation, the assessed worth; the Greek reads “its way” instead, which would anticipate verse 23, where God knows “the way thereof”. “The land of the living” is the ordinary world of people, the place where miners and merchants work.

“The depth” is tehom, the great deep of Genesis 1:2, and the sea is yam. Both are allowed to speak, and both disclaim possession. The two regions that ancient people found most mysterious and dangerous turn out to be empty of it.

The word for gold here is segor, a rare term meaning closed or treasured gold, bullion put away. Silver was weighed out rather than counted, as when Abraham “weighed to Ephron the silver” in Genesis 23:16. No scales exist heavy enough to balance wisdom.

The onyx, shoham, is one of the stones of Eden in Genesis 2:12 and was set on the high priest's shoulders in Exodus 28:9. Ophir's gold, the finest known, appears again from Eliphaz's promise in 22:24. Even that is not the right currency.

“Crystal” is zekukhit, most likely glass, which in the ancient world was a luxury product, rare and prized. Gold and glass were often worked together in fine vessels. “Jewels of fine gold” means vessels of paz, the purest refined gold.

The identifications of these stones are uncertain: ramot may be coral, gavish crystal, and peninim pearls or red coral. “Above rubies” is the phrase Proverbs uses in 3:15 and 8:11 for wisdom and in 31:10 for the worthy wife: “her price is far above rubies.”

Ethiopia is Cush, the land south of Egypt along the upper Nile. The topaz, pitdah, was the second stone on the high priest's breastplate (Exodus 28:17). With “pure gold” the list closes where it began, with gold, having found nothing worth trading.

The refrain comes back, but one word has shifted. In verse 12 the question was where wisdom might be found; now it is whence wisdom comes. The search has moved from location to origin, from the miner's question to the question of source.

The eyes of all the living are hidden from it below, and the birds of the air, which can see farther than any creature, are kept from it above. Height fails as surely as depth did in verse 14. The whole living world is looking in the wrong place.

Destruction is Abaddon, paired with Sheol in 26:6, and here with Death. They have “heard the fame” of wisdom, knowing it only by report. Job will later draw the same contrast between hearsay and sight: “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee” (42:5).

In Hebrew “God” is placed first for emphasis: God, he understands. The verse answers the two refrains exactly, supplying both the “way” and the “place”. The pronoun is emphatic too: he, and no one else in the poem, knows.

“The ends of the earth” uses qetsot, the word Job used in 26:14 when he called God's works only the “parts” of his ways. What is only a fringe to Job is the full horizon God sees. His survey takes in everything under heaven in a single look.

Wind has no apparent weight, and yet God assigns it one; the waters are measured out like grain. Isaiah 40:12 asks who has “measured the waters in the hollow of his hand”. The poem pictures creation as a work of precise weighing, not brute force.

God himself will quote this line in 38:25: “Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters, or a way for the lightning of thunder?” The decree for the rain is choq, the fixed allotment, the word Job used in 23:12 and 23:14 for his portion and his appointed lot.

Four verbs in a row: he saw it, declared it (the verb means to count or recount), established it, and searched it out. Wisdom was fully examined by God at the moment of creation. Proverbs 8:22–31 pictures wisdom present at the same moment, beside God as the world was made.

“The Lord” here is Adonai, a title used only in this verse in the whole of Job. The saying matches Proverbs 1:7 and 9:10, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.” God does not hand humanity his own view of everything; he hands them a way to walk.