The Lord Answers, but Not on the Proposed Terms

The covenant name, the LORD, filled the prologue but almost vanished from the dialogue, where the speakers say God, Eloah or the Almighty. It returns here. “Whirlwind” is se'arah, the storm that carried Elijah up (2 Kings 2:11). A wind took Job's children in 1:19; a wind now brings God's voice.

“Counsel” is etsah, a plan or design. God has a design, and Job's words have cast shadow over it. The question “Who is this” does not use Job's name; it comes as a stranger's challenge. Job will quote the line back word for word in his reply (42:3).

To gird the loins was to tuck the long robe up into the belt, to run or to fight. “Like a man” is gever, a strong man, a warrior. The terms are Job's own from 13:22, “Then call thou, and I will answer: or let me speak, and answer thou me.” He gets the first option.

“Declare, if thou hast understanding” is literally “if thou knowest understanding”, binah, the very thing the poem of chapter 28 asked the place of. The first question is not about suffering or justice at all; it is about the day the world's foundation stones were set.

The mock question “if thou knowest” is a surveyor's joke: surely you remember who took the dimensions. The line, qav, is a builder's measuring cord, the one Zechariah 1:16 says “shall be stretched forth upon Jerusalem” for rebuilding. Earth was built to a plan.

“Foundations” here are 'adanim, sockets or bases, the same word as the silver sockets that held the boards of the tabernacle upright (Exodus 26:19). The cornerstone is pinnah, the stone of Psalm 118:22. The world is pictured as a sanctuary under construction.

When the foundation of the second temple was laid, “all the people shouted with a great shout, when they praised the LORD, because the foundation of the house of the LORD was laid” (Ezra 3:11). At the laying of the earth's foundation the singers were stars and heavenly beings.

“Shut up” is sakh, to hedge or fence in, the verb Satan used in 1:10, “Hast not thou made an hedge about him?”, and Job in 3:23, “a man... whom God hath hedged in.” The hedge Job felt around himself is the same restraint God put around the sea.

“Thick darkness” is 'arafel, the dense cloud in which God met Moses at Sinai: “Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was” (Exodus 20:21). What looks to human eyes like menace is the cloth God wrapped the newborn sea in.

The Hebrew reads “I broke upon it my decree”: God cut the shoreline as a boundary. Proverbs 8:29 says the same: “he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment.” Bars and doors are the fittings of a city gate, shut and bolted.

Jeremiah 5:22 marvels at the same limit: God “placed the sand for the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it.” “Proud waves” is literally the pride of your waves, the swelling crest. Psalm 89:9: “Thou rulest the raging of the sea.”

In 3:9 Job cursed the night of his conception and wished it would never “see the dawning of the day”. He tried with words to cancel a dawn. God asks whether Job, in all his days, has ever once commanded a morning to come.

The picture is of dawn grabbing the earth by its edges like a blanket and shaking it out, and the wicked tumble off like vermin. The Hebrew manuscripts write one letter of “wicked” here, the ayin, raised above the line, a scribal peculiarity found in this verse and verse 15.

A cylinder seal rolled across wet clay leaves an image standing up in relief. As light rolls across the land, hills and valleys stand out in shape and colour, like the folds and dyes of a garment. What was formless in the dark is stamped with detail.

The light withheld from the wicked recalls 24:17, where morning is to them “as the shadow of death”; darkness is their daylight, and dawn takes it away. The raised arm, lifted to strike, is broken off by the coming of light, before it can land a blow.

“The springs of the sea” uses a word found only here, perhaps the sources or weepings of the sea, the “fountains of the great deep” of Genesis 7:11. “The search of the depth” means the hidden recesses of tehom. No one had walked the sea floor.

No book of the Bible uses tsalmavet, “the shadow of death”, as often as Job. In 10:21–22 he spoke of going to “the land of darkness and the shadow of death”. Hezekiah also speaks of “the gates of the grave” (Isaiah 38:10). Job has described the place; he has not stood at its gate.

“The breadth of the earth” is its broad expanses, the wide places from horizon to horizon. “Declare if thou knowest it all” has an edge of irony: a man who has spoken so confidently about the world might be expected to have measured it.

In Genesis light is created on the first day and the sun on the fourth (1:3, 1:16), so light has an existence of its own apart from any lamp. Here light and darkness each have a dwelling place, and a road that leads there.

Darkness is pictured as a guest escorted home to the edge of its territory. Job said in 17:13 “the grave is mine house: I have made my bed in the darkness.” God asks whether Job actually knows the road to that house.

Eliphaz had sneered in 15:7, “Art thou the first man that was born? or wast thou made before the hills?” God now asks the same question with a gentler irony, making the point Eliphaz could not: no human age reaches back to the beginning.

“Treasures” is otsarot, storehouses, the same picture as Psalm 135:7, where God “bringeth the wind out of his treasuries”. Snow was rare enough in much of the land to be a wonder. Job has only seen it fall; he has never visited the warehouse.

Hail as a weapon of war is no metaphor in Israel's history. At Beth-horon, “they were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword” (Joshua 10:11), and hail was the seventh plague on Egypt (Exodus 9:23–25).

The word for light may here mean lightning, or even mist; many translators, guided by the parallel with the east wind, read “where the wind is distributed”. Either way the question asks about the routes by which weather spreads across the land.

“Watercourse” is te'alah, an irrigation channel or trench, the word used of the trench Elijah dug round his altar on Carmel (1 Kings 18:32). God is pictured cutting a channel in the sky for the cloudburst, as a farmer cuts ditches for his fields.

The Hebrew uses two different words: rain on land without ish, a man, on wilderness without adam, a human being. The doubled negative is insistent. God waters places where no person will ever eat the harvest or thank him for it.

“Desolate and waste” is a sound-pair in Hebrew, sho'ah umesho'ah, like tohu wabohu in Genesis 1:2, a jingle for utter barrenness. The rain answers it with a “bud of the tender herb”, the first green shoots on bare ground.

Canaanite religion hailed Baal as the giver of rain and the lord of the storm, and the question may glance at that belief. The rain has no divine father; God fathers it. Dew was vital in a land with a long dry summer (Genesis 27:28 blesses with “the dew of heaven”).

After the father of rain comes the womb of ice. God is pictured both as father and as mother, which leaves no room for a divine consort. “Hoary frost” is the white rime; “gendered” is the older English for begotten, brought to birth.

“Hid as with a stone” means the waters harden and hide themselves, becoming like stone. Freezing was uncommon in the lowlands of Israel but familiar on Hermon and Lebanon. The deep, tehom, which roared in verse 16, is here gripped still.

Pleiades is Kimah, the cluster, and Orion is Kesil, which means fool; ancient lore pictured Orion as a giant bound in the sky. “Sweet influences” reflects the astrology of 1611; the Hebrew may mean chains or bonds, answering the bands of Orion. Job named the same stars in 9:9.

“Arcturus with his sons” is 'ayish, most likely the Great Bear, with the “sons” either its cubs or the three stars of its tail. Mazzaroth brings forth in its season; the Bear is guided like a mother leading her young. The stars move to a schedule no one on earth set.

Jeremiah 33:25 speaks of God's covenant with day and night and “the ordinances of heaven and earth”, the same phrase. “Dominion” is mishtar, rule, from the word for an officer; Genesis 1:16 sets the lights “to rule the day” and “the night”.

Job has raised his voice through thirty-five chapters. God asks whether that voice has ever brought down one shower. Shouting at the clouds, as the Baal priests did on Carmel from morning till noon (1 Kings 18:26), never opened a single cloud.

“Here we are” is hinnenu, the answer of a servant to a master's call, the word Abraham used at Moriah, “Here am I” (Genesis 22:1), and Isaiah at his commissioning (6:8). The lightnings report for duty, and not to Job.

Both key words are rare. “Inward parts”, tuchot, appears elsewhere only in Psalm 51:6. “Heart”, sekhvi, occurs only here, and ancient Jewish tradition and the Vulgate took it as the rooster. On that reading the verse means the ibis and the cock, birds thought to sense the weather and the dawn.

“Number” is safar, to count, as a shepherd counts his flock. “Stay” is a verb meaning to tip or lay down: who can tilt the waterskins of heaven so they pour? The King James sense of holding them back reverses the picture, though both show control.

The verb for “groweth into hardness” is yatsaq, to pour or cast, as molten metal is cast. The parched soil sets hard like a casting. When the rain finally comes, dust becomes mud and the clods stick together, the ground ready for ploughing.

Psalm 104:21 says “The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God.” The speech turns now from the heavens to the animal world, and it opens with the predator, not the pet. God hunts for the lion; Job cannot.

“Covert” is sukkah, a thicket, the same word used for a booth and for God's pavilion in the storm cloud (36:29). God has his canopy of cloud; the lion has its canopy of brush. Both are places of hidden power.

Ravens were unclean (Leviticus 11:15), scavengers of carrion, the least lovable birds, yet ravens fed Elijah (1 Kings 17:6). Psalm 147:9 says God gives food “to the young ravens which cry.” The chapter's last word on the whole cosmos is a hungry chick.