Job’s Hand Goes to His Mouth

A fresh heading breaks into the LORD’s speech after the eagle among the slain in 39:30, as if the voice paused and waited. No whirlwind is named this time, though it framed 38:1 and returns in verse 6. Job has not spoken since 31:40, “The words of Job are ended”.

“Contendeth” is the Hebrew rib, the verb for bringing a lawsuit; Job had begged in 10:2, “shew me wherefore thou contendest with me.” “Reproveth” is yakach, the root of the “daysman” Job wished for in 9:33. His own courtroom words are handed back to him, with the floor.

After five chapters of silence Job finally speaks, and it is the shortest speech he makes anywhere in the book: two verses, against the thirty and more he gave most of his earlier replies.

In 29:9 Job remembered how princes “laid their hand on their mouth” when he came into the gate, and in 21:5 he told his friends to do the same. The gesture he once received as honour, and prescribed for others, he now makes himself.

“Once, yea twice” is a Hebrew way of saying enough and more than enough. Elihu used it of God in 33:14, “God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not.” Job borrows the phrase for his own speaking and closes it off.

The heading of 38:1 returns almost word for word, whirlwind and all. The word is se‘arah, a storm wind, the same one Job used in 9:17 when he complained, “he breaketh me with a tempest.” The storm he accused is the place the answer keeps coming from.

Repeated exactly from 38:3. “Like a man” is geber, the word for a strong man or warrior, and girding meant tucking the long robe into the belt to run or fight. In 13:22 Job offered, “call thou, and I will answer”; the terms he proposed are the ones he is held to.

“Disannul” is the verb for breaking a covenant or voiding a vow. “Judgment” is mishpat, Job’s own word in 27:2, “God, who hath taken away my judgment.” In a two-party lawsuit, one side declared righteous means the other declared guilty; the LORD names that as the logic Job’s case had slid into.

In 26:2 Job mocked Bildad for helping “the arm that hath no strength”. Now the arm in question is his own. The thunder recalls Elihu, who had just said “God thundereth marvellously with his voice” (37:5); the LORD asks whether Job has that voice.

“Glory and beauty” is the Hebrew pair hod and hadar, the clothing of the divine king in Psalm 104:1, “thou art clothed with honour and majesty.” Job once said of his days in the gate, “my judgment was as a robe and a diadem” (29:14). He is offered the royal wardrobe on one condition, which the next verses spell out.

“Rage” is literally overflowings, anger breaking its banks. Job had spoken often of God’s wrath, “He teareth me in his wrath” (16:9); here he is invited to pour out his own. The proud head the list, and “proud” shares its root with the sea’s “proud waves” held back in 38:11.

The verse restates verse 11 with a sharper ending. “Tread down” translates a Hebrew verb found nowhere else in the Bible, to trample, and “in their place” means on the spot, where they stand, with no delay and no inquiry. Job’s complaint in 21:7, “Wherefore do the wicked live”, is being taken at its word.

The dust is burial, and “in secret” is the hidden place of the dead. Binding the face recalls the cloth wound round a corpse’s head. In 14:13 Job had pleaded, “O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave”; the verb there is hide, and here he is asked to do the hiding.

“Confess” is yadah, the verb the psalms use for giving thanks and praise to God. The offer is ironic and exact: accomplish verses 10 to 13 and the LORD will praise Job. In 13:16 Job said of God, “He also shall be my salvation”; the question is whether his own hand could be.

Behemoth is the plural of the ordinary word for a beast, used as a singular: the beast of beasts, a plural of greatness. Job used the same word in 12:7, “ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee.” One of them is now brought forward to do exactly that.

Two words for power, strength and force, locate it in the loins and the belly. The word the King James renders “navel” is rare and is usually taken as the muscles or sinews of the belly; the hide over a hippopotamus’s belly is thick, which fits the more common identification.

“Stones” in 1611 meant testicles, following the Latin Vulgate; most modern versions read “thighs”. Several interpreters take “tail” as a delicate way of naming the same organ, which would explain the cedar comparison. That is an inference, but it suits a passage about raw procreative and bodily vigour.

“Strong pieces of brass” is more exactly tubes or channels of bronze, hollow and hard. “Bars” renders a word found nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible. Bronze and iron are the metals of Job’s mining poem, “Iron is taken out of the earth, and brass is molten out of the stone” (28:2); what men dig for, this animal is built of.

“Chief of the ways of God” is literally first of the ways of God, the phrase wisdom uses of itself in Proverbs 8:22, “The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way.” First can mean first in rank or first in time. The second half is hard Hebrew; the King James makes it a reminder that its maker alone can bring a sword against it.

“Play” is the verb for laughing or sporting, the same one used of the ostrich that “scorneth the horse” (39:18) and the warhorse that “mocketh at fear” (39:22). Leviathan will be asked whether he can be played with as a bird (41:5). Around this great eater, smaller animals play without fear.

“Shady trees” translates a word found only here and in the next verse, now usually identified as the lotus thorn, a shrub of the Jordan valley and the Nile. “Fens” is the marsh word Bildad used in 8:11, “Can the rush grow up without mire?”

The poem gives two full verses to shade for an animal that lies hidden by day and grazes by night. “Willows of the brook” are the trees Israel cut for the booths of Tabernacles in Leviticus 23:40, probably the Euphrates poplar that lines watercourses in the region.

The Hebrew reads more nearly “if a river rages, he is not alarmed”; the King James “drinketh up” follows an older understanding of the verb. Jordan, the only Israelite place named in the divine speeches, may stand for any torrent. It overflowed “all his banks all the time of harvest” (Joshua 3:15).

Captors led animals and prisoners by a ring through the nose, as the LORD threatens Sennacherib in 2 Kings 19:28. Many read this verse as a question, can anyone take him while he watches, or pierce his nose? Read that way, it hands straight into the hooks and cords of the chapter that follows.