Job 28:28

And unto man he said,.... What follows; unto Adam, so some render it, as Mr.

And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.

And; or rather, but; for this is added by way of opposition, to show that man’ s wisdom doth not lie in a curious inquiry into, or in an exact knowledge of, the secret paths of God’ s counsel and providence: but in things of another and of a lower nature. Unto man; unto Adam at first, and in and with him to all his race and posterity. He said, i.e. God spoke it, partly, and at first inwardly, to the mind of man, in which God wrote this with his own finger, and engraved it as a first principle for his direction; and partly afterwards by the holy patriarchs, and prophets, and other teachers of his church, whom God sent into the world to teach men true wisdom; which accordingly they did, not by acquainting the people with the secrets and intricacies of God’ s counsel and providence, but by declaring the revealed will of God, and instructing them in their duty towards God and men, making this their great, if not only, business, to make men wise unto salvation. See 29:29. Behold; which expression notes the great importance of this doctrine, and withal man’ s dulness and backwardness to apprehend and consider it, and man’ s proneness to place his wisdom in vain and curious speculations. The fear of the Lord, i.e. true religion, and the right worship of God, both inward and outward, all which cometh under this name. That is wisdom; in that only consists man’ s true wisdom, because that, and that only, is his duty, and his safety, and happiness, both for this life and for the next; and withal this is attainable, whereas the depths of God’ s ways are unknown and unsearchable to human or created capacities. To depart from evil, i.e. from sin, which is called evil eminently, as being the chief, if not the only, evil, and the cause of all other evils, and that which is constantly and immutably evil, whereas afflictions are frequently made good and highly beneficial. Religion consists of two branches, doing good and forsaking evil; the former is expressed in the former clause of this verse, and the latter in these words. Is understanding; is the best kind of knowledge or wisdom to which man can attain in this life. The same thing is here twice expressed in several phrases. And the design of Job in this close of his discourse, is not only to show the mistake, and reprove the arrogance and boldness, of his friends, in prying into God’ s secrets, and passing such a rash censure upon him, and upon God’ s ways and carriage towards him; but also to vindicate himself from the imputation of hypocrisy and profaneness, which they fastened upon him, by showing that he had ever esteemed it to be his best wisdom and true interest to fear God, and to depart from evil.

Job 28:28 And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that [is] wisdom; and to depart from evil [is] understanding.Ver. 28. But unto man he said, &c.] q.d. Let him not curiously pry into God’ s secrets, nor rashly censure others (as you have done me), but, out of a reverential fear of God, eschew evil and do good, for this shall be his wisdom, Deuteronomy 4:6, and the contrary, Jeremiah 8:9, Insignis est hic locus (Mercer). See like texts, Deuteronomy 29:29 Ecclesiastes 12:13 Psalms 111:10 Proverbs 1:7; Proverbs 9:10.

(28) And unto man he said.—No one can for a moment suppose that this is an historical statement, or is to be treated as being one; but it is nevertheless profoundly and universally true. It is the wisdom of man as man to fear the Lord and to depart from evil; and this is God’s primary revelation to man, which virtually underlies and is involved in all others. When we are told, as we are elsewhere, that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, this implies that the fear of the Lord does not supersede, though it may be essential to, any other revelation, or any other development of wisdom, or any other manifestation of it. It is to be observed that the word rendered “the Lord” here is not the four-lettered name Jehovah which was used by Job in Job 12:9, but the other name for the Divine Being (Adonai), which was in later times universally substituted for the name Jehovah by the Jews in reading.

Verse 28. Unto man he said] לאדם laadam, unto man, he said: This probably refers to the revelation of his will which God gave to Adam after his fall. He had before sought for wisdom in a forbidden way. When he and Eve saw that the tree was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, they took and did eat, Genesis 3:6. Thus they lost all the wisdom that they had, by not setting the fear of the Lord before their eyes; and became foolish, wicked, and miserable. Hear, then, what God prescribes as a proper remedy for this dire disease: The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; it is thy only wisdom now to set God always before thy eyes, that thou mayest not again transgress. Depart from evil is understanding.] Depart from the evil within thee, and the evil without thee; for thy own evil, and the evil that is now, through thee, brought into the world, will conspire together to sink thee into ruin and destruction. Therefore, let it be thy constant employment to shun and avoid that evil which is everywhere diffused through the whole moral world by thy offense; and labour to be reconciled to him by the righteousness and true holiness, that thou mayest escape the bitter pains of an eternal death. See the note on Job 28:12. FROM what has been observed on verses 25, 26, Job 28:25-26, and from the doctrine of the atmosphere in general, I can safely draw the following conclusions: - 1. From the gravity and elasticity of the air, we learn that it closely invests the earth, and all bodies upon it, and binds them down with a force equal to 2160 pounds on every square foot. Hence it may properly be termed the belt or girdle of the globe. 2. It prevents the arterial system of animals and plants from being too much distended by the impetus of the circulating juices, or by the elastic power of the air so plenteously contained in the blood, and in the different vessels both of plants and animals. 3. By its gravity it prevents the blood and juices from oozing through the pores of the vessels in which they are contained; which, were it not for this circumstance, would infallibly take place. Persons who ascend high mountains, through want of a sufficiency of pressure in the atmosphere, become relaxed, and spit blood. Animals, under an exhausted receiver, swell, vomit, and discharge their faeces. 4. It promotes the mixture of contiguous fluids; for when the air is extracted from certain mixtures, a separation takes place, by which their properties, when in combination, are essentially changed. 5. To this principle we owe winds in general, so essential to navigation, and so necessary to the purification of the atmosphere. The air is put into motion by any alteration of its equilibrium. 6. Vegetation depends entirely on the gravity and elasticity of the air. Various experiments amply prove that plants in vacuo never grow. 7.

28. and unto man he said] This ordinance in regard to man is also considered contemporary with creation; then God saw and searched out Wisdom, and at the same time, as suitable to man’s place, He ordained for him his Wisdom, which is the fear of the Lord and to depart from evil. The Wisdom spoken of throughout the chapter is a possession of God alone, it is His who is Creator; man has a wisdom also, which is that of the creature, to fear the Lord. There is not, however, in all the chapter the shadow of a complaint; there is no turning of the spirit against God (ch. Job 15:13) under the feeling that the “envious” Creator has reserved the higher insight for Himself, and only bound on mankind the heavy burden of “fearing” Him. Such a thought is wholly at variance with the spirit of the passage. The speaker is calm and reflective and, to all appearance, satisfied that things are as we see them because they could not be otherwise. Wisdom is the idea or principle lying under the order of the Universe, the world plan. This order of the world, however, is not a mere physical one, an order of “nature.” Such an idea as “nature” was foreign to the Hebrew mind. Equally unknown was the idea of a mere physical constitution of things. The constitution of the world was moral, and hence the life and destinies of men, no less than the phenomena of the world, were comprised under Wisdom. When it is said that Wisdom has no place where it can be found and can be purchased for no price, the language is based upon the conception of Wisdom as an objective thing; but the meaning is that intellectual apprehension of the scope of the phenomena of the world and the events of man’s life is beyond the reach of man; such knowledge belongs only to God, who made the world. To inculcate this truth and the other truth related to it, that man’s wisdom is the fear of the Lord, is the object of the chapter. It seems an entire misapprehension of the meaning of the passage when it is regarded as teaching that “Wisdom, unlike earthly treasures, is nowhere to be found in the visible, sensible world”; that “not in the world of sense, but only from and with God can it be acquired, through the fear of God.” The distinctions introduced here are modern. The passage teaches that Wisdom cannot be found either in the visible or the invisible world (Job 28:22), neither by man nor by any creature (Job 28:21). It is a thing possible to God alone; and man does not attain to it through the fear of the Lord,—the fear of the Lord is the substitute ordained for man instead of it; for as the absolute Wisdom belongs to the Creator, so the fear of the Lord is the wisdom that befits the creature. The connexion between chapters 27 and 28 is difficult to perceive.

And unto man he said - At what time, or how, Job does not say. Prof.

28. Unto man — Hebrew, Adam; which leads some to suppose that this divine precept was delivered to our fore-parents before the fall, and that it “contains perhaps a summary of religious knowledge imparted to them.” — Lee.