Job 12

1. THEN Job answered and said, 2 No doubt but ye are the people, And wisdom shall die with you. 3 But I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you. Yea, who knoweth not such things as these? 4 I am as one that is a laughing-stock to his neighbour, I who called upon God and he answered: The just, the perfect man is a laughingstock. 5 In the thought of him that is at ease there is contempt for misfortune; It is ready for them whose foot slippeth. 6 The tents of robbers prosper, And they that provoke God are secure; Into whose hand God bringeth abundantly. 7 But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; And the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: 8 Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee; And the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. 9 Who knoweth not in all these,

That the hand of the LORD hath wrought this?

10. In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, And the breath of all mankind. 11 Doth not the ear try words, Even as the palate tasteth its meat? 12 With aged men is wisdom, And in length of days understanding. 13 With him is wisdom and might; He hath counsel and understanding. 14 Behold, he breaketh down, and it cannot be built again; He shutteth up a man, and there can be no opening. 15 Behold, he withholdeth the waters, and they dry up; Again, he sendeth them out, and they overturn the earth. 16 With him is strength and effectual working; The deceived and the deceiver are his. 17 He leadeth counsellors away spoiled, And judges maketh he fools. 18 He looseth the bond of kings, And bindeth their loins with a girdle.

19. He leadeth priests away spoiled, And overthroweth the mighty. 20 He removeth the speech of the trusty, And taketh away the understanding of the elders. 21 He poureth contempt upon princes, And looseth the belt of the strong. 22 He discovereth deep things out of darkness, And bringeth out to light the shadow of death.

23. He increaseth the nations, and destroyeth them: He spreadeth the nations abroad, and leadeth them captive. 24 He taketh away understanding from the chiefs of the people of the earth, And causeth them to wander in a wilderness where there is no way. 25 They grope in the dark without light, And he maketh them to stagger like a drunken man.

Chaps. 12-14. Job’s reply to Zophar’s short address extends through three chapters. It is highly animated, and almost exhaustive of the argument he maintains. He enters more keenly into the spirit of the debate as an argument, and is hence drawn somewhat more out of himself than hitherto, and goes further afield in thought and illustration. He is also more bold as well as more keen in recrimination, indulging occasionally in biting sarcasms, and at times displaying a little personal exasperation. In this discourse he with great ability takes up the very doctrine of God’s sovereignty, which Zophar had so forcibly set forth and urged as a ground of submission, and presses it into the support of his own view, arguing that this sovereignty was shown by God’s acting from His own absolute will in the government of the world, far more than by His being bound by the conditions of merit or demerit in man, as they affirm. Nothing, therefore, which the friends could advance on the subject of the Divine power and greatness could prove him guilty, or make out that he was subjected to punishment for his sins. Kitto.

In these chapters Job sums up the result of the first colloquy; chap. 12:1-6 contains a bitter reproof of the speaker’s arrogance and pitilessness, with a reassertion of the statement that the good suffer and the wicked prosper. Vs. 7-25: All results, whether good or evil, must be attributed to God, whose hand hath wrought it all, and upon whom all things living absolutely depend. In this passage Job admits what has been said of the unsearchableness and omnipotence of God, but draws from it the inference that He causes all the evils which are found in the world. In the next place (13:1-12), Job charges his friends with falsehood, and with a base and cowardly attempt to vindicate a course of things which is manifestly inconsistent with the attributes of righteousness. In all this it is evident that Job argues simply from the facts as they come before him; having no clew to the secret of the visitation by which he is reduced to such misery, he sees in it but an absolutely inscrutable dispensation, and rejects all attempts to account for it by facts within the scope of human experience as vain and foolish. He knows that the supposition that he is himself inwardly false, godless, and hypocritical is quite groundless; he does not believe that his friends really think that goodness and prosperity are inseparable; he scorns the mean spirit which can profess to be satisfied with a fallacy, and he threatens them with God’s wrath for such mockery. The following passage (vs. 15-19) is in another tone; Job declares that although he can neither comprehend the visitation nor hope for deliverance, still his trust is unshaken—“though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him;” he will neither give up trust in God nor his own integrity; he then (vs. 20-28) pleads directly with God, asks for light only, only to know why he is thus condemned, what is the special sin; and from the frailty and misery of man he draws a plea for pity and respite (14:1-12), since life once lost is irrecoverable, till the heavens be no more there will be no awakening from that sleep (vs. 13-28). In this passage comes the first gleam of a hope, a dim, uncertain feeling which was afterward to be developed. Job expresses a desire that he may lie in the grave until the time of wrath be past away; he would then wait patiently for his change, with a certainty that God would have a desire to the work of His own hands. As for any other hope, he rejects it altogether; all that is in the world must perish; man passeth away from it, and forever; what may be the lot of his posterity he cannot know; all that is sure for himself in this life is pain and misery. The whole argument may thus be summed up in a few points. The correlation between goodness and prosperity assumed by his friends does not rest on facts; whatever evils exist in the universe come from God’s work; all attempts to frame a theodicea for this life are false and sophistical; all that a good man can do is to retain trust in God, though without hope of living to see the cause of right triumph; the sense of inner weakness, past and present sinfulness, will find expression in prayer, but a consideration of the shortness of life, its wretchedness, its hopeless end, brings out an aspiration, developed by spiritual affliction into a hope of a restoration to life, and of a last judgment, which must issue in the perfect establishment of the right. Cook.

Chap. 12. Hitherto Job’s attitude toward his friends has been that of unquestioning assent. Agreeing with all their assertions, he has endeavored, but wholly without result, to make their philosophy explain these perplexing facts. Now that all three have spoken, however, and revealed their uniform drift, the barrenness of their generalizations flashes upon him, and he sees that they have not touched the difficulties of the case at all. They have urged no more than he has always known. From this point his attitude toward them changes. They no longer stand to him as representatives of wisdom; and ceasing to arraign God, he arraigns the friends instead. J. G. F.

1-3. He begins with a sarcastic remark upon his friends’ intense appreciation of their own wisdom, and ventures to distrust its quality, seeing that it had not led them to show manly pity and compassion for a friend in severe distress. Deriding their pretensions, he declares that he had no need to come to them for instruction, but had at least as much knowledge of the matters in debate as they had. He declares that all they had said upon the wisdom and power of God was merely trite and obvious; and then, as if to prove that they could boast no superiority of view in this respect, he breaks out into a most eloquent discourse on the same subject—the power and providence of God—which is certainly not inferior to theirs in matter, while it exceeds them in freshness of sentiment and illustration. Kitto.

4. I who called upon God, and He answered. If our friends be deaf to our complaints, God is not; if they condemn us, God knows our integrity; if they make the worst of us, He will make the best of us; if they give us cross answers, He will give us kind ones.

6. Job’s friends, all of them, went upon this principle, that wicked people cannot prosper long in this world, but some remarkable judgment or other will suddenly light on them; Zophar had concluded with it, that the eyes of the wicked shall fail (11:20). This principle Job here opposes, and asserts as an undoubted truth that wicked people may, and often do, prosper long in this world. Even great sinners may enjoy great prosperity. We cannot, therefore, judge of men’s piety by their plenty, nor of what they have in their heart by what they have in their hand. H.

7-9. Job takes up and iterates what is true in the views of the friends, at the same time broadening its application. Everything, both good and evil, is in God’s hands; no Eliphaz’s vision, or Bildad’s traditional wisdom, or Zophar’s occult philosophy, is needed to prove that; the commonest things teach it. J. F. G. —Such knowledge as the friends possessed of God’s wisdom and power, and their action in the world, could be learned by any one who had eyes to observe the life and fate of the lower creatures. In all may be seen God’s absolute might and sway prevailing. Davidson. —All these creatures, though without reason and speech, still utter a language which is heard by every intelligent man. They do not even possess knowledge, but they offer instruction, and are a means of knowledge. Creation is the school of knowledge, and man is the learner; and this knowledge forces itself upon one’s attention. Delitzsch.

The great lesson which the animal creation, regarded simply as the creature and subject of God, is fitted to teach us is a lesson of the wisdom, and power, and constant beneficence of God. Job sends us to the animal creation that we may gather from it instances of the greatness of the Creator’s hand and the constancy of the Creator’s providence. For every creature there is a place, and to this each is adapted with transcendent skill and beneficence. Nowhere do we detect a fault or a flaw amid all these teeming myriads. All are perfectly complete, and attest the majesty of Him by whose hand they have been formed. Consider the lessons which the lower animals are fitted to teach us by the way in which they spend their life and use the powers which God has given them. They constantly and unceasingly fulfil the end of their being. Be their sphere large or small, they always occupy it to the full. What a lesson is here addressed to man, and what a rebuke to him for the studied and persevering neglect he manifests of the purpose for which God has made him and sent him into the world! The lower animals are seen always to live according to their nature. They neither transgress that nature, nor do they fall short of it. Can this be said of man? How far is the best from yielding his entire nature in its symmetry and its fulness to what truth and righteousness demand of him! The lower animals teach us to seek happiness according to our nature and capacity. W. L. A.

10. Every living thing. Life everywhere! on the earth, in the earth, crawling, creeping, burrowing, boring, leaping, running, flying. If the sequestered coolness of the wood tempt us to saunter into its checkered shade, we are saluted by the murmurous din of insects, the twitter of birds, the scrambling of squirrels, the startled rush of unseen beasts, all telling how populous is this seeming solitude. If we pause before a tree, or shrub, or plant, our cursory and half-abstracted glance detects a colony of various inhabitants. We pick up a fallen leaf, and if nothing is visible on it, there is probably the trace of an insect larva hidden in its tissue, and awaiting there development. The drop of dew upon this leaf will probably contain its animals, visible under the microscope. This same microscope reveals that the “blood-rain” suddenly appearing on bread and awakening superstitious terrors is nothing but a collection of minute animals; and that the vast tracts of snow which are reddened in a single night owe their color to the marvellous rapidity in reproduction of a minute plant. The very mould which covers our bread, our jam, or our ink, and disfigures our damp walls, is nothing but a collection of plants. The many-colored fire which sparkles on the surface of a summer sea at night, as the vessel ploughs her way, or which drips from the oars in lines of jewelled light, is produced by millions of minute animals. Nor does the vast procession end here. Our very mother-earth is formed of the débris of life. We dig downward thousands of feet below the surface, and discover with surprise the skeletons of strange, uncouth animals which roamed the fens and struggled through the woods before man was. Our surprise is heightened when we learn that the very quarry itself is mainly composed of the skeletons of microscopic animals. The flints which grate beneath our carriage wheels are but the remains of countless skeletons. The Apennines and Cordilleras, the chalk cliffs of England—these are the pyramids of bygone generations of atomies. Ages ago these tiny architects secreted the tiny shells which were their palaces; from the ruins we build our Parthenons, our St. Peters, and our Louvres. So revolves the luminous orb of life! Generations follow generations; and the present becomes the matrix of the future, as the past was of the present—the life of one epoch forming the prelude to a higher life. G. H. Lewes.

11. The mind of man has as good a faculty of discerning between truth and error, when duly stated, as the palate has of discerning between what is sweet and what is bitter. He therefore demands from his friends a liberty to judge for himself of what they had said; and desires them to use the same liberty in judging of what he had said; nay, he seems to appeal to any man’s impartial judgment in this controversy; let the ear try the words on both sides, and it would be found that he was in the right. H.

12-25. A very eloquent description of the Divine power and wisdom begins to flow from the lips of the afflicted man. He makes this description not in mere rivalry with the friends, but with far superior power and wealth of ideas, this far surpassing in point of wealth and copiousness his earlier description (9:4-10). Nor does he here repeat the fine illustrations which he had used in his previous speech, but applies with extreme skill the details of his description precisely to the present case, doing this without any express indication of it, but yet quite perceptibly. For, while he could have described the power of God and His wisdom, which, according to the feelings of the ancients, displayed itself more particularly in enigmas and marvels, in various ways dwelling very much upon most various things, in which the ancient world felt the mysterious, hidden wisdom and power of God, he takes another course, and designedly brings forward partly the great vicissitudes in human affairs, according to which God sends both weal and woe, prosperity and disaster, and partly the experience that even the wisest of the earth may easily become fools before God and get into helpless perplexity. The first phenomenon the opponents will do well to give heed to, since the cause of Job’s misfortune may, after all, be another one hidden from men; the latter let them apply to themselves, and at the same time remember that at last God can bring all hidden things into the light. Ewald.

The design of this grand discourse on the ways of God to men is, I apprehend, to establish his position (9:22). “He destroyeth the perfect and the wicked.” He allegeth those great and general calamities, drought, inundation, and the overthrow of kingdoms; which make no distinction between the innocent and the guilty, but involve the most virtuous characters, and the noblest and most important talents, in distress, disgrace, and ruin. Scott.

15. Great droughts are sometimes great judgments; he withholds the waters, and they dry up; if the heaven be as brass, the earth is as iron; if the rain be denied, fountains dry up and their streams are wanted, fields are parched and their

fruits are wanted. Great wet is sometimes a great judgment; He raises the waters and overturns the earth, the productions of it, the buildings upon it. A sweeping rain is said to leave no food (Prov. 28:3). How many ways God has of contending with a sinful people, and taking from them abused, forfeited mercies; and how utterly unable we are to contend with Him! H.