Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Job · About this commentary
Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?
Job 28:1-28
1 “Surely there is a mine for silver, and a place for gold which they refine. · WEB
Men can dig anything out of the earth except the one thing they need, and the poem ends by relocating wisdom in a way of living.
The debate has stopped, and what stands here is a poem on its own — the calmest thing in the book, set exactly where the argument has exhausted itself.
It opens with mining, described by somebody who has seen it. A shaft away from where people live; men hanging on ropes, forgotten by the foot of anyone above, swinging in the dark Job 28:4. Rock overturned by the roots, channels cut, streams dammed so they do not trickle into the workings Job 28:9–11.
The achievement is stated without irony: the thing that is hidden he brings out to light. Human ingenuity is genuinely extraordinary, and the poem says so at length before it says anything else.
Two verses mark how far that reach goes. That path no bird of prey knows, neither has the falcon's eye seen it Job 28:7. The falcon has the best eyesight in creation and cannot find what a man has found by digging. The proud animals have not walked there. Human beings go where nothing else goes.
Then the question that breaks the poem in half: but where will wisdom be found? Where is the place of understanding? Job 28:12.
The answer is that it is not in the ground. It is not in the land of the living; the deep says it is not there and the sea says the same Job 28:13–14. It cannot be bought — not with gold, silver, onyx, sapphire, coral, crystal, rubies or topaz Job 28:15–19. Every item on that list is something the miners of the first section actually brought up.
So the poem is built as a contrast between two searches. Everything precious in the earth has been located and extracted by men working in the dark. The one thing they need most is not down there, and no quantity of what they did find will buy it.
The question is asked a second time, and this time the search widens to include the dead. It is hidden from the eyes of all living, and Destruction and Death say, 'We have heard a rumor of it with our ears' Job 28:21–22. Even the grave has only heard a report.
God understands its way, and he knows its place Job 28:23. And what he is doing when he knows it is specified: looking to the ends of the earth, weighing the wind, measuring the waters, making a decree for the rain Job 28:24–26. Wisdom is at home in the work of running the world, which is where the whirlwind speech will take Job in ten chapters' time.
And the last verse hands it to human beings after all, in an unexpected form. To man he said, 'Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom. To depart from evil is understanding' Job 28:28.
The words are the ones used of Job in the first verse of the book — a man who feared God, and turned away from evil Job 1:1. What cannot be mined or bought is not withheld; it is available in a way of living, and the man on the ash heap has had it the entire time.
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