Job 28
An interpolated hymn asks where wisdom can be found — and answers that only God knows, while mortals should fear him.
Summary
Chapter 28 opens with an extended metaphor of human mining. Silver has its mine, gold its refinery; iron is taken out of the earth, copper is smelted from ore. Miners descend into shafts, they hang far from other men, they swing in the dark, they overturn the mountains at the roots and cut channels in the rock. They bind up the flooding waters and bring hidden things to light. Humanity is remarkable in its ability to reach into the earth and extract what is hidden. But then the question: where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? The man who mines everything cannot mine wisdom. The living do not know its way; it is hidden from the birds of the air and the beasts of the field.
The second half of the chapter is a liturgical progression of negatives. Wisdom cannot be found in the deep or the sea. It cannot be bought with gold, silver, or rubies. Topaz of Ethiopia, pure gold — none of these can purchase it. Destruction and Death say, We have heard its rumour with our ears, but they have not seen it. Only God knows the way to it; he beholds it when he made the wind, set the waters, made the decree for the rain. He saw wisdom and declared it; he established it and searched it out. And the closing verse: Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding. The hymn offers the traditional answer. Whether the book endorses it, ironizes it, or is using it to set up the coming speeches is among the enduring questions of Job interpretation.
- Job 1Chapter 1 opens the prose frame in which the entire poem is set.
- Job 2Chapter 2 opens with a second scene in heaven that mirrors the first almost exactly — the sons of God, the Satan, the same exchange — before the stakes are raised.
- Job 3Chapter 3 is the opening aria of the poetic dialogue, and it announces at once that the Job of the poem is not the patient Job of the prose frame.
- Job 4Eliphaz the Temanite speaks first, and he begins with the tact of a man who has respect for Job and also has an argument he cannot keep to himself.
- Job 5Chapter 5 is the second half of Eliphaz's opening speech.
- Job 6Job's first reply begins with a statement of the weight of his grief: if it were laid in the balances against the sand of the sea, it would be heavier.
- Job 7Chapter 7 shifts Job's address from his friends to God himself — the first direct address to the divine in the dialogues.
- Job 8Bildad the Shuhite speaks second, and his manner is crisper and less warm than Eliphaz's.
- Job 9Chapter 9 is one of the most searching legal-philosophical passages in the book.
- Job 10Chapter 10 is a sustained address to God that moves between the intimacy of a creator-creature relationship and the bewilderment of a man who cannot understand why his maker has turned against him.
- Job 11Zophar the Naamathite is the third friend to speak and the most blunt.
- Job 12Chapter 12 opens the longest continuous speech Job makes in the first cycle.
- Job 13Chapter 13 is the most forensically direct of Job's speeches so far.
- Job 14Chapter 14 closes the first cycle of speeches, and Job's tone shifts from forensic argument to elegy.
- Job 15The second cycle begins with Eliphaz speaking again, and his tone is markedly harder.
- Job 16Chapter 16 is Job's reply to Eliphaz's second speech, and it opens with one of the great reversals in the dialogues: 'I have heard many such things; miserable comforters are ye all.' If they were in his place and he were in theirs, he could speak the same speeches, shake his head at them, and strengthen them with his mouth — but he would not.
- Job 17Chapter 17 continues Job's second-cycle speech and moves further into exhaustion and isolation.
- Job 18Bildad's second speech is a sustained rhetorical portrait of the wicked man's end.
- Job 19Chapter 19 is the emotional and theological climax of the dialogues.
- Job 20Zophar's second speech is his most sustained and least patient.
- Job 21Chapter 21 is Job's most sustained empirical argument.
- Job 22Chapter 22 opens the third and final round of the dialogue.
- Job 23Chapter 23 is one of the most searching speeches in the dialogue.
- Job 24Chapter 24 widens the frame from Job's personal case to the problem of social injustice at large.
- Job 25Chapter 25 is the shortest chapter in the dialogue section and the last speech attributed to a named friend.
- Job 26Chapter 26 opens with withering irony.
- Job 27Chapter 27 is a formal oath, one of the most striking rhetorical moments in the dialogue.
- Job 28Chapter 28 is widely regarded as the most formally distinct chapter in the book.
- Job 29Chapter 29 opens Job's final monologue, which runs through chapter 31.
- Job 30Chapter 30 is the counterpart to chapter 29 — the but now to the when of the former days.
- Job 31Chapter 31 is Job's closing statement — the end of the dialogue section and the culmination of the entire case he has been building since chapter 3.
- Job 32Chapter 32 introduces a character who has not previously appeared in the book: Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite, of the family of Ram.
- Job 33Chapter 33 is Elihu's first substantive argument.
- Job 34Chapter 34 is Elihu's second speech, addressed to 'wise men' and 'men of knowledge' — meaning the friends as well as Job — and it is more polemical than chapter 33.
- Job 35Chapter 35 develops a distinctive argument: the transcendence of God is so great that human righteousness or wickedness cannot touch him.
- Job 36Chapter 36 opens Elihu's fourth and final speech.
- Job 37Chapter 37 is the climax of Elihu's speeches and their most beautiful section.
- Job 38Chapter 38 is the beginning of one of the great passages of world literature.
- Job 39Chapter 39 continues the whirlwind speech into its most extended passage of nature writing.
- Job 40Chapter 40 contains two distinct movements.
- Job 41Chapter 41 is the climax of the whirlwind speeches.
- Job 42Chapter 42 is the book's last chapter and one of its most argued-over.