Job 38
God answers Job out of the whirlwind with the first of seventy questions: where was Job when the foundations of the earth were laid?
Summary
Chapter 38 begins with one of the most consequential transitions in the Bible: Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind. The long silence of thirty-five chapters breaks, not with the speech Job has been requesting — a formal hearing, a bill of charges, a verdict — but with a counter-interrogation. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof? Who stretched a line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations fastened? Who laid the cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? The questions begin in the deep past — the cosmic origin — and move outward through the created order.
The barrage continues: Who shut up the sea with doors when it burst forth from the womb, wrapped it in cloud, set the bar and said thus far and no farther? Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and shown the dayspring its place so that it might take hold of the ends of the earth and shake the wicked from it? Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? Can you bind the cluster of Pleiades or loose the belt of Orion? Can you bring out Mazzaroth in season? Do you know the ordinances of heaven? Can you lift up your voice to the clouds so that they cover you with water? Who put wisdom in the inward parts or gave understanding to the mind? The questions do not argue. They display. The creator is demonstrating the scale of what creation is, and the creature is being asked to locate himself within it.
- 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.