Jobchapter 38
41 verses · BSBJob book hub →
Speaks with:Psalms 104×8Job 37×8Job 38×6Genesis 1×4Psalms 147×4Job 26×3
Summary
Chapter summary
'Then Jehovah answered Job out of the whirlwind' (38:1). And answers not one of Job's questions, asking scores of his own. 'Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man… Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?'. When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy, when the sea was shut up with doors and swaddled in thick darkness. Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days began? Hath the rain a father? 'Canst thou bind the cluster of the Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?' (38:31). Who provideth for the raven his prey?
Context
Poetry · Unknown — Job overview
- A. 1–11 Jehovah Answers Out of the Whirlwind: Where Wast Thou?
- B. 12–24 Jehovah: Hast Thou Entered the Treasuries of the Snow?
- C. 25–38 Jehovah: Canst Thou Bind the Cluster of the Pleiades?
- D. 39–41 Jehovah: Who Provideth for the Raven His Prey?
The outline
A.Jehovah Answers Out of the Whirlwind: Where Wast Thou?vv. 1 to 11
Read vv. 1 to 11 →B.Jehovah: Hast Thou Entered the Treasuries of the Snow?vv. 12 to 24
Read vv. 12 to 24 →C.Jehovah: Canst Thou Bind the Cluster of the Pleiades?vv. 25 to 38
Read vv. 25 to 38 →D.Jehovah: Who Provideth for the Raven His Prey?vv. 39 to 41
Read vv. 39 to 41 →
The world behind this chapter
Job 38The history
God's opening instruction is a working man's phrase: gird up now thy loins like a man. Men wore long robes, and to run, fight, or do heavy labour you pulled the hem up through your belt. It means get ready to work, not prepare to be crushed.
The first section is a building site. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Who laid the measuring line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations fastened, and who laid the corner stone? Every term is from construction — the surveyor's cord, the footings, the corner stone set first and squaring everything after it. Laying a foundation was a ceremonial occasion in the ancient world, attended and celebrated, and God says the celebration happened without Job: when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. That is the divine council again, the same assembly from chapter 1, present at creation and rejoicing over it.
Then the sea, described as a birth and a nursery. It broke forth as if out of a womb; God made the cloud its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, and set bars and doors and said, hitherto shalt thou come, but no further. Chaotic water was the ancient world's image of everything untameable, and here it is a newborn being wrapped and put behind a door.
The rest of the chapter walks through the sky and the seasons, and much of it concerns places no human being had been: the springs of the sea and the recesses of the deep; the gates of death; the storehouses of snow and hail, reserved 'against the time of trouble, against the day of battle and war' — hail as a weapon in God's arsenal, which Israel's own history had seen. Rain is sent on wilderness where no man is, to satisfy ground nobody farms. Ice and hoar frost are asked after by name. And the constellations are called by their Hebrew names — the Pleiades bound in a cluster, Orion's bands, the Mazzaroth brought out in their season, and the Bear with her young. Sky-watching was serious work in that world, and the question is whether Job can bind or loose any of it.
What it meant to them
God never mentions the accuser, never explains the wager, and never answers the question Job asked. He asks about seventy questions of his own, and every one of them is about a world that runs without Job in it.
For the first hearers the point was not that Job was too small to matter. It was that the universe is vastly larger and stranger than the tidy moral machine everyone in the argument had assumed, and that the God who runs it is not obliged to file a brief.
Sources cited
- John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews & Mark W. Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament
- Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm
- John E. Hartley, The Book of Job
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Job 38. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
Connections from this chapter
v. 32 · A guardrail on the reading
Israel is forbidden to worship the host of heaven that God 'allotted to all the peoples' - the counterweight to venerating the Mazzaroth.
Deuteronomy 4:19→When you look to the heavens and see the sun and moon and stars—all the host of heaven—do not be enticed to bow down and worship what the LORD your God has apportioned to all the nations under heaven.
Deut 4:19 (ASV)
v. 32 · Sky imagery framing the passage
The two texts the Mazzaroth wheel hangs on; the gospel-in-the-stars reading stays an attributed 19th-c. tradition (Seiss, Bullinger; PD). No confidence badge. Presentation, not echo-claim.
Psalms 19:1→The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands.
Commons Uranometria plates (PD)
v. 32 · An anchor verse
Mazzaroth (H4216) is a hapax legomenon; Job 38:32 is its lone occurrence and the page's title word.
Strong's H4216→Strong's H4216 (biblehub.com/hebrew/4216.htm); Job 38:32 ASV
This page draws on Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.