Job39chapter 39

Job 39:1-4

The catalogue of creatures opens with births no man attends: the wild goats of the rock and the calving hinds keep their times without a keeper, and their young go forth and return not. Delitzsch notes the argument running under every portrait in this chapter, that God sustains whole economies of life that owe man nothing and lie wholly outside his management. Job is being shown provinces of providence he never governed, in answer to his demand to audit the one province that touched him.

Job 39:5-8

The wild ass is freedom drawn from the life Job knew: he scorneth the multitude of the city, neither regardeth he the crying of the driver, the taskmaster's shout that ruled every tame beast of burden. God names himself the emancipator, whose house I have made the wilderness, so the animal's liberty is not an escape from providence but a provision of it. Gill notes the barren land as his dwellings, salt land in the Hebrew, a country man calls waste and God calls a home.

Job 39:9-12

The unicorn of the King James is the Hebrew re'em, the wild ox or aurochs, a rendering the commentators correct at length: Clarke reviews the older readings and Delitzsch settles on the great untamable ox the Assyrian hunts pictured. The questions are a farmer's checklist applied to a beast that will meet none of it, the crib, the furrow, the harrow, the harvest brought home to the barn. Strength is not the issue, his strength is great; the issue is that no strength of creature or of providence is Job's to harness.

Job 39:13-18

The goodly wings unto the peacocks is the one place the King James loses the bird: the Hebrew names the ostrich throughout, as the commentators agree, and the portrait is hers, the eggs left in the dust, the hardness toward her young, the folly. Because God hath deprived her of wisdom states the catalogue's boldest claim, that even a creature's want of sense is an appointment rather than an accident. Yet what time she lifteth up herself on high, she scorneth the horse and his rider: the bird denied wisdom is given a speed no wisdom could buy, so the deprivations and the gifts are one hand's work.

Job 39:19-25

The war horse is the catalogue's one creature inside man's service, and the portrait insists his fire was never man's gift: hast thou clothed his neck with thunder, which Delitzsch reads of the quivering mane. He mocketh at fear, swalloweth the ground, and saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha, the only speech any animal is given in these chapters. Henry notes the argument's edge, that the courage men prize in battle is a loan from the God whose government Job has been questioning.

Job 39:26-30

The catalogue closes looking up: the hawk's southward instinct at the turning of the year and the eagle nesting on the crag, seeking prey with eyes that behold afar off, all without Job's wisdom or command. The last line refuses to prettify what the bird is, her young ones also suck up blood: and where the slain are, there is she, and JFB notes that the same grim proverb returns in the Lord's own mouth at Matthew 24:28. The whole chapter has asked one question in six portraits: whether the man who cannot govern a hind's calving or a hawk's flight is fit to arraign the government of the world.