Job39chapter 39

The whole chapter is a parade of animals no human being manages, addressed to a man whose wealth had been measured in animals he did manage.

The mountain goats and hinds calve in inaccessible places with no herdsman attending, and their young grow up and leave. The wild donkey — the onager, a real species of the eastern deserts, never domesticated — has been given the barren land and the salt flats for a home, and it scorns the noise of the city and hears no driver shouting. The wild ox is the aurochs, the huge wild cattle that Assyrian kings boasted of hunting and that survived into recorded history before dying out; God asks whether Job can tie it to a plough harrow and trust it to bring in his grain. Every hearer knew the answer.

The ostrich passage is the strangest and the funniest. She leaves her eggs in the earth and warms them in the dust, forgetting that a foot may crush them; she is hardened against her young as though they were not hers, because God did not give her a share of wisdom. And then — what time she lifts herself on high, she scorns the horse and his rider. Ostriches really did nest in shallow scrapes in the open and really could outrun a horse, and both halves of the description are accurate.

The war horse gets the longest and grandest treatment. His neck is clothed with thunder; he paws in the valley and goes out to meet the armed men; he mocks at fear and does not turn back from the sword. The quiver rattles against him, the glittering spear and the shield; he swallows the ground with fierceness and does not believe it is the sound of the trumpet. He says among the trumpets, Ha, ha, and smells the battle afar off. Chariot warfare was the height of military technology in that age, and the horse's courage in the noise was the thing that made it possible. The hawk's migration and the eagle nesting on a crag and spotting prey from far off close the list.