Job41chapter 41

Job 41:1-4

Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook opens a catalogue of impossibilities, no hook for the tongue, no supplication offered, no covenant made and no service agreed for ever. Leviathan is named elsewhere in Scripture only three times, Psalm 74:14, Psalm 104:26 and Isaiah 27:1. Barnes and Delitzsch read the natural crocodile of the Nile as the creature meant, the identification most of the nineteenth-century bench holds; Gregory the Great's Moralia reads leviathan allegorically as a figure of the devil, a reading the chapter's own language of pride and fire has long invited.

Job 41:5-8

Wilt thou play with him as with a bird, or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens, imagines the creature as a household pet before naming the impossibility of it, the same refusal extended to a banquet or a market where his flesh might be parted among merchants. Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons, or his head with fish spears asks whether ordinary fishing tackle could hold him, and Henry reads the string of refusals as building toward the warning of verse 8. Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more, is read by Clarke as blunt counsel, that one encounter with this creature settles the question for good.

Job 41:9-11

The hope of him is in vain states plainly that no one should expect to master leviathan, and none is so fierce that dare stir him up names the creature's terror as simple fact rather than exaggeration. The argument turns at verse 11, who then is able to stand before me, whatsoever is under the whole heaven is mine, the question about a man's power over one animal becoming a claim of ownership over creation entire. Henry reads the shift as the whole speech's purpose, a beast no hook can catch offered as evidence of a Maker no argument can catch either.

Job 41:12-21

I will not conceal his parts, nor his power, nor his comely proportion, opens a formal inventory of the creature's armor, the doors of his face and his terrible teeth, the scales shut up together as with a close seal so tightly joined that no air can come between them. Gill reads the double bridle of verse 13 as the same term used for a warhorse's gear, dressing leviathan for battle before the chapter turns to fire. His neesings, meaning his sneezes, are said to flash light, his eyes likened to the eyelids of the morning, and the mouth pictured breathing burning lamps while the nostrils smoke as a seething pot, imagery Delitzsch reads as poetic reach built on the crocodile's habit of surfacing and spouting rather than a literal claim of fire.

Job 41:22-29

In his neck remaineth strength moves the inventory to the creature's core, the flakes of his flesh joined and firm, his heart as firm as a stone, yea, as hard as a piece of the nether millstone, a doubled figure Barnes reads as the passage's picture of a courage nothing from within can shake. Every weapon a soldier owns fails in turn against him, the sword that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon, iron esteemed as straw and brass as rotten wood. Clarke notes the same string of failed weapons answers Job's own earlier demand for legal instruments against God, none of which will serve here either, and the mighty are said to purify themselves in fear at his rising as before a judgment.

Job 41:30-32

Sharp stones are under him, he spreadeth sharp pointed things upon the mire, turns the creature's own underside into a weapon dragged across the riverbed. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot, he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment, and the wake he leaves behind is said to shine and whiten the water as though the deep had aged into hoary old age. Delitzsch reads the shining path as an honest description of a wake cut through water at night, poetry resting on an observed detail rather than invention, and Gill takes it simply as the trail any great creature leaves at its largest scale.

Job 41:33-34

Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear, closes the description ranking leviathan above every other creature named in the two whirlwind speeches. The chapter's last line gives the phrase the whole portrait has been building toward, he is a king over all the children of pride, and the readings turn on that title: the mightiest of beasts crowned over its own kind, so most of the bench reading the natural creature; pride itself named and ruled over, so readings that follow Gregory the Great's allegorical leviathan in the Moralia. Henry notes the speeches close here without another word required of Job before his answer opens the next chapter.