Job 6:12
Is my strength like that of stone, or my flesh made of bronze?
BSB
ASV
Is my strength the strength of stones? Or is my flesh of brass?
KJV
Is my strength the strength of stones? or is my flesh of brass?
Rare words are the text's own signal of a deliberate thread: the fewer the occurrences, the more the places it appears belong together.
The walk4
Follow this verse’s cross-references two steps out. Each card is a verse this one points to, and beneath it the verses that one points to in turn. Where several different paths arrive at the same place, that place is listed first: the text keeps returning to it. Every stop shows its own words, and every stop is a page.
Through
Job 40:18His bones are tubes of bronze; his limbs are rods of iron.
leads to
For I knew that you are stubborn; your neck is iron and your forehead is bronze.
Reached by 2 independent paths from here.
Am I the sea, or the monster of the deep, that You must keep me under guard?
Through
Job 41:24His chest is as hard as a rock, as hard as a lower millstone!
leads to
O LORD, do not Your eyes look for truth? You struck them, but they felt no pain. You finished them off, but they refused to accept discipline. They have made their faces harder than…
They made their hearts like flint and would not listen to the law or to the words that the LORD of Hosts had sent by His Spirit through the earlier prophets. Therefore great anger…
Neither is my strength the strength of stones, nor is my flesh of brass? For what have we here denoted by 'brass' and 'stones' save the hearts of the insensate, who oftentimes even receive the strokes of the Most High, and yet they are not softened by any strokes of discipline? Contrary whereunto, it is said to the Elect through the Prophet, by promise from the Lord, I will take the stony heart out of you, and will give you a heart of flesh.
Is my strength the strength of stones? - I am neither a rock, nor is my flesh brass, that I can endure all these calamities. This is a proverbial saying, and exists in all countries. Cicero says, Non enim est e saxo sculptus, aut e Robore dolatus Homo; habet corpus, habet animum; movetur mente, movetur sensibus. “For man is not chiselled out of the rock, nor hewn out of the oak; he has a body, and he has a soul; the one is actuated by intellect, the other by the senses.” Quaest. Acad. iv.
Disease had so attacked him that his strength would need to be hard as a stone, and his flesh like brass, not to sink under it. But he has only flesh, like other men. It must, therefore, give way; so that the hope of restoration suggested by Eliphaz is vain (see on Job 5:11).