Job 26

He couldn’t say because it wasn’t so. Jobs comment reads like sarcasm.

Some scholars say it’s doubtful that Job thought of himself as helpless. But Job could see that his friends certainly thought he was helpless and in deep trouble when it came to matters dealing with God.

The verse more literally says “The shades below tremble, The water and those who live there.” The writer is referring to people now dead as mere shadows of what they once had been. In Bible times many people seemed to think that the earth with its oceans rested above what scholars call the cosmic sea. Some people presumed that the place of the dead, the underworld called Sheol in Hebrew and Hades in Greek, existed beneath the cosmic sea.

Abaddon means dead, destroyed, destruction. It’s another name for the grave, or Sheol.

There’s no direct mention of a tent. But Bible writers often described the sky as a tent covering the earth: “You unfold the sky like it’s just a tent” (Psalm 104:2). Scholars guess a lot about this verse in Job because the original Hebrew language uses some words that are unclear. A more literal but cryptic translation starts the verse with something like this: “He stretches zaphon over the emptiness/void/chaos.” Some scholars say zaphon means the sky over what we would call the North Pole. From there, God stretches the sky to cover the open air above the earth. Some have translated zephon to mean heaven or one of the huge mountains in the north, where some thought the gods lived. Any translation is probably a guess. But the general point seems clear: God created the earth and the sky.

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Clouds here sound a bit like wineskins that could stretch when filled.

Some translate “line” as “circle.” That’s because one of the ancient views of creation imagined earth as a disk floating on a great sea. So, the horizon line beyond the land would have been a circle around the land.

We might imagine this horizon line separating time zones, with daytime on one side of the line and darkness on the other. But among the ancients, darkness beyond the horizon might have been seen as permanent. Ancestors of Jews today could have read this verse and thought of what God did at Creation, by opening up a lighted space for people, separate from the darkness that “cloaked the deep water” (Genesis 1:1).

The mountains are more literally “pillars of heaven.” This is the only time the phrase appears in the Bible. But it could have been “foundation of heaven,” a literal translation of a phrase in 2 Samuel 22:8, Psalm 18:7. Some in ancient times thought of distant mountains on the horizon as pillars that held up the sky, which some thought of as a giant tent top.

In ancient mythological stories, the sea creature called Rahab represented chaos in the world. Bible writers seemed to use that familiar story to illustrate that God turned chaos into a creation as beautiful as the heavens and the earth. Bible writers also occasionally associated Rahab with Egypt, one of Israel’s persistent enemies throughout the centuries.

The timeframe here is still the era of Creation. The writer is using familiar mythological stories to help explain how powerful God is. God literally uses ruah to clear the heavens. Ruah can mean: breath, wind, spirit, Spirit of God, mind, along with many other words and phrases. Context is the clue to interpreting which word is the right one. One interpretation is that with his words alone, he cleared away the darkness of chaos in primordial times to make a place for heaven. He turned darkness into light, as reflected in Genesis 1. This isn’t necessarily a literal description of what God did, but perhaps more likely a metaphorical way of helping readers picture God’s power at work in the world.