Job 28
Wisdom pushes evil away
Miners go hunting in the earth
1There is a place miners [1] goTo search for silver and gold,
And refine them into purity. [2]
2The earth releases its iron.
And copper melts from stony fire.
3Miners dig away at darkness
In lands far from home and comfort.
There in purest black
They shovel in shafts of gloom.
4They open the ground in distant lands
Where others refuse to go,
And travelers have long forgotten.
They dangle and sway above the pits. [3]
Far away from people.
5Beneath the soil providing food
Lies earth transformed,
As flushed by rivers of fire.
6Rocks nourish with lapis [4]
And with flashing flakes of gold.
We can’t see wisdom
7No bird nests here,No falcon watches for prey.
8No wild animal has ventured in,
No lion has prowled thereabout.
9Miners lay their hands on rocks of flint.
And carve mountains to their roots.
10They cut channels, ditches, and rows,
Scanning rocks for anything worthwhile.
11They sift and probe the water as well,
In a quest for hidden riches.
Wisdom isn’t for sale
12But what about wisdom?Where is it hiding?
Under what rock will I find some insight?
13Don’t go looking for it among the humans.
It’s not in the land of the living.
14The ocean floor says, “It’s not here, either.”
The sea says, “Don’t look at me.”
15You can’t buy wisdom with a bar of gold.
And silver won’t cover the cost.
16Nor will Ophir’s purest gold,
Rare onyx, or lustrous lapis.
17You can’t trade it for gold or glass
Not for gold embedded with jewels.
18Don’t bother mentioning coral or crystal.
Rubies won’t buy a pocket of wisdom.
19You can’t buy it with Ethiopia’s gems. [5]
Their purest gold isn’t enough.
Wisdom’s zip code
20Where is wisdom’s home?Where does insight spend its days?
21It’s nowhere in sight.
Even birds can’t see it below.
22Destruction [6] and death don’t know where it lives.
They’ve only heard that it does.
23God knows where wisdom lives.
He knows how to get there, too.
24His field of vision covers the world.
He sees everything high and low.
25God gave the wind its speed
And the water its measure of depth.
26He created rain to fall from the sky
And mapped the route of thunderbolt.
27God saw wisdom and evaluated it.
He understood it and approved it. [7]
28Then God told humans,
“This is wisdom:
Treat your Lord [8] with respect
And do good things in life, not evil.”
Footnotes
The writer takes the scenic route to the main topic of the chapter: the nature of wisdom. Respectfully, mining seem to have nothing to do with wisdom. But the connection is the hunt. People mine for jewels, gold, and silver. People search for wisdom, too. Spoiler alert: the writers says humans don’t know where to find it because only God knows. Fortunately, the writer says God tells us what it is and what it looks like. Some scholars say wisdom isn’t something we can take for ourselves and carry it away, like mined gold or jewels. It’s more like the other way around. Through our faith and behavior, wisdom is what we become and what carries us away. We become the jewels. Someone should probably preach that.
Most Old Testament Bible scholars seem to agree that the person who wrote Job did not write this chapter, which reads more like it belongs in Proverbs. So, scholars don’t generally treat it as a speech by Job or any of his visitors. Some scholars treat it as a separate poem about wisdom that someone in the past 2,000 years or more inserted into Job’s story.
The writer doesn’t talk about pits or vertical shafts, but the swaying could describe miners lowered by rope into a pit. There they mine for jewels in the shaft walls.
Lapis, which is short for “lapis lazuli,” is a metamorphic rock, morphed from forces such as intense heat and pressure. They contain colorful minerals, especially lazurite. The rocks are often blue and have shown up as artifacts from almost 10,000 year ago. Today they are described as semi-precious, somewhat like the child of one’s boss—cherished, but not as much as our own jewels.
It’s unclear in many cases which precious stones the writer was describing. That’s why there’s so much disagreement among Bible translations.
“Destruction” is literally Abaddon, which can mean dead or destroyed. It’s another name for the grave, or Sheol.
Some scholars say God did more than see wisdom. They read Proverbs 8: 22-31 and argue that this says God created wisdom. Yet others argue that those verses reveal that wisdom existed before Creation: “I [wisdom] was with the LORD in the beginning, before he created anything” (Proverbs 8:22).
This “Lord” means master or owner, unlike “LORD.” Most Bibles that capitalize LORD are referring to a term used more than 7,000 times the Bible. It refers to the name of God, abbreviated in ancient Hebrew writings as YHWH. Bible experts are left to guess what vowels to add. The ancients didn’t use vowels in the Bible. Dropping them saved space on the scrolls. The current guess about the full word: Yahweh (YAH way).
Discussion Questions
- Sorry, there are currently no questions for this chapter.
