Job 8:10

10. Shall not they teach thee Job had confidently said, (Job 6:24,) Teach me, and Bildad adduces a most remarkable passage out of the heart of ancient times. He summons the fathers, that they may deal Job a crushing blow. In the early history of most nations knowledge was preserved in the form of proverbs, maxims, and apothegms. Lacking the advantage of circulated books for the transmission of thought, they compressed it into as small a compass as possible, that it might be more easily remembered, and thus preserved for the generations to come. We have before us fragments of a poem (Job 8:11-19) that probably came to Bildad from a very remote age. Some have conjectured that they may be relics of some primeval revelation. The imagery employed, as well as the Egyptian words gome, (Coptic, kam,) reed, (papyrus,) and ahhou, (flag,) satisfy Carey and others that this ancient lay was composed in Egypt.