Job 28:28

28. Unto man Hebrew, Adam; which leads some to suppose that this divine precept was delivered to our fore-parents before the fall, and that it “contains perhaps a summary of religious knowledge imparted to them.” Lee.

The Lord Adhonai. Many manuscripts have Jehovah. That man might answer the end of his being dwelling in harmony with God and himself divine wisdom encompassed him also with law, no less than the elemental powers of nature. This law, like all the works of wisdom, was simple and yet perfect the offspring of divine goodness and love. “ Fear is the mother of foresight:” spiritual fear, of a foresight that comprehends the possibilities of life and the reality of eternity. The fear of God, in any world of moral beings, is a conserving power as essential as that which binds the planetary system. In man wisdom manifests itself as a moral growth, whose life is rooted in the fear of the Lord and the departing from evil; in God it is the eternal embodiment of perfection without growth, degrees, or limitations. “No one,” says St. Ambrose, “can know wisdom without God;” a sentiment which Lord Bacon supplements with a lesson which the philosophers of the day should heed: “It is an assured truth, and a conclusion of experience, that a little, or superficial knowledge, of philosophy may incline the mind to Atheism, but a further proceeding therein doth bring the mind back to religion.” Advancement of Science. See also his Essays, 16. The scholar is referred to the exhaustive treatise on this chapter by Pareau, entitled, “Wisdom better known to the Dead than to the Living,” and to be found at the close of his work De Immortalitatis Notitiis, 28:229-367; also Samuel Wesley’s Dissertationes in Librum Jobi, 34.