Job 29:18

Third strophe He had reason, therefore, to expect that such prosperity would last; that his years would be those of a patriarch, and that the time would never come when the esteem of his fellow-men should be abated; a thought he reverently dwells upon, (compare Job 29:7-10.) spurred by the sense of his present degradation, Job 29:18-25.

18. In my nest The figure is one of peace and security, taken, as Schultens thinks, from the eagles, who build in the highest rocks. Job 39:27-28; Obadiah 1:4. As the sand (See note, Job 6:3.) The translators of the Septuagint, led, perhaps, by the fact that the palm-tree is the hieroglyph for the year, and an image of long life, render this word, הול , hhol, “the trunk of the palm-tree,” see Job 14:7. The rabbins, the Talmud, Dillmann, Zockler, (in Lange,) Hitzig, and others, understand the word to denote the fabled bird called the phenix, which, from the most ancient times, ( Herodotus, 2:73,) has stood as the type of immortality. Among the fabulous versions of its death the one most popularly received is, that the phenix, every five hundred years, built a nest of cassia and myrrh, in which it burned itself, only to reappear with renewed life and youth. The Talmud states that Eve gave the fruit of the forbidden tree to all the animals, and that all of them ate save the phenix, an abstinence which accounts for its wondrous gift of immortality. Authorities equally great favour the Authorized Version, (sand,) among whom are Schultens and Gesenius; also Renan, who does not even notice the Jewish notion, which Conant properly calls a “foolish conceit;” and Cook, (Speaker’s Commentary,) who scouts the learned etymologies linked with the subject. The idea of the phenix, Hahn says, owes its existence solely to the friendly design on the part of Job’s commentators to provide his NEST with a bird.