Job 39:1

β . The questions thus far propounded must have profoundly impressed Job with a sense of his insignificance; another, and more important view of himself, he is now to take in the mirror of nature a no less view than that of his consummate ignorance. His attention is again directed to the brute creation, and he is asked a few plain questions, perhaps in irony, concerning the laws that govern the gestation and birth of animals with which he must have been more or less familiar. These laws, he is made to feel, revolve in a sphere entirely independent of himself the domain of divine forethought and arrangement; man can mark results, but knows not the secret principles which render the gestation of one animal longer, or its parturition less difficult, than that of another, Job 39:1-4.

1. Wild goats The ibex, or rock-goat, (Hebrews, yaal, that is, climber,) was well known to the Jews, both in the Wilderness and in the Land of Promise. But, though familiar with the animal, they knew but little of its habits, owing to its extreme wariness and wildness.… In Arabia Petraea the ibex is very common. It is generally found in small herds of eight or ten. (Tristram, Natural History.) Canst thou mark when, etc. Rather, observest thou the travail of the hinds? “The question here,” as Bochartus well observes, “is not of idle and merely speculative knowledge, but of that knowledge which belongs to God only, by which he not only knows all things, but directs and governs them.” Or, its object may be, in a most humiliating manner, to remind Job that the parturition of the mountain hind takes place without his foresight, intervention, or control. Thus, most moderns.

Hinds The female of the common stag. The reader is referred to Pliny’s Natural History, 8:32, for the views of the ancients on this whole subject.