Job 39:17

17. Because God hath deprived, etc. Rather, For God made her forgetful of wisdom, (hhokmah,) and gave her no share in understanding, (binah.) The Arabs have a proverb, “Foolish as the ostrich,” which might suffice for the illustration of the verse. Bochartus, however, cites five instances of stupidity. One may be given from Livingstone: “The ostrich is generally seen quietly feeding on some spot where no one can approach him without being seen by his wary eye. As the wagon moves along far to the windward, he thinks it is intended to circumvent him, so he rushes up a mile or so from the leeward, and so near to the front oxen that one sometimes gets a shot at the silly bird. When he begins to run, all the game in sight follow his example. I have seen this folly taken advantage of when he was feeding quietly in a valley open at both ends. A number of men would commence running, as if to cut off his retreat from the end through which the wind came; and although he had the whole country, hundreds of miles, before him by going to the other end, on he madly rushed to get past the men, and so was speared. He never swerves from the course he once adopts, but only increases his speed.” South Africa, p. 171. See also Tristram, Nat. His., p. 238, and Wetzstein in Delitzsch, ii, pp. 341, 342. The difference thus suggested between the ostrich and animals pre-eminent in understanding must at the same time have impressed upon Job one of the many mysteries of the world of instinct; a world which Hume declares to be “inexplicable by all the disquisitions of human understanding.”