Job 40:13

13. The dust is used for the grave, as in Job 17:16. Compare Psalms 22:15; Psalms 30:9.

Bind their faces Clarke and Carey think there is here an allusion to the bandaging of mummies. Pettigrew (in his work on Mummies, p. 89) speaks of such, in whose preparation more than one thousand yards of cloth were used. The bandaging of the head prior to burial was quite common among Oriental nations, so that there is no need of confining the allusion to the mummy. Job is challenged to exert the power of death as God exerts it; to send forth that unseen, baleful, and omnipresent spirit of destruction which is ever removing our race to the hidden realms of the dead.

In secret Some suppose to refer to sheol. Job must have been reminded of his outrageous charge against Deity, that he “covereth the faces of the judges” of the earth, Job 9:24.