Job 40:15

Second division A HUMILIATING DESCRIPTION OF TWO AMPHIBIOUS MONSTERS, IN PHYSICAL STRENGTH VASTLY JOB’S SUPERIORS, BEHEMOTH AND LEVIATHAN, WHICH IN MANY RESPECTS RESEMBLE EACH OTHER, BUT IN HABITS AND MODE OF LIFE RADICALLY DIFFER, Job 40:15 to Job 41:34; a carrying forward of the main thought of chap. 39. See p. 252.

Strophe a. FIRST: BEHEMOTH, FIRSTLING OF THE WAYS OF GOD, MIGHTY IN HIS STRENGTH AND MARTIAL IN HIS CONSTRUCTION, BUT A PEACEFUL COMPANION OF THE BEASTS OF THE FIELD, Job 40:15-24.

These and similar contrarieties, which Job 40:15 in brief sets forth, and which also antedate Job’s puny arrival in the world, he may enter side by side with his perplexities of providence, and first attempt their solution.

a. A physical description of this wonderful animal, Job 40:15-18.

15. Behold now behemoth See Excursus VIII, page 274. The transition is easy, as even Dillmann acknowledges, notwithstanding he doubts the authenticity of the entire section. Delitzsch thus links it with the preceding appeal: “Try it only for once this is the collective thought to act like me in the execution of penal justice, I would praise thee. That he cannot do it, and yet ventures with his short-sightedness and feebleness to charge God’s rule with injustice, the following pictures of foreign animals are now further intended to make evident to him.” There is, we think, a deeper spiritual relationship between the solemn challenge and the behemoth-leviathanistic section, than Delitzsch recognises. That Job is not mighty to save, but helplessly impotent in spiritual matters, God proceeds forcibly to impress upon his mind by a view of two monsters of the brute creation, who despise and defy the power of man. Before Job makes himself bold to take the moral government of the world into his hands, he might better try his strength upon the controlling and subduing of some of the creatures God has made. Let him first take a view of himself in the mirror of the animal creation “a mirror of morals, now warning, now encouraging and shaming us; a gallery of pictures, ethical and hortatory, collected for men by God himself.” Zockler. The fathers, and some moderns, have given a spiritual interpretation to these lengthened descriptions, and found in behemoth and leviathan a figurative representation of our ghostly enemy himself. The most of recent commentators, however, see in this divine portraiture of these two creatures a setting forth of God’s infinite power to carry out the purposes of his providence. If the power and wisdom blended together in the creation of such ugly, huge, and repulsive beings, are infinitely beyond Job’s comprehension, how much more that providence which embraces all earthly creatures, all existence, and every grade of being, superhuman and angelic.

Made with thee A similar form of expression appears in Ecclesiastes 2:16; How dieth the wise? with the fool! i.e., as well as the fool. A pertinent rebuke to Job’s pride. This monster is God’s creature no less than Job, and in some respects vastly Job’s superior.

He eateth grass The marvel is, that so powerful an animal, instead of being carnivorous, should be strictly graminivorous. In his frequent inland excursions at night he makes sad havoc among the rice-fields and the cultivated grounds along the Nile. “At every turn,” says Gordon Cummings, p. 297, “there occurred deep, still pools, and occasionally sandy islands, densely clad with lofty reeds. Above and beyond these reeds stood trees of immense age, beneath which grew a rank kind of grass on which the sea-cow [hippopotamus] delights to pasture.”