Job 28:1

Section third PANEGYRIC OF WISDOM, chap. 28.

First strophe Man has wonderful power and skill for surmounting the obstacles of nature and extracting from the gloomiest depths of earth her most precious treasures, Job 28:1-11.

1. For beauty of thought and richness of imagery, Job’s eulogium of wisdom is worthy to be compared with Paul’s panegyric of charity. (1 Corinthians 13:0.) Delitzsch calls it “a song of triumph without vain-glory.” Job is unconsciously carving for himself a monolith with an ineffaceable inscription of the two predominant traits of his character, the fear of God and the eschewing of evil. (Compare Job 28:28 with Job 1:8.) The deep mysteriousness of the divine procedure in the punishment of the wicked, the main thought of the preceding chapter, leads him to speak of divine wisdom in general, whose ways are unsearchable, and, like the field of the miner’s toil, buried in darkness. The wicked through toil and danger may, like the miner, acquire jewels, precious stones, and great store of wealth, but the true and abiding treasures are with God, and come from God alone. The covetous rich man treasures up silver and costly vestments, Job 27:16, but fails of celestial good the divine wisdom, a “pearl of great price;” and this loss is his punishment also a carrying forward of the retributive thought of the preceding chapter. Hengstenberg, following Von Hofmann, thus traces the connexion: “Sin is the destruction of men; the wicked man must go to the ground; FOR wisdom, which alone can ward off destruction, is to be found only in God; the sinner is excluded from this wisdom, and must therefore run into the arms of destruction.” “The sea of life abounds in rocks on which the bark must soon split, if so be wisdom sit not at the helm.” 2:181, 172. “In the organism of the work this chapter is the jewelled clasp that binds the one half, the complication of the plot, to the other half, its solution.” Delitzsch.

Surely For, links the entire chapter with the last ten verses of 27. The transition is abrupt, and is in perfect keeping with Job and the Oriental mode of thought in general.

A vein Literally, outlet, for the silver. In the most ancient times silver was more scarce than gold. Hence throughout the Old Testament we find keseph, silver, used as a term for money. Abraham bought the field of Ephron for “four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant.” Genesis 23:16. The most important silver mines of the ancients were in Spain.

A place for gold Gold abounded in Ethiopia, also in Nubia, as is indicated by the word noub, old Egyptian for gold. There remains to the present time an historical tablet of Rameses II., relating to the gold mines of Ethiopia, possibly the very mines which have been recently discovered in the Bisharee desert, by Linant and Bonomi. Jerome speaks of ancient gold mines in Idumaea, Job’s home.

Where they fine Which they refine. The two different words employed by the Hebrew for refining, זקק , of the text, and tsaraph, point to two different processes of refining, the one (that of the text) of filtering or straining, the other of smelting by fire. Both of these Hebrew words for refining appear in Malachi 3:3, and are in later times probably used interchangeably.

The process of refining by filtering is described at length by Diodorus, iii, chap. 1. The figure below illustrates the Egyptian mode of smelting.