Jó 8:9

9. For we ( are…) yesterday Such is the terse original, as may be seen in the English version. The life of an individual is too short to comprehend the purposes of God. The astronomer gathers up the observations of all who have preceded him for a basis of reasoning. A like appeal Bildad makes to the moral observations of the past. Or he may intimate that the effusion he is about to cite contains the wisdom of one of the most aged patriarchs, whose opportunities for ripened knowledge far surpassed those of the short lives he and Job had thus far lived.

Touching the painful brevity of human life, the classics have nothing that vies with the abrupt expression of Bildad. By Sophocles man is called “the shadow of smoke,” and by AEschylus “the image of a shade.” Nor is the more extended moralizing of Saadi, the Persian poet, more impressive: “Surely the world is like a fading shadow, or like a guest who remains a night and then departs; or like a dream which a sleeping man has seen, which, when the night is gone, has vanished.” Compare 1 Chronicles 29:15.