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Job 38
IV. THE SPEECHES OF YAHWEH
Job must bow to the creator’s wisdom
1 Then from the heart of the tempest Yahweh gave Job his answer. He said:
2 Who is this obscuring my designs with his empty-headed words?
3 Brace yourself like a fighter; now it is my turn to ask questions and yours to inform me.
4 Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? Tell me, since you are so well-informed!
5 Who decided the dimensions of it, do you know? Or who stretched the measuring line across it?
6 What supports its pillars at their bases? Who laid its cornerstone
7 when all the stars of the morning were singing with joy, and the Sons of God in chorus were chanting praise?
8 Who pent up the sea behind closed doors when it leapt tumultuous out of the womb,
9 when I wrapped it in a robe of mist and made black clouds its swaddling bands;
10 when I marked the bounds it was not to cross and made it fast with a bolted gate?
11 Come thus far, I said, and no farther: here your proud waves shall break.
12 Have you ever in your life given orders to the morning or sent the dawn to its post,
13 telling it to grasp the earth by its edges and shake the wicked out of it,
14 when it changes the earth[*a] to sealing clay and dyes it as a man dyes clothes;
15 stealing the light from wicked men[*b] and breaking the arm raised to strike?
16 Have you journeyed all the way to the sources of the sea, or walked where the Abyss is deepest?
17 Have you been shown the gates of Death or met the janitors of Shadowland?
18 Have you an inkling of the extent of the earth? Tell me all about it if you have!
19 Which is the way to the light and where does darkness live?
20 You could show them the way to their proper places, or put them on the path to where they live!
21 If you know all this, you must have been born with them, you must be very old by now!
22 Have you ever visited the place where snow is kept, or seen where the hail is stored up.
23 which I keep for times of stress, for days of battle and war.
24 From which direction does the lightning fork when it scatters sparks over the earth?
25 Who carves a channel for the downpour, and hacks a way for the rolling thunder,
26 so that rain may fall on lands where no one lives, and the deserts void of human dwelling,
27 giving drink to the lonely wastes and making grass spring where everything was dry?
28 Has the rain a father? Who begets the dewdrops?
29 What womb brings forth the ice, and gives birth to the frost of heaven,
30 when the waters grow hard as stone and the surface of the deep congeals?
31 Can you fasten the harness of the Pleiades, or untie Orion’s bands?
32 Can you guide the morning star season by season and show the Bear and its cubs which way to go?
33 Have you grasped the celestial laws? Could you make their writ run on the earth?
34 Can your voice carry as far as the clouds and make the pent-up waters do your bidding?
35 Will lightning flashes come at your command and answer, ‘Here we are’?
36 Who gave the ibis wisdom and endowed the cock with foreknowledge?[*c]
37 Whose skill details every cloud and tilts the flasks of heaven
38 until the soil cakes into a solid. mass and clods of earth cohere together?
39 Do you find a prey for the lioness and satisfy the hunger of her whelps
40 when they crouch in their dens and lurk in their lairs?
41 Who makes provision for the raven when his squabs cry out to God and crane their necks in hunger?