Job 39: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

God keeps questioning Job out of the storm, now about wild animals and birds. He asks who watches over the birth of mountain goats and deer, who set the wild donkey loose in the desert, whether Job can put the wild ox to work, how the ostrich leaves her eggs to the ground, who gave the war horse its courage, and whether the hawk and eagle fly and nest at Job's command. Each creature lives by strength, instinct, or freedom that Job did not give and cannot control. This continues the speech God began in chapter 38.

Claim by Claim

1. 39:1
   • The verse asks whether the hearer knows the time when the wild goats of the rock give birth.
   • The verse asks whether the hearer watches over the calving of the hinds.
2. 39:2
   • The verse asks whether the hearer can count the months the hinds complete in pregnancy.
   • The verse asks whether the hearer knows the time when they give birth.
3. 39:3
   • The animals crouch down.
   • The animals bring forth their young.
   • The animals cast out their birth pangs.
4. 39:4
   • Their young ones grow strong.
   • Their young ones grow up in the open field.
   • The young ones go out.
   • The young ones do not return to their mothers.
5. 39:5
   • The verse asks who sent the wild donkey out free.
   • The verse asks who loosed the bonds of the swift wild donkey.
6. 39:6
   • God says he made the desert plain the wild donkey's house.
   • God says he made the salt flats the wild donkey's dwellings.
7. 39:7
   • The wild donkey scorns the tumult of the city.
   • The wild donkey does not hear the shouts of a driver.
8. 39:8
   • The wild donkey ranges the mountains as his pasture.
   • The wild donkey searches after every green thing.
9. 39:9
   • The verse asks whether the wild ox will be willing to serve the hearer.
   • The verse asks whether the wild ox will spend the night at the hearer's feeding trough.
10. 39:10
    • The verse asks whether the hearer can bind the wild ox with its rope in the furrow.
    • The verse asks whether the wild ox will harrow the valleys behind the hearer.
11. 39:11
    • The verse asks whether the hearer will trust the wild ox because its strength is great.
    • The verse asks whether the hearer will leave his labor to the wild ox.
12. 39:12
    • The verse asks whether the hearer will believe the wild ox will bring back his seed.
    • The verse asks whether the wild ox will gather the hearer's grain to his threshing floor.
13. 39:13
    • The wing of the ostrich flaps joyously.
    • The verse sets the ostrich's wing against the pinion and plumage of the stork.
    • The King James asks whether the hearer gave the goodly wings to the peacocks.
    • The King James asks whether the hearer gave wings and feathers to the ostrich.
14. 39:14
    • The ostrich leaves her eggs on the ground.
    • The ostrich lets her eggs be warmed on the dust.
15. 39:15
    • The ostrich forgets that a foot may crush the eggs.
    • The ostrich forgets that a wild beast may trample the eggs.
16. 39:16
    • The ostrich treats her young harshly, as if they were not hers.
    • Her labor is in vain.
    • She is without fear about it.
17. 39:17
    • God has made the ostrich forget wisdom.
    • God has not given her a share in understanding.
18. 39:18
    • When the ostrich lifts herself up on high, she laughs at the horse and its rider.
19. 39:19
    • The verse asks whether the hearer gives the horse its strength.
    • The verse asks whether the hearer clothes the horse's neck with a mane.
20. 39:20
    • The verse asks whether the hearer makes the horse leap like a locust.
    • The majesty of the horse's snorting is terrifying.
21. 39:21
    • The horse paws in the valley.
    • The horse rejoices in his strength.
    • The horse goes out to meet the weapons.
22. 39:22
    • The horse laughs at fear.
    • The horse is not dismayed.
    • The horse does not turn back from the sword.
23. 39:23
    • The quiver rattles against the horse.
    • The flashing spear is against him.
    • The javelin is against him.
24. 39:24
    • With shaking and rage the horse swallows up the ground.
    • The horse cannot stand still when the ram's horn sounds.
25. 39:25
    • At the blast of the horn the horse says 'Aha.'
    • The horse smells the battle from afar.
    • The horse hears the thunder of the captains.
    • The horse hears the war shout.
26. 39:26
    • The verse asks whether the hawk flies by the hearer's understanding.
    • The verse asks whether the hawk spreads its wings toward the south.
27. 39:27
    • The verse asks whether the eagle mounts up at the hearer's command.
    • The verse asks whether the eagle makes its nest high up.
28. 39:28
    • The eagle dwells on the rock.
    • The eagle lodges on the tooth of the rock.
    • The eagle lodges in a stronghold.
29. 39:29
    • From there the eagle searches out food.
    • The eagle's eyes look far off.
30. 39:30
    • The eagle's young ones gulp down blood.
    • Where the slain are, there the eagle is.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

39:1

This chapter continues without a break the speech God began in chapter 38, spoken to Job out of the storm; the "I" in verse 6 is God speaking. "Hinds" is old English for female deer, and "bring forth" and "calve" both simply mean to give birth. Wild goats and deer bear their young in remote high country, away from any human witness.

39:2

The King James says "hinds." A hind is a mother deer.

39:3

"They cast out their sorrows" is 1611 English, not a statement about grief. The Hebrew word means birth-pangs; the line describes the end of labor, and may also refer to expelling the afterbirth.

39:4

"Corn" in the King James means grain of any sort, wheat or barley. It never means maize or sweetcorn, which were unknown in England in 1611. The Hebrew word here is uncertain and may instead mean open country or open grain-land, which is how most modern translations read it.

39:5

The two halves of the verse use two different Hebrew words for the wild donkey. This is not the domesticated donkey that carried loads and turned mills, but the wild ass of the Syrian and Arabian deserts: fast, and never successfully tamed.

39:6

"Barren land" translates a Hebrew word meaning salt flats, ground so salty that nothing will grow in it.

39:7

The "driver" is the man who walks behind a working animal shouting and goading it on. A domesticated donkey spent its whole life under that voice; the wild one never hears it.

39:9

"Unicorn" is a mistranslation inherited by the King James from the older Greek and Latin Bibles. The Hebrew re'em is the aurochs, a massive wild ox with long forward-curving horns, once common in the Near East and hunted to extinction in the seventeenth century. "Crib" is 1611 English for a feeding trough, the same word later used for the manger at Bethlehem. The question imagines yoking this animal to farm work like an ordinary ox.

39:10

The "band" is the harness rope that holds a plow animal to the furrow. To "harrow" is to drag a weighted frame across plowed ground to break the clods into a seedbed.

39:12

"Barn" translates the Hebrew word for a threshing floor: a flat, hard-packed circle of earth or bare rock, usually on a windy rise, where the cut grain was beaten and then tossed into the air so the wind carried off the chaff. "Seed" here means the harvested grain, not what is planted.

39:13

The King James "peacocks" is a guess by the translators; the Hebrew names the ostrich, and this verse is one of the most difficult in the book. The second bird is also uncertain, most take it as the stork, some as a heron. The contrast is between the ostrich's large but useless wings, which cannot lift her, and the wings of a bird that genuinely flies.

39:14

Ostriches really do lay their eggs in a shallow scrape in open sand and leave them uncovered through the heat of the day, letting the sun do the warming. To ancient observers this looked like abandonment.

39:16

"Her labour is in vain without fear" is compressed 1611 English. It means she has no anxiety or concern about the possibility that all her effort will come to nothing.

39:18

An ostrich runs at around forty miles an hour and can outlast a horse over distance, which is why she can "scorn" the horse and its rider.

39:19

"Clothed his neck with thunder" renders a Hebrew word whose meaning is disputed. It may name the horse's mane, as most modern versions take it, or a rippling, quivering strength in the neck. Translators have gone both ways.

39:20

The King James "make him afraid as a grasshopper" misreads the Hebrew verb, which is about leaping, not fear. The insect is the locust, and the comparison is to the sudden spring of a locust taking off.

39:21

Horses in this period were battle animals, not farm animals. They pulled war chariots and carried armed riders, while the plowing and hauling was done by oxen and donkeys, which is why the horse is described entirely in terms of combat.

39:23

The quiver is the rider's case of arrows, worn so that it knocks and rattles against the horse's flank at a gallop. The third weapon is more probably a javelin or short lance than the King James's "shield".

39:24

"He swalloweth the ground" is a word-for-word rendering of a Hebrew idiom for eating up distance at speed. The last clause is obscure in the King James; the sense is that the horse cannot be held still once the signal sounds. The "trumpet" is the shofar, a ram's horn blown to give battle signals.

39:25

"Ha, ha" is the translators' attempt at a Hebrew word imitating the horse's snort at the horn-blast. "The thunder of the captains" means the roar of officers shouting commands across the field.

39:26

"Toward the south" points to the seasonal migration of birds of prey, which leave for the south each autumn, a movement people observed every year without knowing where the birds went or what directed them.

39:27

The Hebrew word nesher covers both the eagle and the griffon vulture, a bird with a wingspan near nine feet that nests on high cliffs and feeds on carcasses. Verse 30 fits the vulture better than the eagle, and translators have long divided over which is meant.

39:28

"Abideth" here means spends the night. "The strong place" is a stronghold or fortress: the crag is being described as a fortification no attacker can reach.

39:30

"Suck up blood" describes nestlings being fed on carrion. "The slain" are men killed in battle and left unburied on the field, which such birds find and gather over.