Job 26 Bible study: The outskirts of his ways

Every word of this chapter after its first verse is Job's: "Then Job answered" (26:1), after Bildad's short speech (25:1-6), and the next heading is "Job again took up his parable, and said" (27:1). Job opens with questions: "How have you helped him who is without power! How have you saved the arm that has no strength!" (26:2) (tap helped, power), "How have you counseled him who has no wisdom, and plentifully declared sound knowledge!" (26:3) (tap sound knowledge), and "To whom have you uttered words? Whose spirit came out of you?" (26:4). In Hebrew every you in these three verses is singular: Job is speaking to one person, and the one who has just spoken is Bildad (25:1). These are Job's words. When the LORD answers Job, he asks, "Who is this who darkens counsel by words without knowledge?" (38:2), and afterwards he says to Eliphaz, "you have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job has" (42:7). The book doesn't say which words it has in view in either place, and these notes don't decide it.

Job 26:7→leads toHebrews 1:3

Job says of God, "He stretches out the north over empty space, and hangs the earth on nothing" (26:7), and "He binds up the waters in his thick clouds, and the cloud is not burst under them" (26:8). Then: "Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways" (26:14). These are Job's words (26:1). Hebrews says of God's Son, "His Son is the radiance of his glory, the very image of his substance, and upholding all things by the word of his power" (Hebrews 1:3). Hebrews doesn't name Job, and no link between the Hebrew and Greek words is claimed, so setting the two side by side is a reading. It rests on a shared subject, who holds up the world, and not on the word power. Some read the two together: Job tells of God holding up the earth and the waters, and Hebrews says the Son upholds all things. Others read each in its own setting: Job speaks of God (26:6) and names no Son; Hebrews goes on to the Son who "purified us of our sins" and "sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high" (Hebrews 1:3), and says nothing of Job. Neither reading makes Job a picture of Christ, or says what Job himself knew.

שֶׁמֶץshemetssay SHE-mets

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "whisper". Strong's: "an inkling". "How small a whisper do we hear of him!" (26:14). It comes only twice in the Hebrew Bible, both in Job. The other is Eliphaz's, telling of the voice in the night: "Now a thing was secretly brought to me. My ear received a whisper of it" (4:12). In 26:14 Job sets the whisper beside "the thunder of his power".