Job (TOTC) by Francis I. Andersen

Author:Francis I. Andersen [Andersen, Francis I.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783592418
Publisher: Inter-Varsity Press
Published: 2008-09-18T16:00:00+00:00

Eliphaz thus contradicts the statement in 1:22.

7–10. To belittle Job’s utterances further, Eliphaz subjects him to a string of humiliating questions. It is an irony that his interrogation hits the style of the later interview with the Lord that Job will find so healing (chapters 38ff.). The present passage stands in chiasmus with the preceding, as Eliphaz’s initial charges of folly (verses 2f.) and irreligion (4) are elaborated in inverse order: iniquity (5f.) and ignorance (7ff.).

The unique phrase the first man has occasioned much discussion. ‘An allusion to the myth of the primeval man, who existed before the creation of the world’ (Rowley, p. 134) has scarcely been proved. By linking verses 7 and 8 together, it is suggested that this pre-creation man ‘learned the plans of God in the divine council’ (Rowley, ibid.). The chiastic structure of the strophe shows that two sources of knowledge are in mind: antiquity (7 and 10) and initiation to God’s secrets (8 and 9). Job has neither qualification. Two further clues are needed to solve the problem of verse 7. The same idea is found in Psalm 90:2, where similar verbs but different nouns are used. Only God is ‘older than the hills’; there is no talk of a primal man, and it cannot be Adam, for he was made after the mountains. The second clue comes from the parallelism of the verse itself. Instead of man read ‘earth’ as a parallel to hills.175 The preposition does double duty. The question is:

Do you think you are the First176—

born before the earth,

brought forth before the hills?

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