Wednesday, May 10, 2023

David J. A. Clines on Job 38:4-7

  

 

The Structure of the World (38.4-7)

 

4 Where were you when I founded (יסד) the earth?
Tell me, if you have insight.

5 Who fixed its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched the measuring cord (קו) across it?

6 Into what were its bases (אדן) sunk (טבע),
or who set its capstone (אבן פנה),

7 when all the stats of the morning rejoiced (רנן) together,
And all the sons of God shouted for joy?

 

The first thing this sketch of cosmology has to convey is that the world has not always been in existence; it once was brought into being, as a creation. And not just by a single act of creation: the world was in fact built as a house is built. In the text, the first act mentioned is its ‘founding’ (יסד, v. 4), but that cannot have been the very first thing that was done. The measuring of its plan must have preceded that, so יסד must be a headline word for the whole building project.

 

The first task of the divine builder was to mark out the floor plan for the building with a tape measure or measuring line, a cord (קו, v. 5). Only then could the actual work of constructing begin. The construction itself must of course start with the digging of foundations, into which pillars were set. You must realize that the earth is supported by pillars, which are not explicitly mentioned here, though they are in four other places: Job 9.6; Ps. 75.3 (4) (the term is עמוד), 1 Sam. 2.8 (מצוק), and Ps. 104.5 (מכון). They are of course completely different from the pillars of heaven (Job 26.11; cf. 2 Sam. 22.8), which stand on the earth, supporting the sky, . . . .

 

These pillars of the earth need bases (אדן) at their foot, which are sunk (טבע) into some matter that Job apparently doesn’t know about (‘into what were its bases sunk?’, v. 6), but which may be the underworld sea. ‘Bases’ are usually metal supports for pillars, which of course extend below the surface of what the pillars appear to be resting on. You have to dig to make a hole for a base. That is why I said that digging was the beginning of the construction.

 

Fast forwarding, we move in v.5 from the excavation for the bases of the earth in the first colon to the last phase in the second colon: the completion of the building. The last item of all in a structure is the capstone (אֶ֣בֶן פִּנָּתָֽהּ), or keystone, a wedge-shaped stone at the apex of an arch or a round stone at the apex of a vault; it is the last piece fitted, and it serves to lock all the stones in position. This term is usually misunderstood by commentators and translations as ‘cornerstone’. Not so, for in building generally, each course has its own cornerstones, one at each corner of a building, and these cornerstones are the first stones to be laid for its course; the other stones are lined up by reference to them. A building has not one but many cornerstones, but only one capstone or top stone. When that is set in place, the building is finished. The sequel in v.7 confirms that the building work has been completed, for the shouts of rejoicing by the morning stars Venus and Mercury and, in the second colon, by all the stars (‘sons of God’) would be premature before that. Sad to say, incidentally, there does not appear to have been any music at the celebration, despite the famous lines of Milton:

 

Such music (as ‘tis said)
Before was never made,
But when of old the sons of morning sung,
While the Creator great
his constellations set,
And the well-ballanc’t world on hinges hung,
And cast the dark foundations deep,
And id the welt’ring waves their oozy channel keep,

 

and despite the singing in the RSV, and most modern translations (‘the joyful concern of the morning stars’ in the NJB), since רנן means only ‘shout’, not ‘sing’, no Miltonian hinges either, for that matter.

 

Please notice that while we can identify the pillars of the earth and their bases and the matter into which they are sunk as elements of the standard cosmological picture in the Hebrew Bible, there is nothing we know of in Hebrew cosmology to which the capstone corresponds. It must simply be an extension of the metaphor of building. (David J. A. Clines, “One or Two Things You May Now Know about the Universe: The Cosmology of the Divine Speeches in Job,” in Joban Papers [Hebrew Bible Monographs 102; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2023], 328-29, 330-31)

 

 

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