1 Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?
Do you observe the calving of the does?
2 Can you number the months that they fulfill,
and do you know the time when they give birth?
Job 39
We have and we do, Lord God. Spring is calving season. Gestation is roughly 180 days. Your creation is wonderfully made!
19 Do you give the horse his might?
Do you clothe his neck with a mane?
20 Do you make him leap like the locust?
His majestic snorting is terrifying.
Job 39
We do not, Lord God. But we have created modes of conveyance that harness the power of many hundreds of horses. Horses now are no more than luxury articles in all but the most economically depressed countries.
26 Is it by your understanding that the hawk soars
and spreads his wings toward the south?
…
29 From there he spies out the prey;
his eyes behold it from far away.
30 His young ones suck up blood,
and where the slain are, there is he.
Job 39
It was not by our strength, Lord, that the hawk ruled the skies. But you have allowed us to put predators in the sky that fly higher and slay whole armies from the wheeling heights. It is at our command that they raise up on high and rain down fire from above.
10 Adorn yourself with majesty and dignity;
clothe yourself with glory and splendor.
11 Pour out the overflowings of your anger,
and look on everyone who is proud and abase him.
12 Look on everyone who is proud and bring him low
and tread down the wicked where they stand.
13 Hide them all in the dust together;
bind their faces in the world below.
14Then will I also acknowledge to you
that your own right hand can save you.
Job 40
Lord, we have done this and more. No fleshly creature can stand before the wrath of our weapons of war and our methods of industry. We have leveled entire cities in a moment, as you did Sodom and Gomorrah. Yet we wield them not in your wisdom. With all this strength, still our right hand cannot save us.
The cheeky but earnest exercise above illustrates two key elements of the Lord’s reprimand to his suffering servant at the end of the book of Job. The first is the fact that the Lord’s response is framed as a series of rhetorical questions highlighting mankind’s failure to sufficiently realize the dominion mandate. The second element highlighted is that man’s relationship to God’s rhetorical questions is drastically different today than it was in Job’s day.
When Adam and Eve sinned and were expelled from the Garden, the dominion mandate did not go away. God did not “move the goalposts.” The story of humanity’s dominion over the world is still the grand-narrative arc of this world. Man’s sin and the necessity for Salvation are the dramatic complication and perfection to that arc.1
“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” (38:2) The Lord opens his salvo against the pride of Job, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar by quoting from his own passionate herald, Elihu (34:35 and 35:16). This phrase is best understood as a reference to man’s condition after eating from the tree of knowledge. God mockingly insinuates: “I thought your Father Adam ate from the tree of knowledge? How come you’re still so ignorant of this world I’ve made?” Eating from the tree of knowledge did not make us like God in power, because we were not yet ready to handle the tools of wisdom.
Every question that the Lord asks Job in the four chapters that comprise his response challenge and belittle man’s knowledge of and control over the natural world. The Lord’s monologue concludes with two extended poetic hymns on the Alpha and Omega of created strength: the land beast Behemoth – “first of the works of God” (40:19) – and the sea dragon Leviathan – “king over all the sons of pride” (41:34).2 Whether these were actual creatures that once existed, cryptozoological creatures that are currently hiding from us, or mythological creatures symbolizing the entire creaturely might on the land and in the sea3–any which way you cut it–the Lord is making the point that Job is not sufficiently in control of the earth. If he was, he would be able to wrest control from these titans. These creatures (real or mythical) mock man for his inability to take up his birthright of dominion over the earth and its inhabitants.
Revelation uses the same symbolic hierarchy expressed by God in Job when it juxtaposes a beast rising from the sea (13:1-10) with a beast rising from the land (13:11-18) as “ultimate” earthly challenges to the authority of the New Adam’s dominion on the earth. Revelation depicts these challenges to Christ as earthly powers that are puppets of spiritual forces. God’s challenge to Job similarly highlights the problem that if mankind cannot even tame the “natural” creatures, he is utterly defenseless before the sinister powers in unnatural rebellion against God. Isaiah, Amos, and the Psalms also speak of Leviathan in this double or even triple-register: creature, symbol of human pride, and doomed Satanic uprising. In this spiritual sense, then, God is pointing out that even if Job could answer the 67 rhetorical questions that he asks between chapter 38 and 41,4 Job still could not conquer Satan, who we know to be the worker of suffering in Job’s life. Literarily, this is dramatic irony5 of epic proportions. It is unclear that Job fully comprehends the revelations being made to him, but the vision of God in all his power is enough to at least convert him to the elevated state of humility that comes through “known unknowns.” Job puts it this way: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (42:5-6).
So, what of the second point, that man is now in a different relationship to creation than he was on the day that the Lord addressed Job? To answer this, we must recognize that one acceptable construal of humanity’s history is as a massive, cosmological scavenger hunt: “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out” (Prov. 25:2). This verse presupposes that man’s relationship to nature is not static and that he will grow in understanding and power over the created order. Electric lights have caused the sun, moon, and stars to loosen their grip on the governance of man’s affairs. We are not completely free from their guidance and constraints, but the principle described in Exodus 23:30 seems to be in effect: “Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased and possess the land.” Is it ridiculous for a postmillennialist to imagine a future hundreds of years hence in which humanity has taken dominion over the Sun in the particular form of a Dyson sphere powering the new Christendom into the next millennium, spreading the Church’s co-regency to the stars?
It might sound blasphemous to say that God’s questions, which were clearly rhetorical at the time, can now in part be answered in the affirmative. The way that I would answer that charge is that the line of questioning works on two levels. Even if man reached a level of technological advancement where he could master the rapid-fire catechism that God gave to Job, still he would not be able to save himself, as God indicates in Job 40:14. This is because our battle is not against the flesh and blood of the creation, but against the powers and principalities that Satan controlled until Christ’s victory. The technological advances that have brought mankind closer to being able to answer the Lord are not the result of a self-driven evolution, but are proof of the beneficial effects of new management. Christ’s re-making of mankind and the abolishing of Satan’s constant demands for satisfaction of blood-guilt have made it possible for man to accelerate the game of hide-and-seek that the Lord has prepared for us. And yet in none of this has he supplanted our need for a savior “[God] has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecc. 3:11).
Salvation is one area in which the game of hide and seek must always work in reverse; it is the Lord that finds us. Casting our minds forward to some notional future where man has subjected to his will the loftiest forces in nature (“the sons of Pride”), even then mankind will not be in a place to utter “blasphemous judgment” against the corrupting Serpent/Dragon (see Jude 1:9). It is only Christ’s victory against the Devil that has freed man to take mature dominion.
Jonathan David White is a 2021-22 Theopolis Fellow. He lives in Annapolis, MD with his wife and two sons.
Footnotes
- It is even possible to understand a portion of Adam’s motivation in eating the forbidden fruit as him attempting a shortcut to fulfilling the dominion mandate. Satan had promised that eating would make them like God. Surely Adam had been daunted by the charge given him to take dominion. Wouldn’t gaining God-like wisdom speed his trajectory to those lofty heights? Instead, it seems only to have been an insidious scheme to allow Satan to become the “god” of this world (2 Cor. 4:4 and Eph. 2:2). ↩︎
- I am reaching a little with the Alpha and Omega designation, but I draw this conclusion from the following details: Behemoth’s attribution of being the “first of the works of God” comes at the beginning of his hymn whereas Leviathan’s description as being the ultimate authority “over the sons of pride” comes at the very end of his hymn. The two hymns are bookended by these respective epithets.
↩︎ - Jewish mythology ascribes dominion over the top tier of the three-tiered universe to a third created titan: the Ziz. The Ziz is a heavenly “sky lord” holding the key to dominion of the heavens just as the behemoth commands mastery of the land, and the Leviathan mastery of the deeps. Alleged references to this creature are discerned in Ps. 50:11 and 80:13.
↩︎ - 67 is a rough count. It is difficult to determine the exact number of questions, as some are extended riffs on the same rhetorical challenges. Examining the ESV, BSB, KJV, and NASB, you get 62, 71, 85, and 65 questions respectively.
↩︎ - Dramatic irony is a literary device in which the reader knows relevant details that one or more of the characters in the story do not. In Job’s instance, he is un-blissfully unaware of the contest in heaven that has given rise to his suffering. The Lord is able to crush the head of Leviathan, that old Serpent, the Devil. The Lord’s restraining power and full dominion are the only reasons that Job has not been utterly destroyed (Mal. 3:6).
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