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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Job 15:17 - 15:17
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
17 I will inform thee, hear me!
And what I have myself seen that I will declare,
18 Things which wise men declare
Without concealment from their fathers -
19 To them alone was the land given over,
And no stranger had passed in their midst - :
Eliphaz, as in his first speech, introduces the dogma with which he confronts Job with a solemn preface: in the former case it had its rise in a revelation, here it is supported by his own experience and reliable tradition; for חזיתי is not intended as meaning ecstatic vision (Schlottm.). The poet uses חזה also of sensuous vision, Job 8:17; and of observation and knowledge by means of the senses, not only the more exalted, as Job 19:26., but of any kind (Job 23:9; Job 24:1; Job 27:12, comp. Job 36:25; Job 34:32), in the widest sense. זֶה is used as neuter, Gen 6:15; Exo 13:8; Exo 30:13; Lev 11:4, and freq.
(Note: So also Psa 56:10, where I now prefer to translate “This I know,” זה neuter, like Pro 24:12, and referring forward as above, Job 15:17.)
(comp. the neuter הוּא, Job 13:16, and often), and זה־חזיתי is a relative clause (Ges. §122, 2): quod conspexi, as Job 19:19 quos amo, and Psa 74:2 in quo habitas, comp. Psa 104:8, Psa 104:26; Pro 23:22, where the punctuation throughout proceeds from the correct knowledge of the syntax. The waw of ואספרה is the waw apodosis, which is customary (Nägelsbach, §111, 1, b) after relative clauses (e.g., Num 23:3), or what is the same thing, participles (e.g., Pro 23:24): et narrabo = ea narrabo. In Job 15:18 ולא כחדו is, logically at least, subordinate to יגידו, as in Isa 3:9,
(Note: Heidenheim refers to Hos 8:2 for the position of the words, but there Israel may also be an apposition: we know thee, we Israel.)
as the Targum of the Antwerp Polyglott well translates: “what wise men declare, without concealing (ולא מכדבין), from the tradition of their fathers;” whereas all the other old translations, including Luther's, have missed the right meaning. These fathers to whom this doctrine respecting the fate of evil-doers is referred, lived, as Eliphaz says in Job 15:19, in the land of their birth, and did not mingle themselves with strangers, consequently their manner of viewing things, and their opinions, have in their favour the advantage of independence, of being derived from their own experience, and also of a healthy development undisturbed by any foreign influences, and their teaching may be accounted pure and unalloyed.
Eliphaz thus indirectly says, that the present is not free from such influences, and Ewald is consequently of opinion that the individuality of the Israelitish poet peeps out here, and a state of things is indicated like that which came about after the fall of Samaria in the reign of Manasseh. Hirzel also infers from Eliphaz' words, that at the time when the book was written the poet's fatherland was desecrated by some foreign rule, and considers it an indication for determining the time at which the book was composed. But how groundless and deceptive this is! The way in which Eliphaz commends ancient traditional lore is so genuinely Arabian, that there is but the faintest semblance of a reason for supposing the poet to have thrown his own history and national peculiarity so vividly into the working up of the rôle of another. Purity of race was, from the earliest times, considered by “the sons of the East” as a sign of highest nobility, and hence Eliphaz traces back his teaching to a time when his race could boast of the greatest freedom from intermixture with any other. Schlottmann prefers to interpret Job 15:19 as referring to the “nobler primeval races of man” (without, however, referring to Job 8:8), but הָאָרֶץ does not signify the earth here, but: country, as in Job 30:8; Job 22:8, and elsewhere, and Job 15:19 seems to refer to nations: זָר = barbarus (perhaps Semitic: בַּרְבַּר, ὁ ἔξω). Nevertheless it is unnecessary to suppose that Eliphaz' time was one of foreign domination, as the Assyrian-Chaldean time was for Israel: it is sufficient to imagine it as a time when the tribes of the desert were becoming intermixed, from migration, commerce, and feud.
Now follows the doctrine of the wise men, which springs from a venerable primitive age, an age as yet undisturbed by any strange way of thinking (modern enlightenment and free thinking, as we should say), and is supported by Eliphaz' own experience.
(Note: Communication from Consul Wetzstein: If this verse affirms that the freer a people is from intermixture with other races, the purer is its tradition, it gives expression to a principle derived from experience, which needs no proof. Even European races, especially the Scandinavians, furnish proof of this in their customs, language, and traditions, although in this case certain elements of their indigenous character have vanished with the introduction of Christianity. A more complete parallel is furnished by the wandering tribes of the 'Aneze and Sharârât of the Syrian deserts, people who have indeed had their struggles, and have even been weakened by emigration, but have certainly never lost their political and religious autonomy, and have preserved valuable traditions which may be traced to the earliest antiquity. It is unnecessary to prove this by special instance, when the whole outer and inner life of these peoples can be regarded as the best commentary on the biblical accounts of the patriarchal age. It is, however, not so much the fact that the evil-doer receives his punishment, in favour of which Eliphaz appeals to the teaching handed down from the fathers, as rather the belief in it, consequently in a certain degree the dogma of a moral order in the world. This dogma is an essential element of the ancient Abrahamic religion of the desert tribes - that primitive religion which formed the basis of the Mosaic, and side by side with it was continued among the nomads of the desert; which, shortly before the appearance of Christianity in the country east of Jordan, gave birth to mild doctrines, doctrines which tended to prepare the way for the teaching of the gospel; which at that very time, according to historical testimony, also prevailed in the towns of the Higâz, and was first displaced again by the Jemanic idolatry, and limited to the desert, in the second century after Christ, during the repeated migrations of the southern Arabs; which gave the most powerful impulse to the rise of Islam, and furnished its best elements; which, towards the end of the last century, brought about the reform of Islamism in the province of Negd, and produced the Wahabee doctrine; and which, finally, is continued even to the present day by the name of Dîn Ibrâhîm, “Religion of Abraham,” as a faithful tradition of the fathers, among the vast Ishmaelitish tribes of the Syrian desert, “to whom alone the land is given over, and into whose midst no stranger has penetrated.” Had this cultus spread among settled races with a higher education, it might have been taught also in writings: if, however, portions of writings in reference to it, which have been handed down to us by the Arabic, are to be regarded as unauthentic, it may also in 'Irâk have been mixed with the Sabian worship of the stars; but among the nomads it will have always been only oral, taught by the poets in song, and contained in the fine traditions handed down uncorrupted from father to son, and practised in life.
It is a dogma of this religion (of which I shall speak more fully in the introduction to my Anthologie von Poesien der Wanderstâmme), that the pious will be rewarded by God in his life and in his descendants, the wicked punished in his life and in his descendants; and it may also, in Job 15:19, be indirectly said that the land of Eliphaz has preserved this faith, in accordance with tradition, purer than Job's land. If Eliphaz was from the Petraean town of Têmân (which we merely suggest as possible here), he might indeed rightly assert that no strange race had become naturalized there; for that hot, sterile land, poorly supplied with water, had nothing inviting to the emigrant or marauder, and its natives remain there only by virtue of the proverb: lôlâ hhibb el-wattan quat.tâl, lakân dâr eṡsû' charâb, “Did not the love of one's country slay (him who is separated from it), the barren country would be uninhabited.” Job certainly could not affirm the same of his native country, if this is, with the Syrian tradition, to be regarded as the Nukra (on this point, vid., the Appendix). As the richest province of Syria, it has, from the earliest time to the present, always been an apple of contention, and has not only frequently changed its rulers, but even its inhabitants.)