Context No. 1238 of 4322 · Job
Context · Reflection
Job 28:1-16: in context
1“Surely there is a mine for silver, and a place for gold which they refine. 2Iron is taken out of the earth, and copper is smelted out of the ore. 3Man sets an end to darkness, and searches out, to the furthest bound, the stones of obscurity and of thick darkness. 4He breaks open a shaft away from where people live. They are forgotten by the foot. They hang far from men, they swing back and forth. 5As for the earth, out of it comes bread. Underneath it is turned up as it were by fire. 6Sapphires come from its rocks. It has dust of gold. 7That path no bird of prey knows, neither has the falcon’s eye seen it. 8The proud animals have not trodden it, nor has the fierce lion passed by there. 9He puts his hand on the flinty rock, and he overturns the mountains by the roots. 10He cuts out channels among the rocks. His eye sees every precious thing. 11He binds the streams that they don’t trickle. The thing that is hidden he brings out to light. 12“But where will wisdom be found? Where is the place of understanding? 13Man doesn’t know its price, and it isn’t found in the land of the living. 14The deep says, ‘It isn’t in me.’ The sea says, ‘It isn’t with me.’ 15It can’t be gotten for gold, neither will silver be weighed for its price. 16It can’t be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire.
In the middle of Job, a magnificent poem meditates on wisdom. It begins by marveling at human ingenuity in mining: men sink shafts far from human dwellings, hang and swing in the dark, cut channels through rock, overturn mountains, and bring hidden treasures, silver, gold, sapphires, to light. Human beings can find and extract the most inaccessible riches from the deepest places. But then the poem turns and asks the question that all the mining cannot answer: where shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding? It cannot be dug up, cannot be bought with gold or precious stones; the deep and the sea say, it is not in me.
The poem sets up a striking contrast. Human beings are astonishingly good at finding hidden things; we tunnel into the earth, master its dark places, extract gold and jewels no bird or beast could reach. Our ingenuity at uncovering buried treasure is almost limitless. And yet the one thing we most need, wisdom, understanding, cannot be found the same way. It is not buried in the ground waiting to be mined; it cannot be purchased with all the gold our cleverness extracts; the deep and the sea, the places we search for everything else, do not contain it. There is a humbling truth in that. We can achieve extraordinary things, master the material world, build and extract and accumulate, and still not possess wisdom, because wisdom is of a different order altogether. It is not a resource to be discovered by effort or bought with wealth. The poem is building toward its answer, which comes at the end of the chapter: the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom. Wisdom is not mined; it is given, and received only by those who fear God. All our technical mastery cannot dig it up. It comes from a relationship with the God who alone knows where it dwells.
Am I trying to find wisdom the way we find everything else, by cleverness or purchase or effort, when it cannot be mined or bought but is given only to those who fear God?