Job - Chapter 38

Yahweh answers Job

^{1 ①} Then Yahweh answered Job out of the storm:

²Who is this that obscures divine plans
with ignorant words?

³Gird up your loins like a man;
I will question you and you must answer.

⁴Where were you when I founded the earth?
Answer, and show me your knowledge.

⁵Do you know who determined its size,
who stretched out its measuring line?

⁶On what were its bases set?
Who laid its cornerstone,

⁷while the morning stars sang together
and the heavenly beings shouted for joy?

⁸Who shut the sea behind closed doors
when it burst forth from the womb,

⁹when I made the clouds its garment
and thick darkness its swaddling clothes;

¹⁰when I set its limits
with doors and bars in place,

¹¹when I said, “You will not go beyond these bounds;
here is where your proud waves must halt?”

¹²Have you ever commanded the morning,
or shown the dawn its place,

¹³that it might grasp the earth by its edges
and shake the wicked out of it,

¹⁴when it takes a clay color
and changes its tint like a garment;

¹⁵when the wicked are denied their own light,
and their proud arm is shattered?

¹⁶Have you journeyed to where the sea begins
or walked in its deepest recesses?

¹⁷Have the gates of death been shown to you?
Have you seen the gates of Shadow?

¹⁸Have you an idea of the breadth of the earth?
Tell me, if you know all this.

¹⁹Where is the way to the home of light,
and where does darkness dwell?

²⁰Can you take them to their own regions,
and set them on their homeward paths?

²¹You know, for you were born before them,
and great is the number of your years!

²²Have you entered the storehouse of the snow
or seen the storehouse of the hail,

²³which I reserve for times of woe,
for days of war and battle?

²⁴What is the way to the place
where lightning is dispersed,
or the place whence the east wind
begins spreading over the earth?

²⁵Who has cut a channel for the torrents of rain,
and a path for the thunderstorm,

²⁶to bring rain to no-man’s-land
and to the unpeopled wilderness,

²⁷to enrich the wasted and desolate ground,
to make the desert bloom with green?

²⁸Does the rain have a father?
Who fathers the drops of dew?

²⁹From whose womb comes the ice,
and who gives birth to the frost from the skies,

³⁰when the waters lie as hard as stone,
when the surface of the deep is frozen?

³¹Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades,
or loosen the bonds of Orion?

³²Can you guide the morning star in its season,
or lead the Bear with its train?

³³Do you know the laws of the heavens,
and can you establish their rule on earth?

³⁴Can you raise your voice to the clouds
and order their waters to pour down?

³⁵Will lightnings flash at your command
and report to you, “Here we are?”

³⁶Who has given the ibis foresight
or endowed the cock with foreknowledge?

³⁷Who has the wisdom to count the clouds?
Who tilts the water jars of heaven

³⁸so that the dust cakes into a mass
and clods of earth stick together?

³⁹Can you hunt the woods to appease
the hunger of the lioness and her whelps,

⁴⁰as they crouch in their dens
or lie in wait in the thicket?

⁴¹Who provides prey for the raven
when its young cry out to God
and roam about desperate for food?