Bible Commentaries

Job 36:3

To gain a true view we must take into account all varied forms of contemporary experience, and all the experiences of different ages. He will best see the whole, and each part in relation to the whole most truly, who has the widest and best proportioned knowledge founded on the experience of others, and at the same time controls all by his own experience.

—Dr. Hort, Hulsean Lectures, pp172 ,173.

Job 36:5

"It struck me," says Carlyle, "that Sterling's was not intrinsically, nor had ever been in the highest or chief degree, a devotional mind. Of course all excellence in Job 36:8-9

"It is a very melancholy Reflection," Steele observes in The Spectator (No312), "that Men are usually so weak, that it is absolutely necessary for them to know Sorrow and Pain to be in their right senses."

Job 36:10-11

The weakness of the will begins, when the individual would be something of himself. All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey.

—Emerson on The Oversoul.

Job 36:24-26

In his paper on "Madame Sand and the New Apocalypse" in The Paris Sketch-Booh, Thackeray bursts out with the indignant cry: "O awful, awful name of God! Light unbearable! Mystery unfathomable! Vastness immeasurable!—Who are these who come forward to explain the mystery, and gaze unblinking into the depths of the light, and measure the immeasurable vastness to a hair? Oh name, that God's people of old did fear to utter! Oh light, that God's prophet would have perished had he seen! Who are these that are now so familiar with it? Women, truly; for the most part weak women—weak in intellect, weak mayhap in spelling and grammar, but marvellously strong in faith: women, who step down to the people with stately step and voice of authority, and deliver their twopenny tablets as if there were some Divine authority for the wretched nonsense recorded there."

Reference.—XXXVII:6.—H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxvii. p6.