He puts his hand on the hard rock; he overturns mountains by the roots. He cuts out tunnels in the rocks, and his eye sees every treasure. He dams up rivers from their sources, and he brings secret things to the light. But from where will wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? (Job 28:9-12, Lexham English Bible)
After the disaster of Job’s suffering, after the interminable speeches of his friends to explain that disaster away, somewhere near the middle of the book, the poet has Job pose this poignant question, “From where will wisdom be found?” Silver, gold, and copper, all these precious metals can be searched out and found. Through exploration and determination, the miner will find what he seeks, but what of wisdom, that which is more precious than silver or gold? Can the same be said of it? Where, indeed, can wisdom be found?
Before asking the question the poet piles up images of humanity’s never ending quest for things of value. The one looking for gold, “puts an end to darkness” and “searches out the farthest limits, for the ore in gloom and deep shadow.” The miner for gold goes further still, and so “puts his hand on the hard rock; he overturns mountains by the roots” (Job 28:9, LEB). Damming up rivers, mining for gold in places of darkness, uprooting mountains—these images all bring to mind this question, what are you willing do for things of value? How far will you go to find them? What depths will you descend to? Once the poet asks from where wisdom will be found the implication becomes, in your search for wisdom, are you willing to put an end to darkness, to search out the farthest limits?
As part of the Bible’s wisdom literature, Job as a whole is situated within the Bible’s larger conversation about the pursuit of wisdom. The question of what wisdom is and where one can find it pervades not only the Bible but much great literature of the ancient world. To take one famous example, in The Republic Socrates describes the quest for wisdom as a hunt, saying to Glaucon of their pursuit for the meaning of justice: “So then, Glaucon, we must, like hunters, now station ourselves in a circle around the thicket and pay attention so that justice doesn’t slip through somewhere and disappear into obscurity. Clearly it’s somewhere hereabouts. Look to it and make every effort to catch sight of it; you might somehow see it before me and could tell me” (The Republic, translated by Allan Bloom, 432b) As their discussion unfolds throughout the book, it becomes clear that Socrates is after more than justice. As a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, he is a hunter for what is (Republic, 521c); he stalks meaning itself, pursues the face of goodness, desires to penetrate to the heart of being. He is, to quote Jess Williamson’s lovely song “Hunter,” “a hunter for the real thing.”
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In the book Scarcity Brain the journalist Michael Easter describes the innate human longing for more, the desire to push out further and further into places unknown, a desire that has taken us into the cosmos. Our desire to launch into space is a deeply human impulse, akin to the motivation that compelled our ancestors to cross continents, to sail unknown waters. But what happens when that quest no longer has a discernibly good outlet? What happens when that appetite turns in on itself?
Throughout the book Easter discusses things that are designed to exploit our appetite for more, things like slot machines, mobile games, social media algorithms, and even engineered foods. How is this exploitation possible? In a striking passage, Easter describes a study performed on pigeons, an extension of Skinner’s and Pavlov’s behavioral work. These pigeons were given access to a button. Some of the pigeons could hit the button and every other time they hit the button, food would come out. In this case, with predictable rewards, the pigeons ate when they needed to. Not so with the other group. They were given a button that doled out food on an unpredictable, yet carefully timed schedule, and these randomized, unpredictable rewards dished out at precisely the right intervals kept the pigeons coming back for more.
In no time the pigeons with the random button had become inveterate gamblers, incessantly pecking at the button, oblivious to the glut of food they had beyond their need. What had happened? The behavioral scientists had hijacked their rewards system, and Easter’s argument is that slot machine makers, game designers, social media companies, and pretty much every other attention merchant have learned to do this to us.
So often what we seek in the digital world is some kind of reward, and often that reward is Information with a capital I. And those who have the Information often dole it out like a drug. What promises to be expansive, what promises to increase our understanding and broaden our horizons, often turns out to be constricting. We become something akin to a pigeon in a Skinner Box, rather than a bird flying free. That is depressing, and regardless of what you make of studies like this, those of us who endlessly tap buttons for unpredictable rewards, dished out at precisely the right intervals, ought to see ourselves in this study.
I would say, however, that the quest for Information, is often simply a misdirected quest for wisdom. If that is true, there is hope for us yet, and the pigeons point us to a possible remedy for our malformed behavior. What’s more fascinating about the study to me is that they were able to get the pigeons to stop gambling. Once the pigeons were given a larger environment, one that more closely resembled their life in the wild, they gave up their gambling ways. The edges of their lives pushed outward again and suddenly the gambling was much less appealing.
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While the search for mere information, raw data, can often be constrictive, the hunt for wisdom is meant to be expansive. My sense is that Job 28 calls us to a larger environment, summoning us to the quest for wisdom in which we will expand the boundaries of our own perception and current understanding. Wisdom is not found in mines, or in the places of the deep, and yet the implied exhortation is to mine for it, to hunt for it, to go in search of it. If we too are meant to be miners for wisdom, hunters for the real thing, how then do we do it? This poem has something to teach us about that quest and so too, I believe, does poetry as an art form. As a beautiful poem in its own right, Job 28 points beyond itself to the power of poetry writ large.
The poem itself performs the very quest it commends, seeking with image and rhythm, structure and rhetoric, for the heart of wisdom. As we have seen, so much of the poem speaks of the quest for wisdom, mining for it, seeking it, learning that wisdom cannot be found where gold and silver are found. While speaking of searching in vivid terms, the poem performs its own searching. Throughout the chapter, our poet speaks of mining and then acts as a miner. This poet, and all great poets, are spelunkers, repelling into darkness armed with little more than a headlamp.
The same is true for readers of poetry, especially the Bible’s poetry. Poetry must be mined. We must enter its depths, lanterns in hand, determined to seek out the richest veins. And so, not in a simplistic transactional way, but in the hard won way of work in a mine, poetry can become wisdom. The seeking is part of wisdom, and seeking is a part of poetry, both for the poet and for those who read the poetry. Hence it is fitting that it’s in the process of mining for the source of wisdom that the poet comes to a most surprising conclusion—God is a miner too.
Indeed, the poet tells us that just as the miner searches out the limits of the created world, so to the Lord searched out wisdom. As the lovely King James has it, speaking of the Lord’s relationship to wisdom, “Then did he see it, and declare it; He prepared it, yea, and searched it out” (Job 28:27, KJV). The Lord sees wisdom, just as he saw the goodness of creation in Genesis 1. It is the sight of recognition, the step back, the exhaled breath, the sense of accomplishment when one surveys one’s work. The work of creation is from God, it bears his imprint, but it is not him, and so he is able to survey it, to see it, to appreciate it and to declare its goodness. He sees wisdom in the same way, and so in seeing it, he also declares its goodness and even prepares it, weaving it in and through his creation for us to search for and marvel at as well.
Then we reach the astonishing end of this lovely sequence of verbs—the Lord searched wisdom out. What could this possibly mean? Some have suggested the translation “fathomed” for this final verb. Fathomed is a lovely word, suggesting God’s supreme ability to get to the bottom of wisdom. He searches out the unsearchable. He fathoms the fathomless. Where can wisdom be found? In the fathomless Lord who has fathomed wisdom.
We might instinctively back away from the anthropomorphic implication that God has to search for anything, let alone wisdom, but maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe the poem wants us to draw the conclusion that it is in the nature of wisdom to be sought, even by God. The reverse is true. The Spirit, who is the Spirit of wisdom, searches the deep things of God, Paul tells us, and this is no lack in God (1 Cor. 2:10). It is his nature—his abundant, effusive, wise nature—to fathom the fathomless. God plumbing the depths of God—that is where wisdom can be found.
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Commenting on Job 28, Samuel E. Balentine points to the parallel between the human and the divine search for wisdom, drawing attention to the image of the miner:
If the miner can reach to the very limits of what is possible and in the process bring what is hidden to light, then perhaps Job can reach for the boundaries between silence and response, absence and presence. In the process, perhaps, he too can see into the hidden things that defy comprehension. And if the miner must concede that some treasures, like wisdom, elude even the most determined efforts, then perhaps the resolve to ‘overturn’ and ‘split open’ and ‘see’ offers Job a model that in fact brings him as close to God as it is humanly possible to be. (Balentine, Job, 422).
While humanity “searches out to the farthest limit the ore in gloom and deep darkness,” God too saw wisdom, declared it, established it, and searched it out. (Job 28:3;27). The use of the same verb at the beginning in verse 3 and here at the end in verse 28, “suggests that the miner’s God-like capacity and God’s human-like capacity are near mirror images of the same search” (Balentine, 427). The poet chooses a relatively rare verb—chaqar, to search out—to speak of both the human quest for wisdom and for the divine relationship to wisdom, drawing a parallel between the divine and the human. Though one must always mind the analogical gap, the poet has no qualms of speaking of the Lord as one who has searched out the depths of wisdom and of humans as those who seek out the boundary lines of wisdom, who push into the unknown in the quest for ever greater participation in wisdom and the life of its divine author.
The poet only knows this after the journey has taken place, by means of the poem itself, and so Job as a whole and this chapter in particular speaks to the irreducibility of poetry. We can speak meaningfully about poetry, and indeed there is a whole set of conceptual terms to speak of it at the level of craft and at the level of meaning. But to speak of it is not to plumb its depths. If there were some simple message to extract, then we would simply extract it and be on our merry way. But poetry endures because the very best poetry is irreducible.
Poetry must be experienced, and the experience of poetry is itself a means of searching, a kind of hunting, for wisdom. Such a quest allows us to share in the activity of God himself. Poetry, that flimsy yet hardy thing, bears witness both to the necessity and the limits of our own searching. Flimsy because, however finely wrought, however fitting, however bewitching, however beautiful, the words are still just words. Hardy because these words are our best words. In Job the poetry heightens the dramatic tension for the book as a whole, and this poem in particular acts as a threshold, a door the book passes through out into the wild open air of divine encounter.
Some have said that the poem’s conclusion at the end of Job 28—“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”—must be an interpolation because it rings false with the force of the poem. Some scribe found the conclusions of the chapter untenable and so inserts the pithy conclusion. If that is the case, then such a scribe acts like one of Job’s comforters, offering a comfortless comfort, being unable to tolerate ambiguity. But what if it isn’t an interpolation at all? If the poem is a means of searching out, and by that searching leads Job and us to a threshold on the other side of which lies divine encounter, then it is not hard to imagine that he is about to relearn even the meaning of fear. Such a transformative education, of course, happens when Job encounters the whirlwind, and from the fury of that storm God’s own poetry will unmake and then remake him.
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