God Has Given No Share In Understanding

God Has Given No Share in Understanding Comparative commentary by Hilary Davies Cite Share Show Bible Passage Job 39 forms the second part of God’s first address to Job. In a shower of striking images, He has already evoked His own creation of the physical world and its elements: earth, sea, sky, sun, rain, snow, and ice. Now the deity turns to the animal world. But this is no farmyard. His is the world of animals in their natural habitats (with one exception). They give birth, live, and feed in ways that are utterly mysterious, even repellent, to humans. The birds are predatory, and designed to be predatory: the hawk soars far into the sky to perceive its quarry; the eagle ‘spies out the prey; his eyes behold it afar off’ (v.29). Their manners are, in the words of the poet Ted Hughes, ‘tearing off heads’ (Hughes 1960). The undomesticated versions of the cow, the goat, and the donkey are anything but docile: they go where they please, ranging free and far for their sustenance, across mountain, steppe, and salt marsh. They have no need of any master to help them conceive, bear or nurture their young: Can you number the months that they fulfil, and do you know the time when they bring forth, when they crouch, bring forth their offspring, and are delivered of their young? (vv.2–3) By choosing these examples, and emphasizing their independence of humanity, God reminds Job, and indeed us, that, for sedentary agricultural communities, wild animals as are much alien, dangerous, and hostile as they are a part of nature. The corollary is this: to have lost sight of our true position in the natural world, God seems to say, is at the origin of human hubris. And Job, however justifiably, has, in some real sense, shown hubris by challenging the true Creator of all the life forms described here. The great bull of Lascaux underlines this fact because he comes from a time long, long before the Neolithic farming revolution, thousands of years before the emergence of towns or cities and our gradual distancing from the rawness of the wild. He emerges into consciousness as pure presence; he is an object of wonder and awe who must be met on his own terms by the community who painted him. But those who did so, we know from modern hunter-gatherers, had an intimate knowledge of, and respect for, the animals they depicted. This bull may be dangerous, but he has not yet become alien. At completely the other end of this spectrum, William De Morgan’s ostrich, shrunk to the dimensions of a ceramic tile, nevertheless casts, in the words of another poet, W.B. Yeats, ‘a cold eye, on life, on death’ (Yeats 1996). By this we understand our life, our death: the pyramids in the background will one day be dust. This bird makes a mockery of humankind’s endeavours, even though she has been diminished to the level of a decoration. She may be a silly bird but this is ‘because God has made her forget wisdom, /and given her no share in understanding’ (v.17). This too is in His power, and it is His clear message to Job in the whole of this passage: you are no more privileged in this regard than the ostrich. Elisabeth Frink’s lithograph offers us another telling commentary on God’s rebuke to Job. The horse fills the centre of the composition, just as the warhorse fills our imagination when we read the description in the Hebrew Bible; he paws the ground, rearing up over the spectator. But there is something more: a shadowy, naked, stirrupless leg hangs down the horse’s flank. As our eye follows it upwards, we realise that this man is not only riding bareback, but that he is himself entirely naked: a little tuft of pubic hair points towards the horse’s withers. Yet the line of the man’s belly could also form the back of another rider pressed against the horse’s neck, hinting at the movement of horse and rider as in the multiple frames in early photographs of horses galloping; a technique of illusion already perfected 30,000 years ago by Paleolithic artists in the friezes of aurochs, lions, horses, and woolly rhinoceros in Chauvet cave in the Ardèche. The motif of the naked man and horse is of course a well-known one in Frink’s work, and especially in her bronze sculptures. But here the artist does not so much create a centaur as evoke a ghost, an ephemeral, adventitious outline, an absence rather than a presence. Humans will never really achieve mastery of this magnificent animal, the work seems to say: we will never understand the true nature of nature. The text of Job, and these three artworks, all in their different ways testify to the minuteness of humanity within creation, and Creation: we are as specks in the eye of the eagle, as flightless and as foolish as the ostrich, like mere clods of earth under the shattering hooves of the wild ox or battle charger. God’s angry message out of the whirlwind is a brutal lesson in humility. References Chauvet, Jean-Marie, Etienne Brunel Deschamps, and Christian Hillaire. 1995. La Grotte Chauvet (Tours: Editions du Seuil) n.d. ‘William De Morgan (1839–1917)’, De Morgan Collection, available at https://www.demorgan.org.uk/discover/the-de-morgans/william-de-morgan/ [accessed 10/10/2024]. Greenstein, Edward L. 2019. Job, A New Translation (Yale: Yale University Press) Hughes, Ted. 1960. ‘Hawk Roosting’, in Lupercal (London: Faber & Faber) Leroi-Gourhan, André. 1984. ‘La Grotte de Lascaux’, in L’Art des Cavernes, Atlas des Grottes Ornées Paléolithiques Françaises, ed. by M-T. Baudry (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale), pp. 180–200 Yeats, W.B. 1996. ‘Under Ben Bulben’, in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Simon and Schuster)