What is the meaning of Job 15:7? Were you the first man ever born? • Eliphaz opens with this rhetorical jab (Job 15:7a) to remind Job that he is not Adam, “the man formed from the dust” (Genesis 2:7). • Because Job arrived centuries after creation, he cannot claim firsthand knowledge of God’s counsels as Eliphaz implies in Job 15:8–9; compare God’s later question, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4). • Scripture consistently connects wisdom with age and experience rather than novelty (Job 12:12; Proverbs 16:31). Job’s friends argue that since Job is neither the first man nor the oldest, his assertions must be less reliable than traditional understanding. • The point: human perspective is limited; only the Creator has absolute insight (Isaiah 40:13–14; Romans 11:34). Were you brought forth before the hills? • Eliphaz presses further (Job 15:7b), contrasting Job’s birth with the primordial “hills,” a poetic shorthand for creation’s earliest features (Psalm 90:2). • By invoking terrain older than humanity, he underscores God’s eternal nature versus man’s temporal nature; see Proverbs 8:25, where wisdom says, “Before the hills, I was brought forth.” • The logic: if Job did not exist before the mountains, he cannot lecture God on justice or suffering; his understanding is bound by time and space (Ecclesiastes 3:11). • Eliphaz hopes to humble Job, steering him toward submission rather than debate (Job 5:8; James 4:10). summary Job 15:7 uses two vivid questions to humble Job: he was neither the original man nor older than the hills. Eliphaz argues that, because Job lacks primeval existence, he should defer to God’s timeless wisdom and the accumulated counsel of the faithful. The verse reminds us that our insight is finite, while God’s perspective is eternal and wholly trustworthy. |
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