Job 15:8-10

15:8 Do you listen in on God’s secret council? ¹ 

Do you limit ²  wisdom to yourself?

15:9 What do you know that we don’t know?

What do you understand that we don’t understand? ³ 

15:10 The gray-haired ⁴  and the aged are on our side, ⁵ 

men far older than your father. ⁶ 

[15:8]  ¹ tn The meaning of סוֹד (sod) is “confidence.” In the context the implication is “secret counsel” of the Lord God (see Jer 23:18). It is a question of confidence on the part of God, that only wisdom can know (see Prov 8:30,31). Job seemed to them to claim to have access to the mind of God.

[15:8]  ² tn In v. 4 the word meant “limit”; here it has a slightly different sense, namely, “to reserve for oneself.”

[15:9]  ³ tn The last clause simply has “and it is not with us.” It means that one possesses something through knowledge. Note the parallelism of “know” and “with me” in Ps 50:11.

[15:10]  ⁴ tn The participle שָׂב (sav), from שִׂיב (siv, “to have white hair”; 1 Sam 12:2), only occurs elsewhere in the Bible in the Aramaic sections of Ezra. The word יָשִׁישׁ (yashish, “aged”) occurred in 12:12.

[15:10]  ⁵ tn Heb “with us.”

[15:10]  ⁶ tn The line reads: “[men] greater than your father [in] days.” The expression “in days” underscores their age – they were older than Job’s father, and therefore wiser.