Job 38:1-30

Common English Bible

² Who is this darkening counsel
    with words lacking knowledge?
³ Prepare yourself like a man;
    I will interrogate you, and you will respond to me.

⁴ Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?
    Tell me if you know.
⁵ Who set its measurements? Surely you know.
    Who stretched a measuring tape on it?
⁶ On what were its footings sunk;
    who laid its cornerstone,
⁷     while the morning stars sang in unison
        and all the divine beings shouted?
⁸ Who enclosed the Sea^[a] behind doors
    when it burst forth from the womb,
⁹     when I made the clouds its garment,
        the dense clouds its wrap,
¹⁰     when I imposed^[b] my limit for it,
        put on a bar and doors
¹¹     and said, “You may come this far, no farther;
        here your proud waves stop”?

¹⁶ Have you gone to the sea’s sources,
    walked in the chamber of the deep?
¹⁷ Have death’s gates been revealed to you;
    can you see the gates of deep darkness?
¹⁸ Have you surveyed earth’s expanses?
    Tell me if you know everything about it.
¹⁹ Where’s the road to the place where light dwells;
        darkness, where’s it located?
²⁰     Can you take it to its territory;
        do you know the paths to its house?
²¹ You know, for you were born then;
    you have lived such a long time!^[c]
22 Have you gone to snow’s storehouses,
        seen the storehouses of hail
²³     that I have reserved for a time of distress,
        for a day of battle and war?
²⁴ What is the way to the place where light is divided up;
        the east wind scattered over earth?

²⁵ Who cut a channel for the downpours
        and a way for blasts of thunder
²⁶     to bring water to uninhabited land,
        a desert with no human
²⁷     to saturate dry wasteland
        and make grass sprout?
²⁸ Has the rain a father
    who brought forth drops of dew?
²⁹ From whose belly does ice come;
    who gave birth to heaven’s frost?
³⁰ Water hardens like stone;
    the surface of the deep thickens.