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Job

About this book
Chapter 26

1 Then Job replied: 2 “How you have helped the powerless! How you have saved the person who has no strength! 3 How you have advised the one without wisdom, and abundantly revealed your insight! 4 To whom did you utter these words? And whose spirit has come forth from your mouth? 5 “The dead tremble—those beneath the waters and all that live in them.⁠ 6 The underworld is naked before God; the place of destruction lies uncovered. 7 He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth on nothing. 8 He locks the waters in his clouds, and the clouds do not burst with the weight of them. 9 He conceals the face of the full moon, shrouding it with his clouds. 10 He marks out the horizon on the surface of the waters as a boundary between light and darkness. 11 The pillars of the heavens tremble⁠ and are amazed at his rebuke.⁠ 12 By his power he stills the sea; by his wisdom he cut Rahab the great sea monster to pieces.⁠ 13 By his breath the skies became fair; his hand pierced the fleeing serpent. 14 Indeed, these are but the outer fringes of his ways! How faint is the whisper we hear of him! But who can understand the thunder of his power?”

Texts in conversation

Compare Job 26:11 and 1 Enoch 57:2

Hebrew Bible · Pseudepigrapha, Apocalypses

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Summary

In Job, the pillars of heaven tremble at God’s rebuke, a sign of his appearing. 1 Enoch echoes that cosmic shaking but now describes it as the sound of the returning exiles’ chariots instead.

Passages

Job 26:11

Hebrew Bible
10 He marks out the horizon on the surface of the waters as a boundary between light and darkness. 11 The pillars of the heavens tremble and are amazed at his rebuke. 12 By his power he stills the sea; by his wisdom he cut Rahab the great sea monster to pieces.
500–401 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Job

1 Enoch 57:2

Pseudepigrapha, Apocalypses
1 And it happened after that, I saw another group of chariots, with men riding them, arriving on the winds from the east, the west, and the south. 2 The sound of their chariots was heard, and when this disturbance occurred, the holy ones from heaven took notice, and the foundations of the earth shifted from their places, and the noise was heard from one end of the sky to the other, all in one day. 3 And everyone will fall down and worship the Lord of Spirits. And this marks the end of the second Parable.
300 BCE – 100 CE (scholarly estimate) Read in 1 Enoch

References

... The second pair adds a mythic dimension. The rumbling of the chariots is so immense that it shakes the very pillars of the earth. This imagery of an earthquake is normally reserved for the consequences of the theophany and the eschatological cataclysm (Job 26:11; Isaiah 24:19-20; Joel 3:16; Haggai 2:6-7; 1 Enoch 1:5-7), and we may suppose that what the holy ones in heaven hear is the whole ruckus on earth. As noted above, verse 2e reprises the elements in verses 1b-2a. The noise that begins in the East and the West is heard in the corresponding parts of heaven. ...
George W. E. Nickelsburg, A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch Chapters 37-82 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 215.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

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Job 26:11 and 1 Enoch 57:2

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