Job 15:7 - Exposition

Art thou the first man that was born? That is, "Dost thou claim to have the wisdom of that first human intelligence, which, proceeding direct from God ( Genesis 1:27 ), was without fault or flaw—a perfect intelligence, which judged all things aright?" It is not clear that Eliphaz had ever heard of Adam; but he evidently believed in a "first man," from whom all others were descended, and he attributed to this first man a mind and intellect surpassing those of all other men. His question is, of course, rather a scoff than an inquiry. He knows that Job makes no such foolish pretence; but he throws it in his teeth that, from what he has said, men might suppose he took some such view of himself. Or wast thou made before the hills? This is a taunt of the same kind as the previous one, but intensified. Wisdom is the result of experience. Art thou older than all the rest of us—older than the earth itself, than "the everlasting hills"? There were Greeks who claimed to be ethnically προσέληνοι , "older than the moon," but no inhabitant of earth was ever so foolish as to imagine himself individually more ancient than the earth on which he lived.