Job 15:19 - Exposition

Unto whom alone the earth was given . The reference is clearly to a very remote time, when men were comparatively few, and lived in quiet possession of their own lands, undisturbed by invasions, wars, or struggles for territory. Professor Lee thinks that the times immediately after, and even those before, the Flood are glanced at; while Schultens regards Eliphaz as alluding to the first settlements of the Joktanidae in Arabia. In either case, the passage tells in favour or, and not against, the antiquity of the Book of Job, since it marks the composer as "living at a time when the memory of an age of patriarchal simplicity was yet fresh in men's minds" (Canon Cook). And no stranger passed among them . Races were not mixed up one with another, and so the purity of primitive doctrine remained undisturbed.