Job 14:7

7. For Introduces another reason for the plea in Job 14:6.

Tender branch Sprout. The description from Job 14:7-9 is specially applicable to the palm-tree, which is endowed with a wonderful vitality, whence it becomes a figure for youthful vigour. The Greeks gave the same name phoenix (palm-tree) to the wondrous bird which fable represented as rising again from its own ashes. “Even when centuries have at last destroyed the palm,” says Masius, whom Delitzsch quotes, “thousands of inextricable fibres of parasites cling about the stem.” In the country east of the Jordan, the walnut-tree ceases to bear much after one hundred years, and becomes hollow and decayed. It is then cut down to within two or three yards from the ground. If the trees are well watered, new shoots spring up in a year in uncommon luxuriance, and bear fruit the second year. (Wetzstein.) “The Romans,” says Rosenmuller, “made those trees to be the symbol of death which, being cut down, do not live again, and from whose roots no germs arise, such as the pine and cypress.” The revivification of nature, in contrast to the hopeless death of man, has often inspired the muse to elegiac strains, as with the poet Moschus bewailing the death of Bion; also the poets Catullus and Horace, and even the Yajur Veda. See Wordsworth, Good, or Barnes. Compare with Job’s melancholy strains the exquisite, but quite as hopeless, lines of Beattie’s Hermit: “‘Tis night,” etc., and closing with

But when shall spring visit the mouldering urn?

O! when shall it dawn on the night of the grave?