Job 14:12

12. Riseth not Among the most ancient and universal beliefs was that of the transmigration of souls. It was man’s natural recoil from annihilation. He preferred to live in any mode, even in the grossest form of the brute, rather than that his being should be extinguished. Job is thought by some to have in view this false belief: he means rather to affirm that at death man ceases forever from this world. There is no root, shoot, bough, or form of being that can spring out of the man when once he is dead.

Till the heavens be no more “That is, never. For things unchangeable and eternal are in Scripture compared in duration to the heavens.” Such is the view of Noyes and the German commentators. The passage really has respect to the restoration of present life in this world. The law that involves man in complete and hopeless destruction shall forever prevail, or, in Job’s language, “till the heavens be no more.” Of the same heavens of which Job speaks the psalmist says, (Psalms 102:26,) “they shall perish;” ( אֶבד the strong Hebrew word for “perish,” used alike of men and animals.) Isaiah (Isaiah 51:6) also says of the heavens, “They shall vanish away like smoke,” נמלחו , literally, “be rubbed to pieces,” resolved into atoms like smoke. Compare Isaiah 65:17; 2 Peter 3:10, etc. So that, many think, this dark passage has in it the germ of hope, or at least, that it falls into the category of unconscious foreshadowings of scripture truth. It is evident there was a very ancient belief that the heavens and earth should be destroyed. Ovid speaks of such a prediction (Met. 50:256), Esse quoque in fatis reminiscitur, etc. It was a common opinion of the Stoics that the whole world would catch fire, ( Minucius Felix, 34:2,) and in its destruction “involve the very elements and the frame of the universe.” Compare Lucretius, lib. 5:97. The ancient Hindu held a similar belief. At the end of the last calpa the whole creation, nay, the host of gods themselves, will be overwhelmed in one common destruction. The sagas of the Scandinavian, and the old Runic mythology, confirm the great antiquity of this dogma, which may have had its origin in Egypt, (see PRITCHARD’S Mythology, pp. 181, 192,) or more probably in some primeval revelation. It does not appear improbable that such a tradition was in the mind of Job. If so, to say that the dead shall not be raised out of their sleep till the heavens be no more is equivalent to saying that when the heavens are no more the dead shall be raised out of their sleep. “And man that has lain down ( in death) shall certainly not rise again till the heavens be dissolved.” Septuagint.