Bible Strands
Job 38:5
Who fixed its measurements? Surely you know! Or who stretched a measuring line across it?
Berean Standard Bible
Follow its threads on the canvas →
Study note
Setting — God addresses Job during a direct confrontation about the earth's creation. The speaker questions Job's presence and understanding at the moment the world was established.
The words — The Hebrew מִי־ (mi-) asks "who?" and שָׂ֣ם (sam) means "did he appoint," while נָטָ֖ה (na.Tah) translates to "did he stretch out." These terms frame the rhetorical interrogation regarding the establishment and surveying of the earth.
The thread — The measuring motif recurs in Isaiah 40:12, where God marks off the heavens with a span, and Zechariah 2:1, where a figure holds a measuring line. The structural language of foundations and cornerstones continues directly into Job 38:6.
Why it lands — The text states that no human witnessed or directed the architectural precision of the earth's creation. It requires the reader to acknowledge the limits of human knowledge regarding divine ordering.
Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.
The Hebrew words
King James Version
Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?
Cross-references
- Isaiah 40:12 Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, or marked off the heavens with the span of his hand? Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket, or weighed the mountains on a scale and the hills with a balance?
- Job 11:9 Their measure is longer than the earth and wider than the sea.
- Zechariah 2:1 Then I lifted up my eyes and saw a man with a measuring line in his hand.
- Job 28:25 When God fixed the weight of the wind and measured out the waters,
- Psalms 19:4 their voice has gone out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens He has pitched a tent for the sun.
- Psalms 78:55 He drove out nations before them and apportioned their inheritance; He settled the tribes of Israel in their tents.
- Proverbs 8:27 I was there when He established the heavens, when He inscribed a circle on the face of the deep,
- Isaiah 34:11 The desert owl and screech owl will possess it, and the great owl and raven will dwell in it. The LORD will stretch out over Edom a measuring line of chaos and a plumb line of destruction.
- Isaiah 40:22 He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth; its dwellers are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.
- 2 Corinthians 10:16 so that we can preach the gospel in the regions beyond you. Then we will not be boasting in the work already done in another man’s territory.