Huh? It says:
Job 28:20-21 Where then does wisdom come from? Where does understanding dwell? It is hidden from the eyes of every living thing, concealed even from the birds in the sky.
The source of wisdom is hidden from every living thing, including the birds.
A question of which version of the Bible you're attending arises, but might be answered some pages ago.
Job 28.20-21
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RSV↱: "Whence then comes wisdom? And where is the place of understanding? It is hid from the eyes of all living, and concealed from the birds of the air."
•
NASB↱: "Where then does wisdom come from? And where is the place of understanding? Thus it is hidden from the eyes of all living and concealed from the birds of the sky."
•
KJV↱: "Whence then cometh wisdom? and where is the place of understanding? Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept close from the fowls of the air."
It is, admittedly, a strange separation to modern and disbelieving eyes, but even after shrugging off the translation you present, the part about chasing down the root
chay ("khah'·ē", חַי)↱ isn't exactly
fun. The root occurs a
lot in the Hebrew texts; the Strong's count is over five hundred. A perusal of Gesenius very quickly and easily suggests contextual themes reinforcing the basic separation or distinction; one can certainly perform their own analysis of the 501 verses according to source document languages, and it's true I'm not about to go write my own Hebrew-Chaldee lexical concordance.
Such as it is, applications of
chay having to do with people tend to involve other aspects than assertion of biological life. As an adjective meaning, "alive", "living", it comes back to, variously, people, God, and something about the relationship between them. There is a context of "lively, vigorous", and chasing this down runs through
chayil (חַיִל)↱, including warlike strength and power, valor, wealth, moral fitness, and the poetry of Joel. A context of "reviving" clearly involves questions of divinity; the Lord speaking unto Abraham and Sarah in Genesis, and Elisha waxing poetic according to the same phrasing in 2 Kings.
There is a reference to animals, having to do with the word "raw", in 1 Samuel 2.15
(KJV)↱, that one should offer raw meat unto the priest for sacrifice, not boiled: "for he will not have sodden flesh of thee, but raw". Gesenius notes Psalm 58.10 for a version of "fresh" having to do with plants, but it is actually in
58.9 (KJV)↱, and if we chase that down
(châzâh, חָזָה)↱ we hit on colloquialism in two ancient languages, and a poetic context in Hebrew, including Ps. 58.9, and a comparison to a German word, asserted to be "dauen", which makes precisely no sense except that it does, because there is something I'm missing about Ps.58.9-10,
châzâh, and
chârôwn (חָרוֹן), and it simply cannot be that Gesenius has somehow transposed verses 9 and 10 without anyone noticing until now°. More to our purpose, the mess can serve as part of the point: How far down the rabbit hole should we run? There is, after all, springing and running water in Genesis 26 and Leviticus 14.
And, having run through
chay as an adjective, we now come to the second part of the Gesenius entry, listing substantive considerations, which in turn reflect many of the issues covered above: "life" as individual welfare in salutation, swearing an oath on the life of someone, as well as a plural form resulting in contexts regarding "breath of life" and the "tree of life", including notions of "long duration" and "immortality"; "refreshment" having to do with divinity, and also compared to salvation as expressed by Jesus (
sōtēria, σωτηρία), in Luke 19.9 (
KJV↱). Gesenius lists Psalm 34.13, but it looks to be verse 12 (
KJV↱), involving life as "happiness". Last on the list is, "the way of welfare", which is life as moral propriety.
Your analysis, "The source of wisdom is hidden from every living thing, including the birds", errs by presuming the word "including". The translation you present does not, on its face, preclude your interpretation, but the textual record does. There is nothing about Job 28.20 requiring that inclusion. The first part of the Hebrew runs,
`alam `ayin chay (עָלַם). 'Alam (עָלַם) is the reference to the hidden, but also invokes also refers to blindness as a behavioral construct, and people who dissemble. 'Ayin (עַיִן) pertains, in its way, to the eyes. Chay (חַי), as we are now familiar, refers to life, or the living. Thus,
hidden from the eyes of the living. Everything about that has to do with people, behavior, and God. The second half,
cathar 'owph shamayim, does not rely on
'alam. Strong's defines cathar (סָתַר) as an act of hiding either literal or figurative, including "keep close", as KJV translates, and "be absent"; thus, God "keeps close"
from the birds, or is "is absent" from the birds. 'Owph pertains to wing, and thus flight, and is used mostly as fowl and bird. Shamayim is just a strange root referring to being "lofty", generally applied to Heaven, sometimes to air, and once, apparently, combined with another root having to do with cutting and dividing, astrologers. In any case, the hidden quality of the source of wisdom is reiterated for the birds; there is no explicit or even implied inclusion about the phrasing, as the word "and" in the KJV rendering is a syntactical convention of the English language, and could just as easily be replaced with a comma.
The strongest argument for your reading of inclusion is that you need it in order to maintain your imposition of definitions; it is easier to criticize one's own straw man, sometimes, than actually find the correct answer.
Reading the back and forth, what emerges is an all too familiar pattern in which, between the evangelist who thinks he's smarter than the atheists, and the atheists who think they're smarter than the evangelist, none sound like they have a sufficient clue what they're on about to avoid missing the point while explicitly disputing the two creation stories in Genesis.
So let's start at
#9↑. And while it's true "mankind could not have come from two solitary humans", that statement has nothing to do with anything. Jan asks (
#11↑) an obvious question, and Billvon responds with smarmy confidence in
#12↑ and reiterated in
#16↑; we should note he is, quite technically, wrong.
Hint: That Jan is incorrect does not mean anyone else is necessarily correct.
Clue: Her name is Lilith. It's messy; Jan need not inject the Quran as he did in
#25↑, but he is in
#30↑, saying, "That's not what [Genesis 3.20] says", more correct than Billvon; we come back to
chay, in fact, which would separate Eve's descendants from those of Lilith, and that theme is reflected throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, and shows through in the Christian Scriptures°°.
But we're also up to your citation of Gen. 3.20. Jan is correct in
#32↑, but largely by accident; if he could
explain the correct answer, he would have.
Please recognize: In the question of who said what in the Bible and what that all means, the opposition without a clue have the least credibility. That's how you miss at
#33↑, by imposing terms on the discussion that are your own, and also, on this occasion, fallacious; "It clearly does say" "the mother of all humanity" only by your own definition of "living", which is not supported by the literary record available to us, and contradicts the living reflections of that history we still witness today.
It's one thing to this, that, and the other about God, or religion, or whatever, but the enlightened are supposed to have a clue.
At this point, it's like watching a bunch of religious people argue with one another. It seems more about opposition than actually having a point. Still, even if another is relying on bad information, just making it up as you go is even worse.
____________________
Notes:
° There are translation questions; Gesenius might have been using a German-language Bible, possibly the Luther Bible, and any number of questions might arise about its influence on Tyndale and later English-language Bible translators. The truth of my confusion about this and Psalm 34.12-13 is probably at least as entertaining as enlightening.
°° Consider spiritual life and death, the idea of the Hebrews as Chosen, and the Christian attempt to usurp that covenant. Also, any who have ever joked about Adam and Eve, the rest of humanity, and incest should probably at least familiarize themselves with the idea of Lilith.
Works Cited Notes:
The Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the Bible is linked to the University of Michigan↱; NASB and KJV, as well as commentary from citations from Strong's Concordance, and Gesenius' Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament, to BlueletterBible.org↱.
