Job 39 — Who Set the Wild Donkey Free?

Today’s Passage: Job 39

The LORD is still answering out of the whirlwind, and He does not argue. Instead He walks Job through a gallery of creatures: the mountain goat and the wild donkey and the wild ox, the ostrich, the warhorse, the hawk, and the eagle. Every one of them is untamable, and almost none of them is of any use to man, yet every one is fed and guided and delighted in by God. The question under each verse is the same: who runs this world, you or I?

As you read, hold this: Who set the wild donkey free?

Job 39:1–8 (BSB)

¹ “Do you know when mountain goats give birth? Have you watched the doe bear her fawn? ² Can you count the months they are pregnant? Do you know the time they give birth? ³ They crouch down and bring forth their young; they deliver their newborn. ⁴ Their young ones thrive and grow up in the open field; they leave and do not return. ⁵ Who set the wild donkey free? Who released the swift donkey from the harness? ⁶ I made the wilderness his home and the salt flats his dwelling. ⁷ He scorns the tumult of the city and never hears the shouts of a driver. ⁸ He roams the mountains for pasture, searching for any green thing.

The tour opens where no shepherd watches, on the crags where wild goats give birth alone. Do you know? Have you watched? Can you count? The questions are gentle and relentless. The wild goat’s gestation, its labor, its young growing strong in the open field and then wandering off: all of it unfolds far from human management, and none of it escapes God. There is a tenderness here that is easy to miss, because the God being described is not a distant force. He attends the secret birth of a creature no human eye will ever see, and if He keeps such watch over the unseen labor of a wild doe, He has not lost track of Job.

Then comes the day’s hold: who set the wild donkey (פֶּרֶא) pereʾ, pronounced PEH-reh. Strong's H6501, wild donkey, onager. It is the onager, the untamed ass of the desert. “Who set the wild donkey (pereʾ) free?” Elsewhere the word can sound like an insult, a man without a tether, but here the wildness is no insult at all. God Himself set the creature free and made the salt flats its home, so that what man would call useless, God calls His own. The whole gallery is that one sentence spoken again in other flesh. The goat and the ox, the ostrich and the horse and the eagle: none of them answer to Job, and all of them answer to the Voice from the whirlwind. free? Man straps a work-donkey into a harness, but God set this one loose, gave it the salt flats, and freed it from the shouts of a driver. “I made the wilderness his home,” He says. He is not apologizing for a useless donkey; He is taking credit for it. There is a freedom in God’s world that owes nothing to human utility. Job, who has been trying to systematize God, meets a donkey that answers to no system but its Maker’s pleasure.

Job 39:9–18 (BSB)

⁹ Will the wild ox consent to serve you? Will he stay by your manger at night? ¹⁰ Can you hold him to the furrow with a harness? Will he plow the valleys behind you? ¹¹ Can you rely on his great strength? Will you leave your hard work to him? ¹² Can you trust him to bring in your grain and gather it to your threshing floor? ¹³ The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully, but cannot match the pinions and feathers of the stork. ¹⁴ For she leaves her eggs on the ground and lets them warm in the sand. ¹⁵ She forgets that a foot may crush them, or a wild animal may trample them. ¹⁶ She treats her young harshly, as if not her own, with no concern that her labor was in vain. ¹⁷ For God has deprived her of wisdom; He has not endowed her with understanding. ¹⁸ Yet when she proudly spreads her wings, she laughs at the horse and its rider.

Will the wild ox consent to serve you, stay by your manger at night, plow your valleys behind you? The domesticated ox does all of this, and the wild ox will do none of it. The strength Job would most covet turns out to be the strength he cannot command, and so it is with God. The Almighty’s power is not a tool Job can yoke to his own understanding of justice; it answers to God alone, and that is precisely why it can be trusted.

The ostrich is the strangest exhibit of all. By every human measure she is a fool, leaving her eggs in the sand and showing no concern for her young, for God has not given her the wisdom that man prizes. And yet when she runs she laughs at the horse and its rider. A creature can lack the wisdom we admire and still be exactly what He intended, because the world is not a meritocracy of usefulness. If God can sustain the foolish ostrich, Job need not earn his place by being wise enough to understand his own suffering.

Job 39:19–30 (BSB)

¹⁹ Do you give strength to the horse or adorn his neck with a mane? ²⁰ Do you make him leap like a locust, striking terror with his proud snorting? ²¹ He paws in the valley and rejoices in his strength; he charges into battle. ²² He laughs at fear, frightened of nothing; he does not turn back from the sword. ²³ A quiver rattles at his side, along with a flashing spear and lance. ²⁴ Trembling with excitement, he devours the distance; he cannot stand still when the ram’s horn sounds. ²⁵ At the blast of the horn, he snorts with fervor. He catches the scent of battle from afar, the shouts of captains and the cry of war. ²⁶ Does the hawk take flight by your understanding and spread his wings toward the south? ²⁷ Does the eagle soar at your command and make his nest on high? ²⁸ He dwells on a cliff and lodges there; his stronghold is on a rocky crag. ²⁹ From there he spies out food; his eyes see it from afar. ³⁰ His young ones feast on blood; and where the slain are, there he is.

The warhorse is the most magnificent portrait of them all. Unlike the others, the horse is genuinely useful to man, and yet God’s question strips even that away. Do you give strength to the horse? The terrible glory of the animal, its snorting and its laughter at fear and its hunger for the charge, was bred by no human hand. Man may ride a courage he did not create.

The tour ends in the heights. The hawk migrates by an instinct that man did not teach it, and the eagle nests where no hand can climb and sees its prey from distances no human eye can match. Does he soar at your command? The answer is the same as it was for the donkey and the ox: no. The last image is unsentimental, for the young feast on blood, and where the slain are, there the eagle is. God’s world includes the predator and the carcass; it is wild, even fierce, and still wholly His. The whole gallery has lifted Job’s gaze from the goat on the crag to the eagle in the sky, until the man stands earthbound and small, looking up at a creation he can neither command nor comprehend, governed in every detail by a God who can. That, strangely, is the beginning of comfort. The God too great to fit Job’s understanding is the God great enough to be trusted with what Job cannot understand. He still has not explained the why, but He has shown Job a wilderness that does not revolve around him, and a hand that feeds it.