Catholic Commentary
God's Irresistible Power Over the Physical World
14Behold, he breaks down, and it can’t be built again. He imprisons a man, and there can be no release.15Behold, he withholds the waters, and they dry up. Again, he sends them out, and they overturn the earth.16With him is strength and wisdom. The deceived and the deceiver are his.
Job 12:14–16 describes God's absolute and irreversible sovereign power over human civilization and nature through images of demolition and water control. The passage establishes that divine strength and wisdom are unified and inexhaustible, operating beyond human moral categories or comprehension.
God's strength and wisdom are not a system you can master—they are the demolition of every human certainty you build, and no reconstruction is permitted.
Job 12:14 — "Behold, he breaks down, and it can't be built again."
The word "Behold" (Hebrew hēn) is an arresting particle, demanding the listener's full attention — Job is not musing idly but making a declaration. The verb "breaks down" (yihrōs) is used elsewhere for the demolition of walls, cities, and altars (cf. Ps 89:40; Lam 2:2). The image is architectural: God is portrayed as the divine demolisher of structures that human beings regard as permanent. What He tears down admits of no reconstruction — the passive "it can't be built again" is absolute. This is not mere hyperbole; it reflects the ancient Near Eastern understanding of divine sovereignty over human civilization. Cities rise and fall, dynasties collapse, and no human engineer reverses what God has ordained in the tearing-down. Typologically, this verse gestures toward the irreversibility of divine judgment — most potently the fall of Jerusalem (587 BC) and, in the New Testament, Christ's own prophecy that "not one stone will be left on another" (Matt 24:2). But the verse also carries an implicit note of hope for the attentive reader of Job: what God tears down, He may also raise — a seed of the resurrection motif that will flower in Job 19:25–27.
Job 12:15 — "Behold, he withholds the waters, and they dry up."
Again the emphatic hēn. God's mastery over water here is twofold: He can withhold rain and the springs dry up (drought), or, implied in the second half of the Hebrew parallelism, He can release the waters and they overwhelm the land (flood). Both extremes — famine-drought and catastrophic flood — are under His sovereign command. Water in the ancient Near East was not merely a meteorological phenomenon; it was existential. To withhold water was to hold life itself in the hand. This image connects deeply to the theology of creation in Genesis, where God separates and governs the waters (Gen 1:6–10), and to the Exodus, where the sea parts and then closes. Job's point is subtly devastating to his interlocutors: the same God who "withholds" can also release devastation. His governance of the waters is not reducible to a moral accounting system.
Job 12:16 — "With him is strength and wisdom."
This is the theological keystone of the cluster. The Hebrew pair 'ōz (strength, might) and tûšiyyāh (wisdom, sound judgment, efficacy) appear together again in Job 26:12 and Isaiah 28:29, always in the context of divine governance that surpasses human comprehension. Job is not making an abstract philosophical assertion; he is responding to Zophar's claim that God's wisdom is simply being deployed against Job for hidden sins. Job insists: divine wisdom (tûšiyyāh) is not a code that Zophar has cracked. Strength without wisdom is brute force; wisdom without strength is impotent counsel. In God, these are unified and inexhaustible. The deceived and the deceiver alike fall under His governance — a striking aside in the Hebrew (v.16b) that signals God's sovereignty extends even over moral evil, without God being its author.
The Spiritual Senses
Allegorically, the "breaking down" that cannot be rebuilt points to the definitive nature of God's judgments in salvation history — the Old Covenant giving way to the New (Heb 8:13). Morally, these verses confront the human tendency to construct self-sufficient systems — of piety, of explanation, of control — and remind the soul that God's strength and wisdom will always exceed and outlast our constructions.
Catholic tradition illuminates these verses with particular richness through three converging lenses.
God's Omnipotence and Its Relation to Wisdom (CCC 268–274). The Catechism teaches that God's omnipotence is "universal" and "loving" — never raw force detached from reason and love. Job 12:16's pairing of strength and wisdom anticipates this Catholic insistence that divine power is never arbitrary. St. Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologiae I, q.25, argues that God's omnipotence operates always in accord with His wisdom and goodness — He cannot will what is contradictory to His own rational nature. Job, speaking from the ash-heap, arrives at a theologically precise formulation that scholastic theology would later systematize.
Providence and the Mystery of Suffering (CCC 309–314). The Church teaches that God permits evil and suffering within a providential design that transcends immediate human understanding. Job's assertion that God "breaks down" and "withholds" without human recourse directly confronts the Pelagian impulse — the desire to reduce God's action to a human-manageable system of merit and reward. St. Gregory the Great, in his monumental Moralia in Job, reads Job throughout as a type of Christ — one who suffers not for his own sins but within the mysterious economy of divine wisdom. Gregory notes on this passage that "the elect are sometimes 'broken down' precisely so that they cannot rebuild on their own strength, but must be raised by grace alone."
Apophatic Theology and Divine Transcendence. The via negativa, affirmed in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), holds that God infinitely exceeds all human concepts. Job's imagery — demolition, drought, sovereign governance — reaches toward God through negation of human control. Pseudo-Dionysius and, following him, St. John of the Cross both emphasize that the "breaking down" of our self-constructed spiritual certainties is often God's most merciful act, stripping the soul to receive infused wisdom.
Contemporary Catholic life is saturated with the temptation Job's friends embodied: the belief that faithful practice guarantees predictable outcomes — that prayer, sacraments, and moral effort produce a life that "holds together." When a marriage collapses, a health diagnosis arrives, or a ministry crumbles, the instinct is to search for the broken moral calculus, to find whose fault it is.
Job 12:14–16 offers a bracing corrective. The Catholic who prays these verses is invited to sit with an unsettling truth: God's strength and wisdom are not instruments of our plans — our plans are, at best, instruments of His. St. Thérèse of Lisieux discovered this when tuberculosis "broke down" her active apostolic ambitions; what God withheld in physical vitality, He poured out as the Little Way — a wisdom she could not have constructed for herself.
Practically: when something in your life is being "broken down" and you cannot rebuild it — a relationship, a career, a self-image, a theological certainty — resist the reflex to immediately reconstruct. Sit in the space of withholding. Pray Job 12:16 as an act of faith: With Him is strength and wisdom. Not with me. Not with my plan. With Him.
Commentary