Catholic Commentary
The Hawk and Eagle: Divine Wisdom Inscribed in the Birds of Prey
26“Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars, and stretches her wings toward the south?27Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up, and makes his nest on high?28On the cliff he dwells and makes his home, on the point of the cliff and the stronghold.29From there he spies out the prey. His eyes see it afar off.30His young ones also suck up blood. Where the slain are, there he is.”
Job 39:26–30 presents God questioning Job's competence to govern creation by asking whether Job taught hawks to soar or eagles to climb to inaccessible cliffs and hunt prey with superhuman vision. God argues that the created order, including predation and death woven into the eagle's design, operates by a logic transcending human moral categories, implicitly challenging Job's assumption that he can judge divine justice.
God silences Job not with explanations but with the hawk's soar and the eagle's kill—creatures that operate by a logic larger than human moral categories.
Commentary
Job 39:26 — "Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars?" The rhetorical question is the structural key to the entire divine speech (chs. 38–41): God does not answer Job's suffering directly but interrogates Job's competence as a co-architect of reality. The Hebrew netz (hawk) refers likely to a migratory bird of prey — perhaps the Eurasian sparrowhawk or honey buzzard — whose annual southward migration was well observed in the ancient Near East. The verb ya'aveh (soars, or spreads its wings) carries a sense of effortless, instinct-driven ascent. Job did not engineer the hawk's hollow bones, the ratio of wingspan to body weight, or the magnetic sensitivity that guides its migration across continents. The question presses: if you did not design this, by what authority do you presume to instruct your Maker?
Job 39:27 — "Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up?" The Hebrew nesher (eagle) is almost certainly the griffon vulture or golden eagle — among the most majestic fliers in the Levantine sky, capable of riding thermals to altitudes exceeding 10,000 feet. "Mounts up" (yigbah) suggests active, powerful ascent, in contrast to the hawk's glide. The phrase "at your command" (al-pikhah, literally "at your mouth") is a precise legal term — the same language used for royal decrees. The irony cuts deep: Job has been demanding an audience to speak his case before God (cf. 13:3, 23:4), asserting his moral authority. God replies by asking whether Job's word commands even a single eagle.
Job 39:28 — "On the cliff he dwells and makes his home" The scene shifts from flight to habitation. The eagle's inaccessible aerie — built on sheer rock faces and mountain ledges — is beyond human reach or disruption. The word sela (cliff, crag) is used elsewhere in the Psalms as a metaphor for God himself as refuge (Ps 18:2). The eagle's home is in the domain that belongs to God alone: the high, remote, vertiginous places. This is not merely zoological description; it is a theology of divine hiddenness. God dwells where human hands cannot reach.
Job 39:29 — "From there he spies out the prey" Eagles possess eyesight estimated at four to eight times more powerful than human vision, capable of spotting a rabbit from nearly two miles away. The Hebrew yashur (spies, gazes intently) is used of watchful, penetrating perception. This verse introduces a moral tension that anticipates the next: the eagle's gaze is beautiful and terrible at once. It is a gaze from above, comprehensive and unerring — a creaturely analogue to divine providence, which sees all from its own inaccessible height.
Job 39:30 — "His young ones also suck up blood; and where the slain are, there is he." This closing verse is the most viscerally disturbing and theologically dense. The eaglets feeding on blood, and the adult drawn to the battlefield or carcass, are not moral failures — they are the design. The same God who set the Pleiades (38:31) and sent rain on the desert (38:26) built a creature whose young are weaned on blood. This is the hinge-point of God's argument: the created order operates by a logic larger and more complex than Job's moral categories. Suffering, predation, and death are woven into the fabric of a cosmos that is nonetheless declared good by its Maker. Notably, Jesus himself alludes to this verse (Matt 24:28 / Luke 17:37), anchoring it eschatologically: where the body is, there the eagles gather — a sign that the end does not escape divine attention.
Catholic Commentary
Catholic tradition reads the divine speeches in Job not as cruelty toward a suffering man but as an act of merciful revelation — what the Catechism calls the "pedagogy of God" (CCC 53), by which the Lord condescends to educate humanity through created things. The hawk and eagle are instruments of this pedagogy.
St. Gregory the Great, in his monumental Moralia in Job (Bk. 31), interprets the eagle's soaring as a figure of the contemplative soul lifted by grace above earthly concerns: the eagle is one "who, despising all earthly things, seeks only the heights." Gregory sees in the eagle's piercing gaze from the cliff a type of the contemplative's penetrating insight into truth — vision that comes not from human striving but from being placed on the rock (Christ) by God's own hand.
St. Thomas Aquinas, following the literal sense with characteristic precision (Expositio in Job, ch. 39), notes that God's speech establishes a hierarchy: if Job cannot account for the governance of animals, how much less can he adjudicate the governance of human moral history? This reflects the Thomistic principle that natural reason, confronting creation's complexity, is ordered toward humility before divine wisdom (cf. Summa Theologiae I, q.1, a.1).
Pope John Paul II's Fides et Ratio (§19) echoes this structure when it notes that wonder before creation is the beginning of the philosophical and theological journey — not a retreat from reason but its authentic starting point.
The Catechism (CCC 339) teaches that "each creature possesses its own particular goodness and perfection… God wills the interdependence of creatures," including predator and prey. The eagle's blood-drinking young are not a scandal to faith but a participation in a web of creaturely goodness that exceeds any single moral frame.
For Today
Contemporary Catholics often bring to God the same posture Job adopted: a demand for explanation, a list of grievances, a theology constructed around personal moral accounting. When suffering refuses to fit our framework, we mistake the silence of God for absence or injustice. These verses offer a specific corrective: God does not explain the hawk's migration to Job — he shows it. The invitation is not to intellectual surrender but to a radical expansion of attention.
Practically, this passage calls the Catholic reader to a discipline of contemplative attention to the natural world as a site of theological encounter. The Catechism (CCC 341) calls the beauty of creation a reflection of God's own beauty. When we watch a raptor ride a thermal, or observe the ferocity of an eagle's hunt, we are not watching something indifferent to God — we are watching a word God spoke and still sustains.
For those in seasons of unanswered prayer or unresolved suffering, these verses counsel: before demanding that God justify himself within your categories, go stand somewhere you feel small. The hawk does not explain itself. Neither, here, does God — and that is itself a kind of answer.
Cross-References