Where, O Edom, is thy wisdom?
An exegesis of Job 28, interpreted through the lens of technology
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“Concerning Edom. Thus says the Lᴏʀᴅ of hosts: Is there no longer wisdom in Teman? Has counsel perished from the prudent? Has their wisdom vanished? —Jeremiah 49:7
South of the ancient Israelite kingdom of Judah, miners and metallurgists toiled amidst a rocky desert valley called the Arabah. Employing the most sophisticated mining techniques of the Iron Age, these workers extracted and refined thousand of tons of copper ore over the course of millennia. Their labor built the wealth of Edom, a kingdom which, despite its people’s kinship with the Israelites,1 has come to be remembered in the Book of Psalms among the destroyers of Jerusalem.2
Although Esau, recorded in Genesis as Edom’s progenitor, might be best remembered for making the questionable decision of selling his birthright for a pot of stew,3 the kingdom of Edom has been credited elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible for its “wisdom” (hence the quote from Jeremiah that opens this essay). Then, we might ask, what did this Edomite wisdom tradition consist of? Was Edom home, perhaps, to a scribal tradition that collected sayings into something like the Book of Proverbs?
There is at least some archeological evidence of Edomite wisdom literature. Victor Sasson has interpreted an inscription found on a piece of broken pottery, dated to the 7th century BCE, as an Edomite poem.4 However, responding to Sasson’s findings, Bradley L. Crowell argued that given Edom’s status as “a small, decentralized polity with a low level of bureaucratic administration,” it was unlikely that Edomite scribes developed the level of literary expertise needed to compose wisdom literature.5
How else, then, might we account for biblical references to the elusive “wisdom” of Edom? What if the wisdom of Edom was not literary in nature, but technological? This argument comes from the archeologists Ernst Axel Knauf and C. J. Lenzen, who argue that in Jeremiah 49:7, the Hebrew word often translated as “wisdom,” ḥokhmah, refers to the technical skills employed in the copper industry. In their reading, Jeremiah 49:7 reflects “the envy of Edom’s northern neighbours [i.e. the Israelites] which was aroused by its prosperous industry.”6 The scale and sophistication of Edomite copper mining is impressive, even by modern standards—the archeologist Andreas Hauptmann, who specializes in the study of ancient mining and metallurgy, reports that some mineshafts were excavated in the Arabah to a depth of seventy meters!7
A piece of literary evidence that connects the themes of mining and Edomite wisdom is found in Job 28, a self-contained interlude that breaks up the book’s overarching narrative of Job’s debate with his three friends. Job 28, which explores the theme of the search for wisdom, opens with a poetic description of copper mining:
Surely there is a mine for silver and a place for gold to be refined. Iron is taken out of the earth, and copper is smelted from ore. Miners put an end to darkness and search out to the farthest bound the ore in gloom and deep darkness. They open shafts in a valley away from human habitation; they are forgotten by travelers; they sway suspended, remote from people. —Job 28:1–4
No place names are mentioned here, but Knauf and Lenzen argue that this passage describes techniques used in Iron Age copper mines in Edom.8 As we just saw, Edomite miners dug extremely deep mineshafts, which would explain the enigmatic phrase “they swing suspended.” You could imagine miners dangling on ropes, being let down slowly into a shaft so deep and so dark that their eyes could not even see the bottom. The poetic description of mining continues for another seven verses, until we arrive at Job 28:12, which raises questions that mark a thematic turn in the chapter:
But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?
At the point when this question is being posed, the Job poet has already supplied an implicit answer, albeit a negative one: Not in Edom. Not in that valley of reckless technological progress, whose greedy eyes seek to possess “every precious thing,” whose visionaries plunder the secrets of creation for profit. No, wisdom is neither found in Edom, nor in the depths of the sea. Even an intruder into Death’s abode would not find wisdom there.9 Wisdom defies the cold grasp of technical skill. Where shall wisdom be found? Only with the One who is altogether other, God Godself:
God understands the way to it, and he knows its place. For he looks to the ends of the earth and sees everything under the heavens. When he gave to the wind its weight and apportioned out the waters by measure, when he made a decree for the rain, and a way for the thunderbolt, then he saw it and declared it; he established it and searched it out. And he said to humankind, “Truly, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.” —Job 28:23–28
Edom’s quest for wealth and technical wisdom was not merely vain; it also devoured human lives. While some specialized metalworkers enjoyed high socioeconomic status in the Edomite smelting camps, the miners themselves would have been of a lower social class, possibly including slaves, corvée laborers, and prisoners.10 Mining conditions in the ancient Mediterranean world so brutal that the Roman authorities gave the name damnatio ad metalla (“condemnation to the mines”) to a form of punishment in which people were sentenced to lifelong slavery in a mine or quarry.11 Do I dare imagine how many forgotten bones litter the bottoms of those mineshafts?
In my first post, “What does AI have to do with theology?” I noted that the Christian canon rarely touches upon the subject of technology. In Job 28, I find an exception that proves the rule. When I think about Silicon Valley’s reckless push to develop artificial general intelligence, motivated by techno-utopian visions, I see the same materialistic excess and technical hubris that earned Edom a place in the Hebrew Bible among the enemies of God’s chosen people. In what strikes me as a dark echo of biblical history, growing copper demand has led to human rights abuses like forced evictions and sexual assaults in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In a vicious cycle, AI tools are being used to detect the very copper needed to build AI data centers.
The ambitions of some techno-utopians are staggering. AI theorist Nick Bostrom claims that a sufficiently advanced technological civilization could colonize an accessible portion of the universe (the “cosmic endowment”) sufficient for 10⁴³ human lives to be lived out in the real world, or for 10⁵⁸ virtual human lives to be emulated. His metaphor for this scenario is so bizarre that you have to read it for yourself:
If we represent all the happiness experienced during one entire such life with a single teardrop of joy, then the happiness of these souls could fill and refill the Earth’s oceans every second, and keep doing so for a hundred billion billion millennia. It is really important that we make these truly are tears of joy.12
Words that can only come from someone who does not believe in a God who will wipe away every tear!13 But let’s suppose for a moment that Bostrom is right, and that a posthuman civilization really can saturate the cosmos with its simulated egos. What about all of the humans who have been abused and exploited along the way? Will the technocrats be justified in overlooking their suffering in order to achieve utopia? Do they suppose that God’s judgment will be swallowed up in the void between stars?
I do not suppose so, for as the Psalmist wrote,
Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. —Psalm 139:7–8
And as I confess in the Apostles’ Creed, I believe that Jesus Christ “will come again to judge the living and the dead.” Thus I close with God’s judgment against Edom:
“Though you soar aloft like the eagle, though your nest is set among the stars, from there I will bring you down, says the Lᴏʀᴅ. […] On that day, says the Lᴏʀᴅ, I will destroy the wise out of Edom and understanding out of Mount Esau.” —Obadiah 1:4, 8
Genesis 36 identifies Esau, Jacob’s brother, as Edom’s ancestor. See also Deuteronomy 23:7.
Psalm 137:7.
Genesis 25:29–34.
Victor Sasson, “An Edomite Joban Text. With a Biblical Joban Parallel,” ZAW 117, no. 4 (2006): 601–15, https://doi.org/10.1515/zatw.2006.117.4.601.
Bradley L. Crowell, “A Reevaluation of the Edomite Wisdom Hypothesis,” ZAW 120, no. 3 (2008): 404–16, https://doi.org/10.1515/ZAW.2008.024.
Ernst Axel Knauf and C. J. Lenzen, “Edomite Copper Industry,” in Studies in the History and Archeology of Jordan III, ed. A. Hadidi (Department of Antiquities of Jordan, 1987), 87, https://publication.doa.gov.jo/uploads/publications/17/SHAJ_3-83-88.pdf.
Andreas Hauptmann, “Mining Archaeology and Archaeometallurgy in the Wadi Arabah: The Mining Districts of Faynan and Timna,” in Crossing the Rift, ed. Piotr Bienkowski and Katharina Galor (CBRL, 2006), https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv37c06zv.12.
Knauf and Lenzen, “Edomite Copper Industry,” 87.
Job 28:13–22.
Lidar Sapir-Hen and Erez Ben-Yosef, “The Socioeconomic Status of Iron Age Metalworkers: Animal Economy in the ‘Slaves’ Hill’, Timna, Israel,” Antiquity 88, no. 341 (2014): 775–90, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00050687.
Mark Gustafson, “Condemnation to the Mines in the Later Roman Empire,” The Harvard Theological Review 87, no. 4 (1994): 421–33.
Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford University Press, 2014), 101–3.
Revelation 21:4.