She is hardened against her young ones, as though they were not hers: her labor is in vain without concern;
All Commentaries on Job 39:16 Go To Job 39
Gregory The Dialogist
AD 604
39. It despises, as though they were not its own, those whom it discovers to be living otherwise than it has itself taught, and, as its cruelty becomes obdurate, it applies terrors, and exercises itself in torturing them, and, inflamed by the firebrands of envy, it labours that they should perish, for whom it laboured not that they should live. And, when it persecutes the members of the Lord, it suspects that by this it is pleasing God. Whence also the Truth says to the same eggs of the ostrich, The hour cometh, that whosoever killeth you, thinketh that he doeth God service. [John 16, 2] Because, therefore, when the synagogue is led by cruelty to persecution, it thinks that it is acting thus by the impulse of divine fear, it is rightly subjoined;
She hath laboured in vain, no fear compelling her.
40. For not fear, but cruelty, has compelled it to pant in the labour of persecution. But because vices, when tinged with the colour of virtues, are commonly the more abominable, the less they are known even to be vices; the synagogue was more harsh in persecution, as it believed that it was becoming more religious by the deaths of the faithful. And therefore it could not at all discern what it was doing, because it shut out from itself the light of understanding, by putting pride in the way.
