The princes refrained from talking, and laid their hand on their mouth.
All Commentaries on Job 29:9 Go To Job 29
Gregory The Dialogist
AD 604
Thus now “the young men see holy church and hide themselves, and the old men rise up and stand,” because the youth fear its mighty righteousness, and the elderly magnify it. Those empty of mind flee. The serious and perfect do homage to [the church] by rising up in response to the merits of its life. By this discipline the mature come to love and the immature to judgment. And so “the young men see her and hide themselves,” because they are afraid to be detected in their hidden courses of conduct. But “the elders rise up and stand,” because all the perfect ones make it appear by humility how they have gained ground in good practice. But because he describes all this of his own people, let him further describe how he is feared by foreign people.… Who else in this place can be understood as [foreign] nobles or princes but those who promote wayward teaching? About them it is said by the psalmist, “Strife was poured out upon their princes, and they led them aside in the pathless place and not in the way.” For these identical persons, while they are not afraid to interpret the dispensation of God in a wrong sense, assuredly draw the common herds subject to them not into that way that is “Christ” but into “a pathless place,” over whom “strife is also rightly said to be poured out,” because by their statements they mutually contradict themselves.
