Can you put a rope in his nose? or pierce his jaw through with a hook?
All Commentaries on Job 41:2 Go To Job 41
Gregory The Dialogist
AD 604
“Can you put a ring in its nose?” As stratagems are signified by “nostrils,” so by a “ring” is designated the omnipotence of divine power. For when it keeps us from being seized by temptations, it encircles around and holds firm in wondrous ways the snares of the ancient enemy. A ring is therefore put into its nostrils when by the strength of heavenly protection drawn around us, its cunning is restrained so as not to prevail against the weakness of humanity, as far as it secretly searches out its fatal arguments.… “Or can you pierce its jaw with a bracelet?” … The Lord therefore bores through the jaw of this Leviathan with a bracelet, because by the ineffable power of his mercy he so thwarts the malice of the ancient enemy that he sometimes loses even those whom it has seized, and they, as it were, fall from its mouth, who, after the commission of sin, return to innocence. Who, once seized by its mouth, would escape his jaw, if it were not bored through? Did it not seize Peter in his mouth when he denied? Did it not seize David in its mouth when he plunged himself into such a gulf of lust? But when they returned, each of them through penitence to life, this Leviathan let them escape, as it were, through the holes of his jaws. Those therefore are withdrawn from its mouth through the hole of its jaw who after the perpetration of such great wickedness have come back with penitence.
