Mountain goat and doe

¹ Do you know when mountain goats give birth; do you observe the birthing of does?

² Can you count the months of pregnancy; do you know when they give birth?

³ They crouch, split open for their young, send forth their offspring.

Wild donkey

⁴ Their young are healthy; they grow up in the open country, leave and never return.

⁵ Who freed the wild donkey, loosed the ropes of the onager

⁶ to whom I gave the desert as home, his dwelling place in the salt flats?

⁷ He laughs at the clamor of the town, doesn’t hear the driver’s shout,

Wild ox

⁸ searches the hills for food and seeks any green sprout.

⁹ Will the wild ox agree to be your slave, or will it spend the night in your crib?

¹⁰ Can you bind it with a rope to a plowed row; will it plow the valley behind you?

¹¹ Will you trust it because its strength is great so that you can leave your work to it?

Ostrich

¹² Can you rely on it to bring back your grain to gather into your threshing floor?

¹³ The ostrich’s wings flap joyously, but her wings and plumage are like a stork.

¹⁴ She leaves her eggs on the earth, lets them warm in the dust,

¹⁵ then forgets that a foot may crush them or a wild animal trample them.

¹⁶ She treats her young harshly as if they were not hers, without worrying that her labor might be in vain;

¹⁷ God didn’t endow her with sense, didn’t give her some good sense.

Horse

¹⁸ When she flaps her wings high, she laughs at horse and rider.

¹⁹ Did you give strength to the horse, clothe his neck with a mane,

²⁰ cause him to leap like a locust, his majestic snorting, a fright?

²¹ He paws in the valley, prances proudly, charges at battle weapons,

²² laughs at fear, unafraid. He doesn’t turn away from the sword;

²³ a quiver of arrows flies by him, flashing spear and dagger.

²⁴ Excitedly, trembling, he swallows the ground; can’t stand still at a trumpet’s blast.

Hawk and eagle

²⁵ At a trumpet’s sound, he says, “Aha!” smells the battle from afar, hears officers’ shouting and the battle cry.

²⁶ Is it due to your understanding that the hawk flies, spreading its wings to the south?

²⁷ Or at your command does the eagle soar, the vulture build a nest on high?

²⁸ They dwell on an outcropping of rock, their fortress on rock’s edge.

²⁹ From there they search for food; their eyes notice it from afar,

³⁰ and their young lap up blood; where carcasses lie, there they are.