Before a Full Manger: Job's Hungry Ox and the Child Laid in a Manger
Old Testament: Job 6:5
Will the wild ass bray when he hath grass? or will the ox low when he standeth before a full manger?
Old Testament, also: Isaias 1:3
The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib: but Israel hath not known me, and my people hath not understood.
New Testament: Luke 2:7, 12; John 6:51-52
And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him up in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. ... And this shall be a sign unto you. You shall find the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, and laid in a manger. ... I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever; and the bread that I will give, is my flesh, for the life of the world.
The connection
Job answers his friends with a proverb from the farmyard: "Will the wild ass bray when he hath grass? or will the ox low when he standeth before a full manger?" (Job 6:5). A beast cries out only when it is hungry, and Job's cry is the cry of a creature before an empty manger. Isaias names the ox again, and the tame ass at its master's crib: "The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib: but Israel hath not known me" (Isaias 1:3). St Luke uses the word three times at the Nativity. Mary "laid him in a manger", and the angel gives it to the shepherds as the sign: "You shall find the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, and laid in a manger" (Luke 2:7, 12). St Gregory the Great notes in the Catena Aurea that Bethlehem "is by interpretation the house of bread", and the Child laid in the feeding trough grows up to say, "I am the living bread which came down from heaven ... the bread that I will give, is my flesh, for the life of the world" (John 6:51-52). St Gregory reads Job's verse as a prophecy of exactly this. The wild ass is the Gentiles and the ox is Israel under the yoke of the Law, both crying out for the Redeemer; "The 'grass' of the wild ass then, and the ox's 'fodder,' is this very Incarnation of the Mediator", and so "at His birth He filled a manger, Who gave Himself for food to the souls of mortal beings." St Bede says the same in the Catena: "He Who is the bread of Angels is laid down in a manger, that He might feast us, as it were the sacred animals, with the bread of His flesh." The Catechism dwells on the poverty of the stable and on the shepherds who were its first witnesses (CCC 525).
Moral sense
The beast does not cry when it is fed. Our restlessness is hunger, and Job's lowing is the sound of every soul that has not yet found its food. Isaias turns the proverb into a rebuke: the ox and the ass know their master's crib, and God's own people do not. At Bethlehem the inn had no room, and the animals were nearer the Child than the town was. St Cyril of Alexandria says He was laid "in the place of food" so that we might live no longer like beasts, "partaking not of hay, but of the heavenly bread, the life-giving body." The shepherds "came with haste" (Luke 2:16); the same manger is set before us at every altar.
Anagogical sense
Job's full manger is the table of the kingdom. "Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God" (Luke 14:15), and of those who come there it is said, "They shall no more hunger nor thirst", for "the Lamb, which is in the midst of the throne, shall rule them, and shall lead them to the fountains of the waters of life" (Apocalypse 7:16-17). The lowing of the ages ends there. The manger that was empty in Job's day and filled at Bethlehem is never empty again.
The Fathers
St Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job VII.7: "The 'grass' of the wild ass then, and the ox's 'fodder,' is this very Incarnation of the Mediator, by which both the Gentile world and Judaea are together filled to the full." And: "Whence too the Lord, when He was born, is placed in a manger, that it might be signified, that the holy animals, which under the Law had long been found an hungred, are filled with 'the fodder' of His Incarnation. For at His birth He filled a manger, Who gave Himself for food to the souls of mortal beings." St Bede, in the Catena Aurea on Luke 2:7: "He Who is the bread of Angels is laid down in a manger, that He might feast us, as it were the sacred animals, with the bread of His flesh." St Cyril of Alexandria, in the same place: "He is laid in the manger, in the place of food, that we changing the life of beasts, might be brought to the knowledge that befits man, partaking not of hay, but of the heavenly bread, the life-giving body."
Warrant
Patristic because St Gregory the Great reads Job 6:5 itself as the Gentiles and Israel crying out for the Incarnation and the manger of Bethlehem as their answer (Moralia in Job VII.7, which the site's corpora do not hold; checked against the Library of the Fathers translation). St Bede and St Cyril of Alexandria, in the Catena Aurea on Luke 2:7, read the manger as the place of food where the Bread of Angels is laid; they do not cite Job. The New Testament does not cite Job 6:5 or Isaias 1:3 at the Nativity, and the ox and the ass of the Christmas crib are drawn from Isaias 1:3, not from St Luke. Checked in the Greek: phatne, the manger, stands in the Septuagint at Job 6:5 and Isaias 1:3 and at Luke 2:7, 2:12 and 2:16, and the Latin has praesepe at all five. The only other time St Luke uses the word, Christ speaks of loosing "his ox or his ass from the manger" (Luke 13:15). The Septuagint of Job 6:5 differs from the Hebrew and the Vulgate: its wild ass seeks grain and its ox stands at the manger holding food, so the manger is shared but the wording is not. The Bread of Life discourse belongs to the entry on the bread from heaven in the desert and is only named here. St Gregory Nazianzen sets Isaias 1:3 at the manger himself: "worship the manger through which thou, being without sense, wast fed by the Word. Know as Isaiah bids thee, thine Owner, like the ox, and like the ass thy Master's crib" (Oration 38, On the Theophany 17); and St Jerome, telling of St Paula's visit to the cave at Bethlehem, names "the stall where the ox knew his owner and the ass his master's crib" (Letter 108.10).
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 525.
The verses
Job 6:5 · Isaias 1:3 · Luke 2:7 · Luke 2:12 · John 6:51 · John 6:52
