Does gray hair bring wisdom or slower reflexes or both? This is the issue over which airline pilots and the Federal Aviation Administration have been arguing for years. The rule has been that pilots cannot fly jetliners after they turn sixty years old. Pilots claim that eligibility after sixty should be determined on a case by case basis. They cite the time when Captain David Cronin, age fifty-nine, brought a jumbo jet back to a safe landing in Hawaii after a huge hole had opened in its fuselage. He maintained that his decades of experience had given him a wisdom for such a crisis not covered in any manuals. Does wisdom come with age?

Where does wisdom come from? This is the question asked in the twenty-eighth chapter of the book of Job, which is part of the so-called wisdom literature of…