Covered with sapphires. These words refer to his body, and describe the purple tunic covering the snowy white skin. Good, Meier, &c. take it to describe the blue veins which were seen through his clear snowy skin, like a sapphire stone through a thin transparent plate of ivory. But this is against the meaning of ‏מְעֻלֶּפֶת‎, which signifies covered, and not inlaid; the external covering, and not the internal seen through the outer cover. Commentators are not agreed whether that which we call the genuine sapphire, a transparent stone of a beautiful sky-blue colour, in hardness and value next to the diamond, is meant by ‏סַפִּיר‎; or the sapphire of the ancients, which, according to Pliny, (Hist. Nat. xxxvii. 39; Theophrast. De Lapid. 231,) is a stone of a pure blue colour, and has frequently pebble spots of a golden yellow hue, which were formerly thought to be really gold, and is evidently our lapis lazuli, lazure-stone. As the latter does neither suit Job xxviii. 6, for the lazure-stone is not very precious; nor Exod. xxviii. 18, since it is too soft to bear engraving, it is more probable that the real sapphire is meant by ‏סַפִּיר‎ in the Scriptures. This stone is often found in collections of ancient gems; see Rosenmüller, Bib. Bot. and Miner.; Kitto, Cyclop. Bib. Lit. s.v. The Syriac, which translates ‏מְעֻלֶּפֶת סַפִּירִים‎ by ܥܰܠ ܡܰܦܚܳܐ ܣܦܻܝܐܳܐ‎, upon the sapphire breathing, must have had another reading. 15. His legs are like pillars of marble, &c. His white legs, standing upon beautiful feet, resemble the purest marble columns based upon golden pedestals. ‏שׁוֹק‎, as Kimchi well explains it, ‏מה שהוא על הרגל חליל ויגיע עד הברכים‎, is that part of the limb from the knee to the foot. That ‏אַדְנֵי פָז‎ refers to his feet (Ibn Ezra, Rashbam, Kleuker, Meier, Hitzig, &c.), and not to his sandals (Good, Williams, &c.), is evident from ver. 11 and 14, where the head and the hands, the visible parts of the body, are described as golden; and it is but natural that the feet, the only remaining exposed parts, should also be described as golden.