The Book of Job is in several ways the most mysterious book of the Hebrew Bible. Formally, as a sustained debate in poetry, it resembles no other text in the canon. Theologically, as a radical challenge to the doctrine of reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked, it dissents from a consensus view of biblical writers—a dissent compounded by its equally radical rejection of the anthropocentric conception of creation that is expressed in biblical texts from Genesis onward. Its astounding poetry eclipses all other biblical poetry, working in the same formal system but in a style that is often distinct both lexically and imagistically from its biblical counterparts. Despite all these anomalous traits, it was quickly embraced by the framers of biblical tradition: extensive fragments of an Aramaic translation found in the caves at Qumran suggest that by the second century B.C.E. the Dead Sea sectarians (and no doubt others) already regarded Job as part of the incipient canon of sacred texts.
As is the case with so many other biblical books, we know nothing about the author of Job—not his class background and certainly not any of his biographical details and not even with any certainty the time when he wrote. Some scholars, perplexed by the many peculiarities of the book, and especially by the linguistic ones, have speculated that it is a translation from Aramaic, or Edomite, or even Arabic. There is virtually no evidence for such ascriptions, and they seem especially untenable in light of the greatness of the Hebrew poetry of Job, rich as it is in strong rhythmic effects, virtuosic wordplay and sound-play—qualities that a translation would be very unlikely to exhibit.
The Book of Job belongs to the international movement of ancient Near Eastern Wisdom literature in its universalist perspective—there are no Israelite characters in the text, though all the speakers are monotheists, and there is no reference to covenantal history or to the nation of Israel—and it is equally linked with Wisdom literature in its investigation of the problem of theodicy. The troubling phenomenon of the suffering of the just is addressed in roughly analogous texts both in Mesopotamia and Egypt, but any direct influence of these on the Job poet is questionable. Scholars have often assumed that there were Wisdom schools in ancient Israel and elsewhere in the region where disciples guided by teachers mastered, and in all likelihood memorized, instructional texts and imbibed the general principles for leading a just and prudent life. It is hard to imagine that the Job poet could have been part of any such institutional setting, given the radical nature of his views. One should probably think of him, then, as a writer working alone—a bold dissenting thinker and a poet of genius who produced a book of such power that Hebrew readers soon came to feel they couldn’t do without it, however vehement its swerve from the views of the biblical majority.
No confident agreement among scholars on the date of the book has been reached. There are still a few stubborn adherents to the view that it was composed early in the First Temple period, although, as I shall explain, the linguistic evidence argues against that notion. The frame-story (chapters 1 and 2, concluded in chapter 42) is in all likelihood a folktale that had been in circulation for centuries, probably through oral transmission. In the original form of the story, with no debate involved, the three companions would not have appeared: instead, Job would have been tested through the wager between God and the Adversary, undergone his sufferings, and in the end would have had his fortunes splendidly restored. A passing mention in Ezekiel 14:14 and 19 of Job, together with Noah and Daniel (not the Daniel of the biblical book), as one of three righteous men saved from disaster, reflects the presence of a Job figure—perhaps featuring in the same plot as that of the frame-story—in earlier folk-tradition. The author of the Book of Job, however, has either reworked an old text or formulated his own text on the basis of oral tradition, using archaizing language. There is an obvious effort in the frame-story to evoke the patriarchal age, though in a foreign land with non-Israelites, but the neat symmetries of formulaic numbers and the use of prose refrains resemble nothing in the Patriarchal narrative in Genesis. The style of the frame-story gives the general impression of early First Commonwealth Hebrew prose, but here and there a trait of Late Biblical Hebrew shows through—for example, the use of the verb qabel in 2:10 for “accept,” a verb that occurs in late texts such as Esther and Chronicles but not in earlier biblical writing. Other late usages, such as a couple of the prepositions that follow verbs there, have been detected by Avi Hurvitz, a historian of biblical Hebrew.
The poetry incorporates a noticeably higher proportion of terms borrowed from the Aramaic than does other biblical poetry. In some cases, even Aramaic grammatical suffixes are used, something that a translator from Aramaic would probably have avoided but that would have come naturally to a writer who was hearing a good deal of Aramaic all around him and probably actively spoke it himself together with Hebrew. (To cite one recurrent example: the Aramaic milin, “words,” which would replace early biblical devarim in later Hebrew, appears thirty-four times in Job out of a total of thirty-eight biblical occurrences, and the Aramaic plural ending -in, instead of the Hebrew -im, is used several times.) All this suggests a historical moment when Aramaic was in the process of beginning to replace Hebrew as the vernacular of the Judahite population. That would place the Job poet in the fifth century or perhaps as early as the later sixth century B.C.E., though it is impossible to be more precise, and one cannot exclude an early fourth-century setting.
The overall structure of the book is fairly clear, but it is somewhat obscured by certain disjunctures between the frame-story and the poem, and by two major interpolations and some gaps in the received text. There is a palpable discrepancy between the simple folktale world of the frame-story and the poetic heart of the book. God’s quick acquiescence in the Adversary’s perverse proposal is hard to justify in terms of any serious monotheistic theology, and when the LORD speaks from the whirlwind at the end, He makes no reference whatever either to the wager with the Adversary or to any celestial meeting of “the sons of God,” a notion of a council of the gods that ultimately goes back to Canaanite mythology. The old folktale, then, about the suffering of the righteous Job is merely a pretext, a narrative excuse, and a pre-text, a way of introducing the text proper, and what happens in it provides little help for thinking through the problem of theodicy. The two major interpolations are the Hymn to Wisdom (chapter 28), a fine poem in its own right but one that expresses a pious view of wisdom as fear of the LORD that could scarcely be that of the Job poet, and the Elihu speeches (chapters 32–37), which could not have been part of the original book both because Elihu is never mentioned in the frame-story, either at the beginning or at the end, and because the bombastic, repetitious, and highly stereotypical poetry he speaks is vastly inferior to anything written by the Job poet.
After the opening two chapters of the frame-story, the core of the book is introduced by Job’s harrowing death-wish poem (chapter 3), to which God will offer a direct rejoinder at the beginning of the speech from the whirlwind (see the commentary on chapter 38). There are then three rounds of debate between Job and his three reprovers, each of the three speaking in turn and he replying to each. The third round of the debate was somehow damaged in scribal transmission. Bildad is given only a truncated speech, and the third contribution of Zophar to the debate seems to have disappeared entirely. In any case, after these three rounds, Job concludes the discussion with a lengthy profession of innocence in which he also recalls his glory days before he was overwhelmed by catastrophe (chapters 27 and 29–31, with his speech interrupted by the Hymn to Wisdom of chapter 28). At this point, in the original text, the LORD would have spoken out from the whirlwind, but a lapse in judgment by an ancient editor postponed that brilliant consummation for six chapters in which the tedious Elihu is allowed to hold forth.
The Book of Job is, of course, a theological argument, but it is a theological argument conducted in poetry, and careful attention to the role that poetry plays in the argument may put what is said in a somewhat different light from the one in which it is generally viewed. The debate between Job and his three adversarial friends and then God’s climactic speech to Job exhibit three purposefully deployed levels of poetry. The bottom level is manifested in the language of reproof of the three companions. In keeping with the conventional moral views that they complacently defend, the poetry they speak abounds in familiar formulations closely analogous to what one encounters in many passages in Psalms and Proverbs. What this means is that much of their poetry verges on cliché. The Job poet, however, is too subtle an artist merely to assign bad verse to them, which would have the effect of setting them up too crudely as straw men in the debate. Thus, there are moments when their poetry catches fire, conveying to us a sense that even the spokesmen for wrongheaded ideas may exercise a certain power of vision. One might also surmise that this writer was too good a poet to be able to resist the temptation of creating for the three companions some lines and even whole passages of fine poetry.
In any case, the stubborn authenticity of Job’s perception of moral reality is firmly manifested in the power of the poetry he speaks, which clearly transcends the poetry of his reprovers. The death-wish poem that initiates his discourse is a brilliantly apt prelude to all that follows. Biblical poetry in general works through a system of intensifications, heightening or focusing or concretizing the utterance of the first verset of a line in the approximate semantic parallelism of the second verset (and in triadic lines, this process of intensification often moves on from the second verset to the third). When Job takes up his complaint in poetry in chapter 3, he exploits this inherent dynamic of biblical verse to burrow progressively deeper into the aching core of his suffering. Anguish has rarely been given more powerful expression. All this begins in the very first line he speaks, a pounding rhythm in the initial verset, yoʾvad yom ʾiwaled bo, “Annul the day that I was born,” followed by the second verset, “and the night that said, ‘A man is conceived.’” In the pattern of intensification evident here, Job, longing for relief from pain through nonexistence, wants to wipe out not just the event of his birth, in the first verset, but going back nine months and moving from day to night, his very conception, evoked in the second verset. The mention of night then triggers a long chain of images of night and darkness, each deepening the effect of the ones that precede it.
It should be said that almost all biblical poetry, because it is formally based in part on semantic parallelism, is driven to search for synonyms. No other biblical poet, however, exhibits the virtuosity in the command of rich synonymity that is displayed by the Job poet. He compounds the primary term hoshekh, “darkness,” with tsalmawet, “death’s shadow,” ʿananah, “cloud-mass,” the unique kimrirey yom, “day-gloom” (or, perhaps, “eclipse”), ʾofel, “murk,” and a series of verbs that indicate a befouling, obscuring, or shutting down of light. The extraordinary breadth of the Job poet’s vocabulary is one of the traits that has led some scholars to imagine a foreign source for the poem, but this is a rather silly inference. There are poets in many literary traditions whose imagination and relation to language lead them to stretch the lexical limits of their medium—one might think of Shakespeare, Mallarmé, and Wallace Stevens—and the writer who fashioned the poetry of Job was clearly such a poet. This is another reason for his being drawn to tap Aramaic, as a resource that enables him to extend the reach of his vocabulary (the just cited kimrirey is the first instance in the poem of an Aramaic root Hebraized in order to enrich the poet’s lexicon).
The English reader should be warned that this dazzling lexical abundance has created problems first for the ancient scribes and then for all who have attempted to translate this book. Scribes in general are uneasy about transcribing words with which they are unfamiliar, and as a result they tend to substitute terms they know or otherwise to introduce some graphic stutter in copying the text. This is at least one principal reason that the text of Job has come down to us at many points quite garbled, making interpretation a matter of guesswork and repeatedly inviting emendation. But when a whole line or sequence of lines of poetry has been completely mangled in transmission, efforts to recover the original formulation through emendation are bound to be highly conjectural. The present translation therefore for the most part limits itself to relatively minor emendations of the received text—changes of single letters, reversals of consonants, alterations of the vowel-points that indicate the vocalization of words—and these changes are undertaken with a somewhat greater measure of confidence when they are warranted by a variant Hebrew manuscript or by one of the ancient translations. Moreover, even when the integrity of the text appears not to have been compromised, the precise meaning of a rare term can remain in doubt, as is the case for kimrirey in Job’s initial poem. In these instances, a struggling translator can rely only on context, common sense, an awareness of analogous forms and usages in biblical Hebrew and sometimes in rabbinic Hebrew, and the background of other Semitic languages, with Aramaic obviously being by far the most relevant.
The other chief resource deployed in the poetry that Job speaks is its extraordinary metaphoric inventiveness. This strength is already observable in the death-wish poem in the exquisite expression of the desire for unending darkness, “let it [the night of Job’s conception] not see the eyelids of dawn” (3:9). In a procedure that is by no means typical for biblical poetry, the Job poet ranges far and wide through unexpected semantic fields for the sources of his similes and metaphors, drawing on weaving, agronomy, labor practices, meteorology, the sundry crafts, the preparation of foods. Here, for example, is a representation of the formation of the embryo from shapeless plasma in the womb: “Why, You poured me out like milk / and like cheese You curdled me” (10:10). The chiastic pattern of this line, a b b’ a’, is one of which this poet is especially fond. The fecundity of metaphor, moreover, is allied with a keenly observant interest in the processes of nature that is also rather unusual for a biblical poet. If Job compares the way his friends have betrayed him to the drying up in summer of a wadi, a desert gulch that may be filled with water during the rainy season (6:15), he then proceeds for five lines to follow the seasonal cycle, the melting of snow and ice, the caravans crossing the desert desperately looking for sources of water. It seems almost as if the vehicle of the metaphor—that is, the natural panorama—interested the poet as much as the sense of betrayal he has Job express through the metaphor.
Still another source of metaphor tapped by the Job poet, beyond quotidian reality and nature, is mythology. The mythological register, too, is invoked in Job’s first poem, when the amplitude of the curse he brings down on the night he was conceived is extended through these words: “Let the day-cursers hex it, / those ready to rouse Leviathan” (3:8). Leviathan, who will be mentioned quite a few times in the course of the poem, sometimes under other names, before he makes his full-scale appearance at the climax of the Voice from the Whirlwind, is the fearsome sea monster of Canaanite mythology (in some versions, he has seven heads) who had to be subdued by the weather god whose realm is the dry land. The day-cursers, we may infer, about whom little is known, are also mythological figures, able to exert a magical power through language—to this Job himself in this opening poem aspires—even over the dreaded beast of the sea, enemy of the ordered realm of creation. The poetry of Job, then, at least in its metaphors, reaches deep into the chaotic sea, up to the stars where celestial beings dwell, and down into the kingdom of death, that shadowy underworld bordered by a Current that can be crossed only in one direction. In this poem where intensification is the key to so much, mythology serves as the ultimate intensifier.
The third—and, ultimately, decisive—level of poetry in the book is manifested when the LORD addresses Job out of the whirlwind. Here, too, the Job poet’s keen interest in nature is evident, but in an altogether spectacular way that, one might say, trumps Job in the game of vision. The poet, having given Job such vividly powerful language for the articulation of his outrage and his anguish, now fashions still greater poetry for God. The wide-ranging panorama of creation in the Voice from the Whirlwind shows a sublimity of expression, a plasticity of description, an ability to evoke the complex and dynamic interplay of beauty and violence in the natural world, and even an originality of metaphoric inventiveness that surpasses all the poetry, great as it is, that Job has spoken. Many readers over the centuries have felt that God’s speech to Job is no real answer to the problem of undeserved suffering, and some have complained that it amounts to a kind of cosmic bullying of puny man by an overpowering deity. One must concede that it is not exactly an answer to the problem because for those who believe that life should not be arbitrary there can be no real answer concerning the good person who loses a child (not to speak of ten children) or the blameless dear one who dies in an accident or is stricken with a terrible wasting disease. But God’s thundering challenge to Job is not bullying. Rather, it rousingly introduces a comprehensive overview of the nature of reality that exposes the limits of Job’s human perspective, anchored as it is in the restricted compass of human knowledge and the inevitable egoism of suffering. The vehicle of that overview is an order of poetry created to match the grandeur—or perhaps the omniscience—of God. The visionary experience that this poetry enables for Job is of a vast creation shot through with unfathomable paradoxes, such as the conjoining of the nurturing instinct with cruelty, where in place of the sufferer’s longing for absolute darkness the morning stars sing together and there is a rhythmic interplay between light and darkness.
Poetry of such virtuosity and power, dependent as it must be on the expressive force of the original words and their ordering, is bound to pale in translation. The English version offered here is an attempt—which, inescapably, can be no more than intermittently successful—to convey something of the concreteness, the rhythmic compactness, the metaphoric richness, and the lexical vividness of the Hebrew. Perhaps one can draw a degree of encouragement from the fact that the greatness of the Book of Job has somehow managed to shine through in a long line of variously imperfect translations. My hope is that the present translation might manage to let that poetic light show in the English at least a little more than it has in earlier renderings.
CHAPTER 1
1A man there was in the land of Uz—Job, his name. And the man was blameless and upright and feared God and shunned evil. 2, And seven sons were born to him, and three daughters. 3And his flocks came to seven thousand sheep and three thousand camels and five hundred yokes of cattle and five hundred she-asses and a great abundance of slaves. And that man was greater than all the Easterners. 4And his sons would go and hold a feast, in each one’s house on his set day, and they would call to their sisters to eat and drink with them. 5And it happened when the days of the feast came round, that Job would send and consecrate them and rise early in the morning and offer up burnt offerings according to the number of them all. For Job thought, Perhaps my sons have offended and cursed God in their hearts. Thus would Job do at all times.
6And one day, the sons of God came to stand in attendance before the LORD, and the Adversary, too, came among them. 7And the LORD said to the Adversary, “From where do you come?” And the Adversary answered the LORD and said, “From roaming the earth and walking about in it.” 8And the LORD said to the Adversary, “Have you paid heed to My servant Job, for there is none like him on earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and shuns evil?” 9And the Adversary answered the LORD and said, “Does Job fear God for nothing? 10Have You not hedged him about and his household and all that he has all around? The work of his hands You have blessed, and his flocks have spread over the land. 11And yet, reach out Your hand, pray, and strike all he has. Will he not curse You to Your face?” 12And the LORD said to the Adversary, “Look, all that he has is in your hands. Only against him do not reach out your hand.” And the Adversary went out from before the LORD’s presence.
13And one day, his sons and his daughters were eating and drinking wine in the house of their brother, the firstborn. 14And a messenger came to Job and said, “The cattle were plowing and the she-asses grazing by them, 15and Sabeans fell upon them and took them, and the lads they struck down by the edge of the sword, and I alone escaped to tell you.” 16This one was still speaking when another came and said, “God’s fire fell from the heavens and burned among the sheep and the lads and consumed them, and I alone escaped to tell you.” 17This one was still speaking when another came and said, “Chaldaeans set out in three bands and pounced upon the camels and took them, and the lads they struck down by the edge of the sword.” 18This one was still speaking when another came and said, “Your sons and your daughters were eating and drinking wine in the house of their brother, the firstborn. 19And, look, a great wind came from beyond the wilderness and struck the four corners of the house, and it fell on the young people, and they died. And I alone escaped to tell you.” 20And Job rose and tore his garment and shaved his head and fell to the earth and bowed down. 21And he said,
“Naked I came out from my mother’s womb,
and naked shall I return there.
The LORD has given and the LORD has taken.
May the LORD’s name be blessed.”
22With all this, Job did not offend, nor did he put blame on God.
CHAPTER 1 NOTES
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1. A man there was in the land of Uz. These initial words signal the fable-like character of the frame-story. The opening formula, “A man there was,” ʾish haya, resembles the first words of Nathan’s parable of the poor man’s ewe in 2 Samuel 12, “Two men there were in a single town,” shney ʾanashim hayu beʿir aḥat. The more classical formula for starting a story in Hebrew narrative is “there was a man,” wayehi ʾish, the order of verb and subject reversed and the converted imperfect form of the verb used.
Uz. Many scholars have located this land in Edom, across the Jordan from the land of Israel. But it is really a never-never land somewhere to the east, as befits the fable and the universalizing thrust of the whole book. In this regard, the fact that ʿuts in Hebrew means “counsel” or “advice” invites one to construe this as the Land of Counsel.
2. seven sons … three daughters. These make a sum of ten, and all the numbers that follow yield multiples of ten. If the story is meant to evoke the pastoral world of the Patriarchs, it is clearly a stylized rendering of that world, as these formulaic numbers suggest and as the studied use of refrainlike repetitions throughout the tale equally suggests.
3. flocks. The Hebrew miqneh, deriving from a root that means “to acquire,” can mean either flocks or possessions. In a pastoral society, possessions would be chiefly flocks, and what follows is, except for the reference to slaves, a catalogue of livestock. The use in verse 10 of the verb “spread” (more literally, “burst forth”) in conjunction with miqneh also argues for the sense of “flocks.”
5. offer up burnt offerings. In the pastoral, prenational, and non-Israelite setting of the story, there is neither temple nor priesthood, and Job, the pious monotheist, performs his own sacrifices.
cursed God. The Hebrew says, euphemistically, “blessed God.” Many think this is a scribal substitution to avoid a blasphemous phrase, though it is also possible that the euphemism was actually used in speech. The same usage occurs in the Adversary’s words in verse 11.
6. the sons of God. This celestial entourage is a literary vestige of the pre-monotheistic notion of a council of the gods and is reflected in several of the canonical psalms (perhaps, most notably, in Psalm 82).
the Adversary. The Hebrew is hasatan, and it invariably uses the definite article because the designation indicates a function, not a proper name. The word satan is a person, thing, or set of circumstances that constitutes an obstacle or frustrates one’s purposes. Only toward the very end of the biblical period would the term begin to drop the definite article and refer to a demonic figure. Marvin Pope imagines hasatan here as a kind of intelligence agent working for God, but the dialogue suggests rather an element of jealousy (when God lavishes praise on Job) and cynical mean-spiritedness.
8. blameless … upright … who fears God and shuns evil. The near verbatim repetition by God of the narrator’s characterization of Job confirms its perfect authority.
11. reach out Your hand, pray, and strike all he has. The Adversary carefully formulates this outrageous request to strip Job of possessions and offspring with the polite particle of entreaty “pray,” naʾ.
12. in your hands. The Hebrew uses the singular and pointedly plays with “reach out Your hand” both before and after this phrase. It is therefore unwise to render the phrase as “in your trust” or “in your power,” as English translators since 1611 have done.
14–18. The tale of disasters, hewing to the general procedure of extensive repetition deployed here, alternates between attacks by marauders (verses 15 and 17) and natural catastrophes (verses 16 and 18). It also follows a common biblical pattern of three plus one—three disasters that destroy Job’s property and a fourth that kills his children.
15. the lads. That is, the servants.
16. God’s fire. This is probably a reference to lightning. “God,” ʾelohim, might be merely an intensifier—that is, “fearsome fire.”
19. the young people. The Hebrew neʿarim is the same word used for “lads” or servants, but here it refers to Job’s sons and daughters and hence a gender-inclusive translation is required.
And I alone escaped to tell you. This thrice-repeated refrain is aptly picked up by Melville in the haunting conclusion of Moby-Dick, when everything on the Pequod is wiped out, only Ishmael surviving.
20. shaved his head. This (like the rending of the garment) is a general sign of mourning, though prohibited in Israel and thus a neat way of reminding the audience that Job is not an Israelite.
21. Naked I came out … / naked shall I return there. Job’s acceptance of his dire fate (which gave rise to the notion of the “patient Job”) is cast as a solemn two-line poem. This first line exhibits a link of narrative development between the two versets: first birth, then death. The reference of “there” has a loose associative logic: the grave is not the womb, but it is part of mother earth from which the first man was made. There is something “existential” in this brief poetic statement: whatever a man acquires in life—even in the children he begets—is supernumerary to the fundamental condition of nakedness in which he enters and leaves life.
May the LORD’s name be blessed. Here Job makes exactly the opposite declaration to the one the Adversary expected: he says “blessed” in its actual meaning, not as an antithetical euphemism.
CHAPTER 2
1And one day, the sons of God came to stand in attendance before the LORD, and the Adversary, too, came among them to stand in attendance before the LORD. 2And the LORD said to the Adversary, “From whence do you come?” And the Adversary answered the LORD and said, “From roaming the earth and walking about in it.” 3And the LORD said to the Adversary, “Have you paid heed to My servant Job, for there is none like him on earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and shuns evil and still clings to his innocence, and you incited Me against him to destroy him for nothing.” 4And the Adversary answered the LORD and said, “Skin for skin! A man will give all he has for his own life. 5Yet, reach out, pray, Your hand and strike his bone and his flesh. Will he not curse You to Your face?” 6And the LORD said to the Adversary, “Here he is in your hands. Only preserve his life.” 7And the Adversary went out from before the LORD’s presence. And he struck Job with a grievous burning rash from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. 8And he took a potsherd to scrape himself with, and he was sitting among the ashes. 9And his wife said to him, “Do you still cling to your innocence? Curse God and die.” 10And he said to her, “You speak as one of the base women would speak. Shall we accept good from God, too, and evil we shall not accept?” With all this, Job did not offend with his lips.
11And Job’s three companions heard of all this harm that had come upon him, and they came, each from his place—Eliphaz the Temanite and Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite, and they agreed to meet to grieve with him and to comfort him. 12And they lifted up their eyes from afar and did not recognize him, and they lifted up their voices and wept, and each tore his garment, and they tossed dust on their heads toward the heavens. 13And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spoke a word to him, for they saw that the pain was very great.
CHAPTER 2 NOTES
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1–3. Still following the stylized folktale narrative procedure of elaborate verbatim repetition, the story now repeats all the language of 1:6–8, with only a couple of insignificant variations: here the Adversary is said “to stand in attendance,” which was merely implied in 1:6; and here God asks him “From whence” (ʾey mizeh) rather than “From where” (meʾayin). The first new material appears in God’s accusatory words to the Adversary at the end of verse 3: “still clings to his innocence, and you incited Me against him to destroy him for nothing.”
4. Skin for skin! In this second dialogue between God and the Adversary, the pace picks up. Instead of offering a detailed account of Job’s circumstances (1:10–11), the Adversary responds brusquely and pithily. Almost all interpreters agree that “Skin for skin” is some sort of proverb, but there is no clear consensus on its meaning. In light of the second half of the verse, which is manifestly an explanation of these three words, and in light of the Adversary’s next line of attack, which is to strike Job with an acutely painful skin disease, a plausible interpretation would be the following: what is most precious to a man is his own physical being; in the end, he is prepared to sacrifice everything, even the “skin” (or lives) of his own dear ones, but hurt him badly in his own flesh and bones, and he will abandon all his principles of integrity.
6. Here he is in your hands. God’s acquiescence in this perverse experiment is a puzzle for ethical monotheism, and perhaps one must say that the origins of the folktale are from a time when there was no real ethical monotheism. In any case, this wager or test is never addressed in the rest of the book.
7. And the Adversary went out … And he struck Job. In keeping with the acceleration of narrative tempo, the Adversary immediately proceeds from his exchange with God to his mischief, with no intervening narrative material as in 1:13–14.
burning rash. The Hebrew sheḥin derives from a root that means “hot” and is the same term used in Exodus for the fifth plague. Attempts at a precise medical diagnosis are pointless: the essential idea is that a burning rash covering the entire body from the soles of the feet to the head would be agonizing (and also disfiguring, as the initial failure of the three friends to recognize Job suggests).
9. Do you still cling to your innocence? Curse God and die. Again, the euphemism of “bless” for “curse” appears. Job’s wife assumes either that cursing God will immediately lead to Job’s death, which might be just as well, or that, given his ghastly state, he will soon die anyway, so that he might as well curse the deity who inflicted these horrors on him. In either case, her use of the repeated phrase “still cling to your innocence” (the Hebrew equally suggests “blamelessness” or “integrity”) is sarcastic: what is the point of your innocence, she says, after all that has happened? In the body of the poem, Job will still cling to his innocence, in the very act of accusing God, as God recognizes at the end of the book.
10. accept. The Hebrew verb qabel is Late Biblical, so this may be a point where the writer’s own period leaked through the archaizing style he adopted for the frame-story. A few others, including the prepositions that follow a couple of the verbs, have been identified by Avi Hurvitz, a historian of biblical Hebrew.
11. Job’s three companions. The precise location of their respective homelands has been debated by scholars, though it is clear that their places of origin reflect a spread of a few hundred miles to the east of the Jordan. One of the companions, Eliphaz, has a name associated with the descendants of Esau, or Edom. Bildad is probably a pagan name (“son of Adad”). In any case, the geographical background suggests that Job, “greater than all the Easterners,” (1:3) was a man who had international connections.
to grieve with him. The literal sense of the Hebrew verb is to nod the head, as a sign of mourning or sympathy.
12. they lifted up their eyes … they lifted up their voices. In the elegant repetition, one act leads to the other, from seeing Job’s disfigurement to an immediate physical response of grief.
tossed dust on their heads toward the heavens. This, like the rending of the garments, is a gesture of mourning. The Septuagint lacks “toward the heavens,” perhaps because the Greek translators considered it superfluous.
13. none spoke a word to him, for they saw that the pain was very great. In the frame-story, the three companions seem deeply sympathetic with Job and respectful of his suffering. This argues for a discrepancy between the frame-story and the poem, where they are accusatory and even contemptuous of him. One might imagine that after the seven days of mourning, they came to the conclusion that he must have been a scoundrel to deserve all this suffering, but that seems forced.
CHAPTER 3
1Afterward, Job opened his mouth and cursed his day. 2And Job spoke up and he said:
3Annul the day that I was born
and the night that said, “A man is conceived.”
4That day, let it be darkness.
Let God above not seek it out,
nor brightness shine upon it.
5Let darkness, death’s shadow, foul it,
let a cloud-mass rest upon it,
let day-gloom dismay it.
6That night, let murk overtake it.
Let it not join in the days of the year,
let it not enter the number of months.
7Oh, let that night be barren,
let it have no song of joy.
8Let the day-cursers hex it,
those ready to rouse Leviathan.
9Let its twilight stars go dark.
Let it hope for day in vain,
and let it not see the eyelids of dawn.
10For it did not shut the belly’s doors
to hide wretchedness from my eyes.
11Why did I not die from the womb,
from the belly come out, breathe my last?
12Why did knees welcome me,
and why breasts, that I should suck?
13For now I would lie and be still,
would sleep and know repose
14with kings and the councillors of earth,
who build ruins for themselves,
15or with princes, possessors of gold,
who fill their houses with silver.
16Or like a buried stillborn I’d be,
like babes who never saw light.
17There the wicked cease their troubling,
and there the weary repose.
18All together the prisoners are tranquil,
they hear not the taskmaster’s voice.
19The small and the great are there,
and the slave is free of his master.
20Why give light to the wretched
and life to the deeply embittered,
21who wait for death in vain,
dig for it more than for treasure,
22who rejoice at the tomb,
are glad when they find the grave?
23—To a man whose way is hidden,
24For before my bread my moaning comes,
and my roar pours out like water.
25For I feared a thing—it befell me,
what I dreaded came upon me.
26I was not quiet, I was not still,
I had no repose, and trouble came.
CHAPTER 3 NOTES
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3. Annul the day that I was born. The Job poet displays a virtuosity that transcends all other biblical poetry. Thus, the very first words of the poem begin with a strong accent for emphasis of feeling and an emphatic alliteration: yoʾvad yom ʾiwaled bo. The initial verb (intransitive in the Hebrew) means to die or to be lost, and therefore “perish,” used by the King James Version and several modern translations, is semantically accurate but in regard to diction is a bit fussy and lacks the directness of the Hebrew. A couple of modern translators have opted for “damn,” but yoʾvad neither is an expletive nor does it imply damnation, which is not a biblical idea. The force of what follows is that Job would like to expunge the day of his birth from the calendar, which is a contextual justification for “annul.” This choice sacrifices the initial stress but does yield an iambic cadence.
and the night that said, “A man is conceived.” Day and night are a formulaic word pair in biblical poetic parallelism. But in a spectacular deployment of the pattern of intensification that generally characterizes the relationship between the first and second verset in a line of biblical poetry, Job asks not only that the day of his birth be expunged but, nine months earlier, the very act of conception that led to the birth. The phrase “the night that said” might also be construed as a third-person singular with unspecified subject standing in for a passive: “the night when it was said.” From this point on, the poet proceeds to work over first the day, then the night, summing up language to expunge each in turn.
5. darkness … / cloud-mass … / day-gloom. In calling up different terms for the blocking out of light, the poet reflects a richness of lexical resources that makes him stand out among biblical poets. The most unusual term here is kimrirey yom, “day-gloom,” probably derived from an Aramaic root that means “darkness,” and perhaps referring to an eclipse, though that is not certain. The oddness of the English rendering here is meant to intimate the strangeness of the word in the Hebrew.
7. let that night be barren, / let it have no song of joy. The line moves in a metonymic slide from the wished-for barrenness of Job’s mother to the night of conception as barren and joyless.
8. the day-cursers … / those ready to rouse Leviathan. As will happen again and again in the poem, the poet switches into a mythological register. Leviathan is the fearsome primordial sea-monster subdued by the god of order in Canaanite mythology. For this reason, some scholars prefer to read “Yamm-cursers” for “day-cursers,” assuming the Hebrew yam instead of yom. In either case, the cursers are mythological or magical agents.
9. Let its twilight stars go dark. In this triadic line, we have a temporal sequence of (a) light fading in the evening, (b) a night of hoping for a daybreak that never comes, (c) a dawn that does not come.
the eyelids of dawn. This exquisite and surprising image—another hallmark of this poet’s originality—simultaneously indicates the first crack of light on the eastern horizon and the movement of the awakening person’s eyes taking in the first light of day. The metaphor will recur late in the poem in the most unanticipated context.
10. the belly’s doors. The Hebrew says “my belly,” an ellipsis for “my mother’s belly.”
wretchedness. This recurrent term in Job, ʿamal, is here put forth as a virtual synonym for “life” or “the world.” Job’s anguish could scarcely be expressed more compactly.
12. knees welcome me. The simplest explanation is a reference to the mother’s knees, parted as the newborn emerges.
14. build ruins for themselves. In this brilliantly compact formulation of the futility of all human endeavor, kings build great edifices for themselves that are destined to turn to ruins. One thinks of Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”
16. buried stillborn. Many render tamun as “hidden,” which is what the word means in earlier biblical Hebrew, but the term in this Late Biblical text, as the context makes clear, has traveled toward the sense of “buried” that it has in rabbinic Hebrew.
stillborn … / babes who never saw light. Here the poem refers directly back to the idea of dying at birth in verse 11.
17. There the wicked. The catalogue of human types (wicked, weary, prisoners, slaves, taskmaster) reveals a vision of life that involves hierarchies of domination and acts of exploitation.
20. Why give light. The Hebrew says, “Why should he give light,” but it is not clearly the case, as many assume, that the pronoun refers to God. As elsewhere, the unspecified third-person singular may function as a passive, and thus the translation keeps the ambiguity of grammatical reference.
deeply embittered. The Hebrew nefesh (“life-breath,” “essential self “) is an intensifier, hence “deeply.”
21. treasure. The Hebrew matmon (“something buried”) derives from the same root as “buried” in verse 16.
22. the tomb. The Masoretic Text reads gil, “joy.” This translation adopts a commonly proposed emendation, gal, literally, “grave mound.” A scribe may have been led into the error by the proximity of a verb of rejoicing.
23. To a man. This phrase appears to refer back to the verb at the beginning of verse 20, “Why give … ?”
hedged him about. In the Adversary’s words in 1:10, this very verb referred to God’s protection of Job. Here, it is pointedly turned around to mean that God has blocked Job on every side.
26. not quiet … not still, / … no repose … trouble came. The poem ends climactically with a string of terms expressing constant perturbation, the very opposite of the condition of peaceful nonexistence for which Job longs.
1And Eliphaz the Temanite spoke out and he said:
2 If speech were tried against you, could you stand it?
Yet who can hold back words?
3 Look, you reproved many,
and slack hands you strengthened.
4The stumbler your words lifted up,
and bended knees you bolstered.
5But now it comes to you and you cannot stand it,
it reaches you and you are dismayed.
6 Is not your reverence your safety,
your hope—your blameless ways?
7 Recall, pray: what innocent man has died,
and where were the upright demolished?
8 As I have seen, those who plow mischief,
those who plant wretchedness, reap it.
9Through Godov’s breath they die,
before his nostrils’ breathing they vanish.
10 The lion’s roar, the maned beast’s sound—
and the young lions’ teeth are smashed.
11The king of beasts dies with no prey,
the whelps of the lion are scattered.
12 And to me came a word in secret,
and my ear caught a tag end of it,
13in musings from nighttime’s visions
when slumber falls upon men.
14Fear called to me, and trembling,
and all my limbs it gripped with fear.
15And a spirit passed over my face,
made the hair on my flesh stand on end.
16 It halted, its look unfamiliar,
an image before my eyes,
stillness, and a sound did I hear:
17 Can a mortal be cleared before God,
can a man be made pure by his Maker?
18 Why, His servants He does not trust,
His agents He charges with blame.
19 All the more so, the clay-house dwellers,
whose foundation is in the dust,
who are crushed more quickly than moths.
20 From morning to eve they are shattered,
unawares they are lost forever.
21Should their life thread be broken within them,
they die, and without any wisdom.
CHAPTER 4 NOTES
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2. If speech were tried against you. Eliphaz’s opening words register an awareness that Job is likely to resist all reproof.
3. Look, you reproved many. The opening rhetorical strategy is to pay Job a kind of back-handed compliment: he was known as a man who gave encouragement to the failing and also did not hesitate to rebuke those guilty of misdeeds. He should, then, be prepared to accept justified reproof himself, but Eliphaz fears this is not the case (“But now it comes to you and you cannot stand it,” verse 5).
6. Is not your reverence your safety. The whole line is cast in an elegant chiasm: reverence (a), safety (b), hope (b’), blameless ways (a’). Job should have nothing to fear from warranted rebuke because his God-fearing life and his integrity have always given him security and hope. If he reaffirms these virtues, in the light of his friends’ reproof, he will still be all right, despite all that has befallen him.
7. Recall. This verb is symptomatic of Eliphaz’s argument. The knowledge that the innocent are never overtaken by disaster is something we have always known, and need only recall. If Job is plunged in a sea of disasters, there must be good reason for it.
8. plow … / plant … reap. This conventional agricultural metaphor marks a strict line of causality in the moral realm: just as the planted seed will grow according to its kind, evil acts will produce a harvest of calamity for their perpetrators.
10. The lion’s roar. The lexical wealth of the Job poet defies translation. There are five different biblical words for lion—ʾaryeh, shaḥal, kefir, layish, and laviʾ—and all five of them are used in verses 10 and 11. The King James Version, in a strategy of desperation, associated different terms with lions of different ages, but no one really knows what the original differentiations were, or if there were any. (This translation, in a gesture to tradition, adopts just one of the 1611 inventions, “young lions” for kefirim.)
the young lions’ teeth are smashed. The force of both lines is that even such fearsomely powerful beasts can be reduced by God to impotence, their whelps scattered with no prey to nurture them.
12. and to me came a word in secret. Eliphaz presents his perception of man’s inevitably flawed stature before God as the revelation of a scary night-vision.
15. a spirit. The Hebrew ruaḥ can also mean “breath” or “wind,” but the context of nocturnal terror surely argues for a spectral apparition.
16. its look unfamiliar. Literally, “I did not recognize its look.”
17. Can a mortal be cleared before God. These are the words of the spirit speaking to Eliphaz.
18. servants … / agents. These are the courtiers of the celestial entourage and the divine messengers, the “angels” of traditional terminology.
19. clay-house dwellers. The clay house, as both ancient and modern commentators have noted, is the human body, a transient habitation with a foundation in dust, as the account of the creation of the first human being in Genesis 2 reminds us.
20. From morning to eve. This is a hyperbolic representation of the brevity of the human life span.
21. their life thread. The Hebrew yeter is a cord that can be either a tent cord (which is how some interpreters understand it here) or a bowstring. One gets the sense of some essential cord within the human body, the breaking of which immediately leads to death. The image strongly conveys the fragility of man’s physical existence, which at any moment can come to an end.
they die, and without any wisdom. Eliphaz, of course, means to impart conventional wisdom to Job. But the greater part of humankind, he proposes, is cut off by sudden death before attaining true wisdom.
1Call out, pray: will any answer you,
and to whom of the angels will you turn?
2For anger kills a fool,
and the simple, envy slays.
3 I have seen a fool striking root—
all at once his abode I saw cursed.
4His children are distant from rescue
and are crushed in the gate—none will save.
5Whose harvest the hungry eat
and from among thorns they take it away,
and the thirsty pant for their wealth.
6 For crime does not spring from the dust,
nor from the soil does wretchedness sprout.
7 But man is to wretchedness born
8 Yet I search for El
and to God I make my case,
9Who does great things without limit
wonders beyond all number,
10Who brings rain down on the earth
and sends water over the fields.
11Who raises the lowly on high—
the downcast are lifted in rescue.
12Thwarts the designs of the cunning,
and their hands do not perform wisely.
13He entraps the wise in their cunning,
and the crooked’s counsel proves hasty.
14 By day they encounter darkness,
as in night they go groping at noon.
15 He rescues the simple from the sword,
and from the hand of the strong, the impoverished,
16and the indigent then has hope,
and wickedness clamps its mouth shut.
17Why, happy the man whom God corrects.
Shaddai’s reproof do not spurn!
18 For He causes pain and binds the wound,
He deals blows but His hands will heal.
19 In six straits He will save you,
and in seven harm will not touch you.
20In famine He redeems you from death,
and in battle from the sword.
21 From the scourge of the tongue you are hidden,
and you shall fear not assault when it comes.
22At assault and starvation you laugh,
and the beast of the earth you fear not.
23With the stones of the field is your pact,
the beasts of the field leagued with you.
24 And you shall know that your tent is peaceful,
probe your home and find nothing amiss.
25And you shall know that your seed is abundant,
your offspring like the grass of the earth.
26You shall come to the grave in vigor,
as grain-shocks mount in their season.
27Look, this we have searched, it is so.
Hear it, and you—you should know.
CHAPTER 5 NOTES
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3. I have seen a fool striking root— / all at once his abode I saw cursed. This line summarizes the moral calculus of mainline Wisdom literature that the three companions bring to bear against Job: the prosperity of the fool or the wrongdoer is illusory and ephemeral. The Hebrew of the second verset says literally, “all at once his abode I cursed,” and this translation understands this as an ellipsis for the speaker’s perception that the house has been suddenly cursed. Others emend the verb to read “is cursed,” eliminating the first-person singular.
4. crushed in the gate. The gates of the town were the place for enacting justice. They were also where a victorious enemy entered.
5. from among thorns. The Hebrew is obscure, and the text looks corrupt here.
6. For crime does not spring from the dust. Moral mischief is perpetrated by conscious human agents; it does not just spring up spontaneously like grass or weeds.
7. But man is to wretchedness born. This pronouncement may have a double edge. Man’s fate is misery; but, given Eliphaz’s moralism, he may also be saying that wretchedness is the predictable consequence of the perversity of human nature.
like sparks flying upward. The Hebrew beney reshef is understood by some to be an explicitly mythological reference because Reshef is the Northwest Semitic god of pestilence and the underworld. However, with the emphasis here on man as a source of trouble, the concrete image of sparks makes better sense: just as a fire sends burning sparks swirling upward, man creates wretchedness all around him.
8. Yet I search for El. Eliphaz is now quick to assert his own piety, in contrast to the general rule of troublemaking humankind that he has just expressed. What follows is a celebratory catalogue of God’s power and providential acts, cast, as we might expect, in rather traditional poetry—in fact, reminiscent of Psalms. The Job poet cannily devises for each of the three companions poetry that has its moments of strength but is often rather conventional, in keeping with their worldview. The startling originality of Job’s poetry stands out in contrast.
14. By day they encounter darkness, / as in night they go groping at noon. This line is another instance of the Job poet’s fondness for chiastic structures: a (“day”), b (“encounter”), c (“darkness”), c’ (“night”), b’ (“go groping”), a’ (“noon”).
15. the simple from the sword. The Masoretic Text appears to say “from the sword from their mouth.” The only way to save this reading would be to drop the second “from” as a dittography, thus yielding “from the sword of their mouth,” which is a possible biblical metaphor. This translation follows Pope, who emends mipihem, “from their mouth,” to petaʾim, “the simple.” Perhaps “mouth” at the end of the next line influenced the copyist to make a mistake here.
18. He causes pain and binds the wound. This whole line is particularly addressed to Job’s present predicament of terrible suffering. Job is encouraged to imagine that his agony is “reproof” from God, Who will heal him when he mends his sinful ways.
19. In six straits He will save you. This celebration of God’s providential care for the just, which continues to the end of verse 26, is again reminiscent of Psalms. Compare, for example, Psalm 91.
21. From the scourge of the tongue. It is also possible to construe this phrase, as many interpreters have done, to mean: “When the tongue [that is, of slander] goes wandering.”
assault. The primary sense of the Hebrew shod is “plunder,” but in the present context, the element of violence implied by the term is salient.
24. find nothing amiss. The verb teḥetaʾ commonly means “to offend” (King James Version, “sin”), but its original sense, derived from archery, is “to miss the mark.” The likely idea here is that when the just man looks into his house, everything is in order.
26. in vigor. The meaning of the Hebrew kelaḥ has long been disputed. The only other time it appears in the Bible is later in Job (30:2), where it is matched in the poetic parallelism with “strength,” and hence the inference about what it means. If that inference is correct, then Eliphaz is saying that the just man remains hale and hearty until his death, which is simply a natural process of coming to an end, like the harvest invoked in the second verset.
27. we have searched. This first-person plural epitomizes Eliphaz’s stance: he speaks with the assurance of collective wisdom.
and you—you should know. The second-person pronoun, generally omitted before a conjugated verb, is emphatic, weʾatah daʿ-lakh, pointing the finger at Job: as for you, you should certainly know this home truth.
1And Job spoke out and he said:
2Could my anguish but be weighed,
and my disaster on the scales be borne,
3they would be heavier now than the sand of the sea.
Thus my words are choked back.
4For Shaddai’s arrows are in me—
The terrors of God beset me.
5Does the wild ass bray over his grass,
the ox bellow over his feed?
6Is tasteless food eaten unsalted,
does the oozing of mallows have savor?
7 My throat refuses to touch them.
They resemble my sickening flesh.
8If only my wish were fulfilled,
and my hope God might grant.
9 If God would deign to crush me,
loose His hand and tear me apart.
10 And this still would be my comfort,
I shrink back in pangs—He spares not.
Yet I withhold not the Holy One’s words.
11What is my strength, that I should hope,
and what my end that I should endure?
12Is my strength the strength of stones,
is my flesh made of bronze?
13Indeed, there is no help within me,
and prudence is driven from me.
14 The blighted man’s friend owes him kindness,
though the fear of Shaddai he forsake.
15 My brothers betrayed like a wadi,
like the channel of brooks that run dry.
16 They are dark from the ice,
snow heaped on them.
17When they warm, they are gone,
in the heat they melt from their place.
18The paths that they go on are winding,
they mount in the void and are lost.
19The caravans of Tema looked out,
the convoys of Sheba awaited.
20Disappointed in what they had trusted,
they reached it and their hopes were dashed.
21For now you are His.
22Did I say, Give for me,
and with your wealth pay a ransom for me,
23and free me from the hands of the foe,
from the oppressors’ hands redeem me?
24Instruct me—as for me, I’ll keep silent,
and let me know where I went wrong.
25How forceful are honest words.
Yet what rebuke is the rebuke by you?
26Do you mean to rebuke with words,
treat the speech of the desperate as wind?
27Even for the orphan you cast lots,
and haggle for your companion.
28And now, deign to turn toward me.
To your face I will surely not lie.
29Relent, pray, let there be no injustice.
Relent. I am yet in the right.
30Is there injustice on my tongue?
Does my palate not taste disasters?
CHAPTER 6 NOTES
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3. are choked back. The unusual verb laʿu appears to derive from loʿa, “gullet.” Others understand it to mean “spewed out.”
4. venom. God, violating the ancient equivalent of a Geneva convention, uses poisoned arrows.
5. the wild ass bray … / the ox bellow. The answer to these rhetorical questions is of course “no”: an animal has no need to make noise when it is given food. This phenomenon of natural eating in the animal realm is then antithetically complemented by the idea in the next line that flavorless food is inedible for humans.
7. My throat refuses to touch them. For Job in his suffering, all food has become nauseating.
They resemble my sickening flesh. The translation is an educated guess. The syntax of the Hebrew is crabbed, and the last word of the line, laḥmi, could mean either “flesh” or “bread.”
9. If God would deign to crush me. The violence of this whole shocking line is probably an expression of the extremity of Job’s suffering: given all he has undergone, he wishes that God would get done with the business and utterly destroy him.
10. I shrink back in pangs—He spares not. The translation reproduces the enigmatic character of the Hebrew. Many interpreters seek to save coherence by construing this as “unsparing pangs,” but the word for “pangs” is feminine, ḥilah (singular in the Hebrew), whereas the verb “spare” is conjugated in the masculine.
Yet I withhold not the Holy One’s words. Most commentators understand this as Job’s words against God, but “words” and “the Holy One” are tied together in the construct state (the Hebrew equivalent of a genitive). Job may be saying that even in his acute anguish he never suppressed the words of God’s ethical injunctions, knowing that he lived by them, whatever God had done to him.
11. endure. The literal sense is “make my life-breath long.” Since elsewhere, shortness of life-breath means impatience, this is probably an antonym, “patience.”
14. The blighted man’s. The Hebrew mas is obscure and hence the translation conjectural, following a proposal by Pope.
15. My brothers betrayed like a wadi. The wadi is a desert ravine. In the rainy season it fills with water and gives the appearance of a flowing stream, but in the summer, when no rain falls in this region, it turns into a dry channel.
16. They are dark from the ice. The Job poet is distinctive among biblical poets in his searching interest in natural phenomena. Having introduced the striking image of the wadi that goes dry in the summer as a representation of betrayal, he goes on with it for the next five lines, keenly attending to different manifestations of the annual cycle. The water in the wadi here—the landscape might be northern Israel bordering on the mountains of Lebanon, or perhaps the high country of Iran—is darkened by the ice on its surface.
17. in the heat they melt. Evidently, the melting of the ice and the heaped-up snow is telescoped with the evaporation of water that follows.
19. Tema … / Sheba. Sheba is in the southwest end of the Arabian peninsula, Tema in the north, and in fact caravans went from one to the other on a trade route. The geography is nicely appropriate for Job as an “Easterner.”
looked out, / … awaited. Apparently, they are looking for a water source in the desert as they travel, so the wadi image is continued.
21. you are His. The Masoretic Text reads “you are no,” which makes no sense as a biblical usage. For loʾ, “no,” this translation reads lo, “to Him” or “His.” The idea, then, would be that Job’s friends have gone over to God’s side.
You see panic and you fear. You see the devastation I have suffered and, afraid that it might befall you as well, you hasten to become advocates for the punitive God.
30. Does my palate not taste disasters? The literal sense of the Hebrew verb is “understand.”
1Does not man have fixed service on earth,
and like a hired worker’s his days?
2Like a slave he pants for shade,
like a hired worker he waits for his pay.
3Thus I was heir to futile moons,
and wretched nights were allotted to me.
4Lying down, I thought, When shall I rise?—
Each evening, I was sated with tossing till dawn.
5My flesh was clothed with worms and earth-clods,
my skin rippled with running sores.
6 My days are swifter than the weaver’s shuttle.
They snap off without any hope.
7Recall that my life is a breath.
Not again will my eyes see good.
8The eye of who sees me will not make me out.
Your eyes are on me—I am gone.
9A cloud vanishes and goes off.
Thus, who goes down to Sheol will not come up.
10He will not return to his home.
His place will not know him again.
11As for me, I will not restrain my mouth.
I would lament with my spirit in straits
I would speak when my being is bitter.
12 Am I Yamm or the Sea Beast,
that You should put a watch upon me?
13When I thought my couch would console me,
that my bed would bear my lament,
14 You panicked me in dreams
and in visions You struck me with terror.
15And my throat would have chosen choking,
my bones—death.
16I am sickened—I won’t live forever.
Let me be, for my days are mere breath.
17 What is man that You make him great
and that You pay heed to him?
18You single him out every morning,
every moment examine him.
19How long till You turn away from me?
You don’t let me go while I swallow my spit.
20What is my offense that I have done to You,
O Watcher of man?
Why did You make me Your target,
21And why do You not pardon my crime
and let my sin pass away?
For soon I shall lie in the dust.
You will seek me, and I shall be gone.
CHAPTER 7 NOTES
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1. fixed service. The more common meaning of the Hebrew tsavaʾ is “army.” By extension, the word also refers to any set term of service.
2. shade, / … pay. These terms are coordinated. The slave or the hired hand works in the hot sun all day, longing for the relief of shade, which he is likely to get only at evening, when he completes his work in the field. At the end of the day’s work, he would also receive his pay.
3. futile moons, / … wretched nights. These words anticipate the account of tormented insomnia in verse 4 and of nightmares in verse 14.
5. flesh … / skin. The language here clearly picks up the affliction with a terrible skin disease from the frame-story in chapter 2.
6. My days are swifter than the weaver’s shuttle. / They snap off without any hope. The shuttle moves back and forth rapidly, and the image illustrates the Job poet’s remarkable resourcefulness in drawing figurative language from unexpected semantic fields, including technology. His virtuosity is also evident in an untranslatable pun: the word for “hope,” tiqwah, also means “thread.” Awareness of the pun dictates the choice of the verb “snap off” in the translation. The brevity of human life and the irreversibility of death are a constant theme in Job’s argument with God. Death as the inexorable end is central in verses 7–10.
12. Am I Yamm or the Sea Beast. Yamm is the sea god of Canaanite mythology. Figured as a sea monster, he is also called Tanin (as in the second name here), Rahab, and Leviathan. In some versions, the monster has several heads. Yamm is subdued by Baal, the weather god, and imprisoned so that he cannot rise up to overwhelm the land. Thus Job, acutely aware of the brevity of his life as mortal man, rhetorically asks the deity whether he is to be thought of as an undying monstrous god to be kept imprisoned under eternal guard. Variations of this potent myth will continue to crop up in the poem.
14. You panicked me in dreams. Job’s troubled restless nights, entirely understandable given all he has suffered, are here attributed to God as still another form of torture. In the ancient Near East, dreams were generally thought to come from the gods.
15. my throat would have chosen choking. Because the multivalent nafshi is bracketed with “choking,” and parallel to “my bones,” its use as a term for throat seems likely here, though it could also mean “my being.”
16. mere breath. Here the term hevel, favored by Qohelet, is used.
17. What is man that You make him great. This whole line looks like a sardonic citation—and reversal—of Psalm 8:5–6: “What is man that You should note him, / and the human creature, that You pay him heed, / and You make him little less than the gods, / with glory and grandeur You crown him?” Instead of the psalmist’s marveling over man’s preeminence in creation, Job goes on to say, bitterly, that since man is such an inconsequential creature, it makes no sense for God to single him out—for such scathing, unblinking scrutiny.
19. while I swallow my spit. This startling phrase is another instance of the powerful physiological concreteness of Job’s poetry.
20. I became a burden to You. The Masoretic Text reads “to myself,” but this is a famous case of a tiqun sofrim, a euphemistic scribal correction. That is, the scribes did not want to write the virtually blasphemous phrase that Job had become a burden to God, so they substituted the first-person pronoun for the second person.
21. For soon I shall lie in the dust. / You will seek me, and I shall be gone. Job invokes the previously expressed idea of the brevity of human life as grounds for asking God to relent from persecuting him: against the background of eternity, Job’s life will be over in but a moment, so why should God persist in making that ephemeral moment such a miserable one?
1And Bildad the Shuhite spoke out and he said,
2How long will you jabber such things?—
the words of your mouth, one huge wind.
3 Would God pervert justice,
would Shaddai pervert what is right?
4If your children offended Him,
He dispatched them because of their crime.
5If you yourself sought out El,
and pleaded to Shaddai,
6if you were honest and pure,
by now He would rouse Himself for you,
and would make your righteous home whole.
7Then your beginning would seem a trifle
and your latter day very grand.
8 For ask, pray, generations of old,
take in what their fathers found out.
9 For we are but yesterday, unknowing,
for our days are a shadow on earth.
10Will they not teach you and say to you,
and from their heart bring out words?
11 Will papyrus sprout with no marsh,
reeds grow grand without water?
12Still in its blossom, not yet plucked,
before any grass it will wither.
13Thus is the end of all who forget God,
and the hope of the tainted is lost.
14Whose faith is mere cobweb,
a spider’s house his trust.
15He leans on his house and it will not stand,
he grasps it and it does not endure.
16 —He is moist in the sun,
and his tendrils push out in his garden.
17 Round a knoll his roots twist,
on a stone house they take hold.
18If his place should uproot him
and deny him—“I never saw you,”
19why, this is his joyous way,
from another soil he will spring.
20Look, God will not spurn the blameless,
nor hold the hand of evildoers.
21He will yet fill your mouth with laughter
and your lips with a shout of joy.
22Your foes will be clothed in disgrace,
and the tent of the wicked gone.
CHAPTER 8 NOTES
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3. Would God pervert justice, / would Shaddai pervert what is right? Bildad’s complacent confidence in the traditional moral calculus is epitomized here not only in the substance of the statement but in the mechanically formulaic nature of the language. Throughout the speeches of Job’s three critics, the poet performs a delicate balancing act in assigning them boilerplate poetry that reflects their conventional mindset (see the comment on verse 8) and giving them some striking lines in which his own extraordinary poetic powers are manifest. As instances of this second category, one might consider “we are but yesterday” in verse 9 or the elaboration of the image of the spiderweb in verses 14 and 15.
4. He dispatched them because of their crime. Eliphaz, the first of the three friends to speak, began with a diplomatic gesture toward Job. Now Bildad brutally tells a just bereaved father that his children all were killed by God because they must have committed some great offense.
8. For ask, pray, generations of old. The formulaic language of this entire verse is reminiscent of these lines from the Song of Moses: “Remember the days of old, / give thought to the years of times past. / Ask your father, that he may tell you, / your elders, that they may say to you.” (Deuteronomy 32:7).
9. For we are but yesterday, unknowing. Because our lives are a fleeting moment, we can have no real knowledge, for which we must turn to the age-old wisdom of our forebears.
for our days are a shadow on earth. This lovely phrase also happens to be formulaic, occurring in Psalms and elsewhere.
11. Will papyrus sprout with no marsh. There is an iron law in the moral realm as in nature. Just as the plant needs water to grow, a man cannot survive unless he is rooted in virtue. Only the righteous man is “like a tree planted by streams of water” (Psalm 1:3).
grow grand. Pointedly, the poet uses the same verb, yisgeh, that is attached at the end of verse 7 to the prospect of Job’s flourishing if he mends his ways.
13. the end. The Masoretic Text here reads ʾorḥot, “the paths,” but the reading of the Septuagint ʾaḥarit (the same consonants, with the order of the r and ḥ reversed) makes more sense. ʾAḥarit means “end” and, by extension, “destiny.”
16. —He is moist in the sun. The subject here seems to switch from those who forget God to the virtuous man (hence the introduction of the dash in the translation). Perhaps, if one recalls the antithesis between the righteous and the wicked in Psalm 1, a phrase of transition, such as “Not so the righteous,” was lost in transcription. In any case, the phrase “moist in the sun” means that he remains moist even in the blazing sun.
17. Round a knoll his roots twist, / on a stone house they take hold. This line, developing the pushing out of the tendrils from the previous line, is another instance of the Job poet’s keen eye on the processes of nature as he elaborates his images.
19. this is his joyous way, / from another soil he will spring. The resilience—even in the face of disaster—of the righteous man goes beyond the laws of nature: uprooted, he will somehow find other soil from which to grow.
20. God will not spurn the blameless, / nor hold the hand of evildoers. At the end of his speech, Bildad again invokes stereotypical language, reminiscent of many psalms and of the Book of Proverbs.
22. the tent of the wicked gone. This concluding verset, formulaic in itself, picks up the image of the wicked man’s flimsy habitation of cobweb from verses 14 and 15.
1And Job spoke out and he said:
2Of course, I knew it was so:
how can man be right before God?
3Should a person bring grievance against Him,
He will not answer one of a thousand.
4Wise in mind, staunch in strength,
who can argue with Him and come out whole?
5 He uproots mountains and they know not,
overturns them in His wrath.
6He makes earth shake in its setting,
and its pillars shudder.
7He bids the sun not to rise,
and the stars He seals up tight.
8He stretches the heavens alone
and tramples the crests of the sea.
9He makes the Bear and Orion,
the Pleiades and the South Wind’s chambers.
10He performs great things without limit
and wonders without number.
11Look, He passes over me and I do not see,
slips by me and I cannot grasp Him.
12Look, He seizes—who can resist Him?
Who can tell him, “What do You do?”
13God will not relent His fury.
Beneath Him Rahab’s minions stoop.
14And yet, as for me, I would answer Him,
would choose my words with Him.
15Though in the right, I can’t make my plea.
I would have to entreat my own judge.
16Should I call out and He answer me,
I would not trust Him to heed my voice.
17Who for a hair would crush me
and make my wounds many for naught.
18He does not allow me to catch my breath
as He sates me with bitterness.
19 If it’s strength—He is staunch,
and if it’s justice—who can arraign Him?
20Though in the right, my mouth will convict me,
I am blameless, yet He makes me crooked.
21I am blameless—I know not myself,
I loathe my life.
22It’s all the same, and so I thought:
the blameless and the wicked He destroys.
23If a scourge causes death in an instant,
He mocks the innocent’s plight.
24 The earth is given in the wicked man’s hand,
the face of its judges He veils.
If not He—then who else?
25And my days are swifter than a courier.
They have fled and have never seen good,
26slipped away like reed ships,
like an eagle swooping on prey.
27If I said, I would forget my lament.
I would leave my grim mood and be gladdened,
28I was in terror of all my suffering.
I knew You would not acquit me.
29I will be guilty.
Why should I toil in vain?
30Should I bathe in snow,
31You would yet plunge me into a pit,
and my robes would defile me.
32For He is not a man like me that I might answer Him,
that we might come together in court.
33Would there were an arbiter between us,
who could lay his hand on us both,
34who could take from me His rod,
and His terror would not confound me.
35 I would speak, and I will not fear Him,
for that is not the way I am.
CHAPTER 9 NOTES
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2. be right before God. “Right” (Hebrew verbal root ts-d-q) here and elsewhere means being vindicated in a court of law. Thus the opening line announces the metaphor of legal disputation that dominates this whole chapter and recurs later in Job’s argument. His sense of justice leads him to the legal metaphor, but he bitterly recognizes that he will never have his day in court because the two parties involved are absolutely unequal. God the accuser will always overwhelm him with His superior power and hold him guilty, whatever the facts of the case. One detects a fundamental idea that will lead to Kafka’s The Trial.
5. He uproots mountains. These lines, down to the end of verse 10, invoke traditional poetic language generally used to celebrate God’s power, as in many of the psalms and in Eliphaz’s words (5:9–16), one line of which (5:9) is actually reproduced here (verse 10). But Job turns around the meaning of the traditional celebration of God: the divine power is deployed to dismay man and to take unfair advantage of him.
7. bids the sun. The catalogue of God’s sundry powers moves up vertically from earth to sky.
and the stars He seals up tight. If the darkening of the sun in the first verset could refer to an eclipse, a natural phenomenon, this intensification in the second verset is altogether apocalyptic.
9. the South Wind’s chambers. After the constellations, these may be mythological.
13. Rahab’s minions. Rahab is another name for the primordial sea monster, and so the minions (literally, “helpers”) are his mythological henchmen. The subduing of Rahab’s minions, like the trampling on the crests of the sea in verse 8, has its background in the conquest of the sea god by the weather god in Canaanite mythology.
17. for a hair. The Hebrew biseʿarah has a homonym and so could be construed, as many interpreters do, to mean “in a storm.” (That is the word used for “whirlwind” or “storm” at the beginning of God’s speech in 38:1.) But the poetic parallelism with “for naught” in the second verset argues for the sense of “for a hair”—that is, a mere trifle.
19. If it’s strength—He is staunch. This line repeats the terms bracketed together in verse 4. As elsewhere, the Job poet has a keen eye for verbal and imagistic continuities in his poem.
22. the blameless and the wicked he destroys. This single verset compactly summarizes Job’s argument against the mainline biblical notion of God’s justice. Observing the reality of human events, including, of course, the disasters that have beset him, he sees no neat system of reward for the virtuous and punishment for the transgressor: the purported system of divine justice is essentially arbitrary.
23. He mocks the innocent’s plight. The Hebrew uses a plural noun, which is represented as a singular here to accord with the singular “wicked man” in the next line. God’s mockery of the innocent makes him not just arbitrary but sadistic.
24. The earth is given in the wicked man’s hand. Job now steps up his argument: God is not merely arbitrary; he actually tilts the conduct of the world to favor the wicked and prevents earthly judges (second verset) from seeing wrongdoing.
25. my days are swifter than a courier. In the two lines that begin here, the poet adopts an alternate strategy to the one of elaborating a single image through several lines that we observed in the previous chapter. Instead, he gives us three different images for swiftness in quick succession: from earth (the courier) to water (the reed ships) to sky (the eagle), with the last metaphor expressing the most violently rapid motion, and one that is not connected with human beings as are the two preceding ones.
27. be gladdened. The verb ʾavligah appears only in Job and hence its meaning is uncertain. A different understanding, “restrain myself,” has become the general sense of the verb in modern Hebrew.
30. in snow. The translation follows the consonantal text (ketiv), which reads bemo sheleg. The marginal correction (qeri) reads bemey sheleg, “in snow waters.”
make my palms pure with lye. This is an especially violent instance of the pattern of intensification in second versets. Snow (or snow water) would be pure, but the extreme cleansing measure of lye could do terrible damage to the palms.
31. plunge me into a pit. The clear implication is a pit filled with foul muck.
33. an arbiter … / who could lay his hand on us both. This impossible fantasy underscores the actual maddening disparity between Job and the God who is persecuting him.
35. I would speak, and I will not fear Him, / for that is not the way I am. The wording of the second verset here is rather obscure, and divergent interpretations (and emendations) have been proposed. The general sense of the line, though, is clear: Job will not let the terror of God confound him or silence him. He still wishes to voice his protest, not succumbing to fear. In light of this, perhaps the force of the second verset is, as this translation understands it: I am not the kind of person to be subdued by fear of God’s power, and so I will speak out.
1My whole being loathes my life.
Let me give vent to my lament.
Let me speak when my being is bitter.
2I shall say to God: Do not convict me.
Inform me why You accuse me.
3Is it good for You to oppress,
to spurn Your own palms’ labor,
and on the council of the wicked to shine?
4 Do You have the eyes of mortal flesh,
do You see as man would see?
5Are Your days like a mortal’s days,
Your years like the years of a man,
6that You should search out my crime
and inquire for my offense?
7You surely know I am not guilty,
but there is none who saves from Your hand.
8 Your hands fashioned me and made me,
and then You turn round and destroy me!
9Recall, pray, that like clay You worked me,
and to the dust You will make me return.
10Why, You poured me out like milk
and like cheese You curdled me.
11With skin and flesh You clothed me,
with bones and sinews entwined me.
12Life and kindness you gave me,
and Your precept my spirit kept.
13 Yet these did You hide in Your heart;
I knew that this was with You:
14If I offended, You kept watch upon me
and of my crime would not acquit me.
15If I was guilty, alas for me,
and though innocent, I could not raise my head,
sated with shame and surfeited with disgrace.
16 Like a triumphant lion You hunt me,
over again wondrously smite me.
17You summon new witnesses against me
and swell up Your anger toward me—
vanishings and hard service are mine.
18 And why from the womb did You take me?
I’d breathe my last, no eye would have seen me.
19As though I had not been, I would be.
From belly to grave I’d be carried.
20My days are but few—let me be.
Turn away that I may have some gladness
21before I go, never more to return,
to the land of dark and death’s shadow,
22the land of gloom, thickest murk,
death’s shadow and disorder,
where it shines thickest murk.
CHAPTER 10 NOTES
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1. Let me give vent. The Hebrew verb ʿazav usually means “to for-sake,” and hence the meaning here is uncertain. The translation follows a proposal of Pope, but not with great conviction.
4. Do You have the eyes of mortal flesh. Job’s complaint against God for persecuting him has two complementary sides. On the one hand, since God enjoys the perspective of divinity, it makes no sense for Him to treat Job as though He were an ignorant and angry human being. On the other hand (verses 20–23), since Job is a mere mortal whose days are few, it is unreasonable that this brief life span should be loaded with misery.
8. Your hands fashioned me and made me. Picking up the word “hand” from the end of the previous verse is a bridge to a new segment of the text—such repetition of terms to mark the transition from one textual unit to another is a characteristic compositional move in the Bible in both poetry and prose. The poet launches on one of the most remarkable evocations of the sheer creatureliness of man in biblical literature.
and then You turn round. The Masoretic Text reads “together all around,” yaḥad saviv. This translation follows the reading of the Septuagint, which has ʾahar sabota, a phrase that makes better sense in context.
9. like clay You worked me. The poet picks up the image of God’s creating the first human from clay in Genesis 2 and, characteristically, gives it artisanal concreteness.
and to the dust You will make me return. This notion of man’s inevitable mortality (compare 1:21) is a constant theme of Job’s.
10. poured me out like milk / and like cheese You curdled me. In keeping with his own vivid sense of metaphor and of reality—and again in the chiastic formulation he favors—the Job poet now goes beyond the figure of God the potter taken from Genesis. The embryo begins in a conjoining of fluid and protoplasm and then begins to take on the solidity of flesh, like milk congealing into cheese.
12. and Your precept my spirit kept. Given the way biblical syntax functions, it is also possible to switch subject and object around here (as most interpreters do): Your precept (providence?) kept my spirit. But the formulation sounds like several lines in Psalm 119, where it is the human being, or his spirit, who keeps God’s precept (pequdah).
13. Yet these did You hide in Your heart. Despite all God’s seeming benefactions in giving Job physical shape and substance and afterward support, He all along hid hostile intentions toward his lovingly fashioned creature.
15. guilty … / innocent. Job bitterly complains that he is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t by this inimical God.
16. like a triumphant lion. The syntactically obscure Hebrew of the received text here seems to say: “He triumphs, like a lion You hunt me.”
over again wondrously smite me. The translation is an interpretive guess about the enigmatic Hebrew, which literally reads: “You came back, You do wonders against [?] me.”
17. vanishings and hard service are mine. This entire clause is one of the notable puzzles in Job. The second of the two nouns is the same word used at the beginning of chapter 7 (and rendered there, because of the immediate context, as “fixed service”). The first noun, ḥalifot, derives from a verb that means “to slip away,” “to vanish,” or “to change.” What Job may be saying is that his existence has become durance vile (“hard service”) in which everything he would cling to slips between his fingers (“vanishings”).
18. And why from the womb did You take me? This verse and the next obviously pick up the theme and some of the language of the death-wish poem in chapter 3 (in particular 3:11–13).
21–22. dark … death’s shadow, / … gloom … murk. These lines also recall the death-wish poem of chapter 3 in deploying a whole series of synonyms for darkness, though with a difference: in the earlier poem, darkness was wished for; here it functions as an expression of the absolute extinction of life that awaits every human being in death’s realm.
22. thickest. The usual function of the Hebrew kemo is as the preposition of comparison, “like,” but that would yield here “gloom like murk,” which does not make much sense. Kemo, however, occasionally occurs in poetic texts as an intensifier rather than as a preposition, and this translation construes it that way both here and in its recurrence in the third verset.
where it shines thickest murk. This is construed by some as a second-person singular referring to God, “and You shine,” although a third-person feminine singular verb (the identical conjugated form) referring to “land” at the beginning of the verse seems more likely. In any case, this concluding image is a strong oxymoron (not a characteristic figure of biblical poetry): in the grim realm of death, shining itself is darkness.
1And Zophar the Naamathite spoke out and he said:
2 Shall a swarm of words be unanswered,
and should a smooth talker be in the right?
3Your lies may silence folk,
you mock and no one protests.
4And you say: my teaching is spotless,
and I am pure in your eyes.
5Yet, if only God would speak,
and would open His lips against you,
6would tell you wisdom’s secrets,
And know, God leaves some of your crime forgotten.
7 Can you find what God has probed,
can you find Shaddai’s last end?
8Higher than heaven, what can you do,
deeper than Sheol, what can you know?
9Longer than earth is its measure,
and broader than the sea.
10 Should He slip away or confine or assemble,
who can resist Him?
11For He knows the empty folk,
He sees wrongdoing and surely takes note.
12And a hollow man will get a wise heart
when a wild ass is born a man.
13 If you yourself readied your heart
and spread out your palms to Him,
14if there is wrongdoing in your hand, remove it,
let no mischief dwell in your tents.
15For then you will raise your face unstained,
you will be steadfast and will not fear.
16For you will forget wretchedness,
like water gone off, recall it.
17And life will rise higher than noon,
you will soar, you will be like the morning.
18And you will trust, for there is hope,
will search, and lie secure.
19You will stretch out, and none make you tremble,
and many pay court to you.
20And the eyes of the wicked will pine,
escape will be lost to them,
and their hope—a last gasp of breath.
CHAPTER 11 NOTES
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2. Shall a swarm of words be unanswered. The third of the friends immediately strikes an impatient note, beginning with a frontal attack on Job and making no diplomatic gesture toward him.
a smooth talker. Literally, “a man of lips.”
5. open His lips. This idiom is probably chosen to jibe with the mocking reference to Job as “a man of lips” in verse 2.
6. prudence is double-edged. The application of “double-edged” (or perhaps simply “double”), kiflayim, is not entirely clear. Some would emend it to plaʾim, yielding “prudence is wondrous.”
God leaves some of your crime forgotten. Zophar blithely assumes that Job is guilty of some crime so great that, even with all he has suffered for it, God has mercifully not exacted punishment for it to the full extent of the divine law.
7. Can you find what God has probed. The next three verses are boilerplate language for the poetic celebration of God’s world-embracing knowledge and power contrasted to man’s puny grasp. When God begins to speak from the whirlwind, He will strike a similar theme, but in an entirely different poetic register and conceptual frame.
10. Should He slip away or confine or assemble. Interpretive attempts to find tight logical coherence in this sequence of three verbs have not been persuasive. It is best to understand them as three different instances of how God does whatever He pleases—disappears, imprisons, brings people together—without man’s being able to control or affect His actions.
12. a hollow man will get a wise heart / when a wild ass is born a man. This pungent remark sounds, as Marvin Pope has suggested, like the invocation of a proverb.
13. If you yourself readied your heart. These words introduce an exhortation, which will continue to the end of Zophar’s speech, for Job to turn back from his evil ways in the expectation that God will then forgive him and restore him to well-being and tranquillity.
15. you will raise your face unstained. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “without blemish,” and Zophar may well be referring not only to the supposed moral taint in Job but to the fact that he has been hideously disfigured by his skin disease.
1And Job spoke up and he said:
2Oh yeovs, you are the people,
and with you wisdom will die!
3But I, too, have a mind like you, I am no less than you,
and who does not know such things?
4A laughingstock to his friend I am,
who calls to his God and is answered,
a laughingstock of the blameless just man.
5 The smug man’s thought scorns disaster
readied for those who stumble.
6 The tents of despoilers are tranquil,
provokers of El are secure,
whom God has led by the hand.
7 Yet ask of the beasts, they will teach you,
the fowl of the heavens will tell you,
8or speak to the earth, it will teach you,
the fish of the sea will inform you.
9Who has not known in all these
that the LORD’s hand has done this?
10 In Whose hand is the breath of each living thing,
and the spirit of all human flesh.
11Does not the ear make out words,
the palate taste food?
12 In the aged is wisdom,
and in length of days understanding.
13With Him are wisdom and strength,
He possesses counsel and understanding.
14Why, He destroys and there is no rebuilding,
closes in on a man, leaves no opening.
15Why, He holds back the waters and they dry up,
sends them forth and they turn the earth over.
16With Him is power and prudence,
17He leads councillors astray
and judges He drives to madness.
18He undoes the sash of kings
and binds a loincloth round their waist.
19He leads priests astray,
the mighty He misleads.
20He takes away speech from the trustworthy,
and sense from the elders He takes,
21He pours forth scorn on princes,
and the belt of the nobles He slackens,
22 lays bare depths from the darkness
and brings out to light death’s shadow,
23raises nations high and destroys them,
flattens nations and leads them away,
24 stuns the minds of the people’s leaders,
makes them wander in trackless wastes—
25they grope in darkness without light,
He makes them wander like drunken men.
CHAPTER 12 NOTES
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2. you are the people. The sarcastic thrust of the line is evident: the friends have repeatedly claimed to be the voice of the wisdom of the generations and of society in general, and Job now bitterly turns this claim back against them.
3. mind. The Hebrew means “heart,” but here its function as the organ of understanding in biblical physiology is clearly salient.
who does not know such things? The literal sense is “who does not have such things?”
4. who calls to his God and is answered, / … the blameless just man. All this is, of course, a sarcastic reference to Job’s three reprovers.
5. The smug man’s thought scorns disaster. This is an interpretive guess at the Hebrew, which is extremely crabbed. The translation assumes that the obscure ʿashtut is a shortened or defective form of ʿeshtonot, “thoughts.” Something along the lines of the construction proposed here makes sense in context because the smug man scorning disaster and showing contempt for one who stumbles neatly applies to Job’s friends.
6. The tents of despoilers are tranquil. Job’s perception that the wicked often prosper, seemingly helped by God, is a direct rejoinder to the complacent moral calculus of the friends.
7. Yet ask of the beasts. It is the common knowledge of all creation, Job argues, that God’s power causes everything. This sounds like a pious opening, in keeping with the view of the three companions, but he goes on to say that God’s power is exercised destructively and capriciously.
10. In Whose hand. This entire verse is a virtual quotation of pious tradition—quoted in order to be subverted.
12. In the aged is wisdom. This verse and the next are a mocking imitation of the words of the three companions, and what the lines seem to say is abruptly reversed beginning in verse 14.
15. the waters … dry up, / … they turn the earth over. As Job sees it, God’s power over creation is exerted chiefly in acts of destruction. The Voice from the Whirlwind will provide a strong rejoinder to this view.
16. the duped and the duper. The literal sense of the cognate Hebrew verbs is “the one who errs and the one who leads him to err.”
17. councillors … / judges. Those who should exercise wisdom are catastrophically deprived of it by God. In the following verses, other figures of authority—kings, elders, priests, the trustworthy—are also undone by God.
22. lays bare depths from the darkness. In the account of creation at the beginning of Genesis, God resoundingly calls forth light from the primordial darkness. Here He does exactly the opposite.
24. stuns. Literally, “removes.”
trackless wastes. The “wastes” here, tohu, are the same term used for the primordial void in Genesis 1. Job continues the boldly heretical idea that God, far from being a beneficent Creator establishing order, uses His violent power perversely to mislead humankind.
25. like drunken men. The Hebrew uses a singular noun.
1 Why, my eye has seen all,
my ear has heard and understood.
2As you know, I, too, know.
I am no less than you.
3Yet I would speak to Shaddai,
and I want to dispute with God.
4And yet, you plaster lies,
5Would that you fell silent,
and this would be your wisdom.
6Hear, pray, my dispute,
and to my lips’ pleas listen closely.
7Would you speak crookedness of God,
and of Him would you speak false things?
8 Would you be partial on His behalf,
would you plead the case of God?
9Would it be good that He probed you,
as one mocks a man would you mock Him?
10He shall surely dispute with you
if in secret you are partial.
11Will not His majesty strike you with terror,
and His fear fall upon you?
12Your pronouncements are maxims of ash,
your word piles, piles of clay.
13Be silent before me—I would speak,
no matter what befalls me.
14Why should I bear my flesh in my teeth,
and my life-breath place in my palm?
15 Look, He slays me, I have no hope.
Yet my ways I’ll dispute to His face.
16Even that becomes my rescue,
for no tainted man comes before Him.
17Hear, O hear my word
and my utterance in your ears.
18Look, I have laid out my case,
I know that I am in the right.
19Who would make a plea against me?
I would be silent then, breathe my last.
20 Just two things do not do to me,
then would I not hide from Your presence.
21Take Your palm away from me,
and let Your dread not strike me with terror.
22Call and I will reply,
or I will speak, and answer me.
23How many crimes and offenses have I?
My offense and my wrong, inform me.
24Why do You hide Your face,
and count me Your enemy?
25Would You harry a driven leaf,
and a dry straw would You chase,
26that You should write bitter things against me,
make me heir to the crimes of my youth?
27And You put my feet in stocks,
watch after all my paths,
on the soles of my feet make a mark.
CHAPTER 13 NOTES
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1. Why, my eye has seen all. Job repeats the rhetorical move with which he began his speech (12:3), even using one identical phrase, “I am no less than you.”
3. dispute. The Hebrew verb, which can also mean “reprove,” here has a legal connotation, and language expressing Job’s desire to confront God in a court of law recurs through this chapter.
4. plaster lies. This idiom is also used in Psalms 119:69. It may derive from the idea of covering over the truth, as with plaster.
quack healers. The relevance of this epithet is that Job’s companions seek to “heal” his grievous ills by telling him he has done wrong and that he will be restored to well-being if he renounces his evil ways.
8. Would you be partial on His behalf? This is the crux of Job’s argument against his pious reprovers. The law commands that no partiality be shown in judgment (see Leviticus 19:15), and this includes tipping the legal scales to make God seem just. To Job, this is “crookedness,” “false things,” and God Himself will not tolerate it. The rebuke to the three friends by God in the closing of the frame-story bears out Job in this regard.
10. dispute. The leading edge of the verb here is probably “reprove,” but the translation preserves the continuity of terms in the Hebrew with verses 3 and 6.
12. your word piles, piles of clay. All translations of the obscure Hebrew are conjectural. The construction here links gabey with the rabbinic gibuv, “heap” or “pile,” and adds “word” interpretively.
14. my life-breath place in my palm. Elsewhere, this is an idiom for putting oneself in great danger, but the parallelism with the first verset would seem to highlight the physical concreteness of the image.
15. Look, He slays me, I have no hope. The intended sense of his famous line is ambiguous. This translation follows the consonantal received text (ketiv). The marginal correction (qeri) changes loʾ (no) to lo (for him), yielding, “though He slay me, I will hope for Him.” Others, without much warrant, understand the verb yaḥel as though it were a phonetically similar verb, ḥul, and translate “though He slay me, I will not quake.”
16. for no tainted man comes before Him. Job, of course, is firm in his conviction that he himself is untainted, and so he is perfectly ready to stand before God. Thus, his very willingness to dispute with God is his “rescue.”
19. I would be silent then, breathe my last. If anyone could really muster a case against Job, he would renounce his argument and be prepared to give up the ghost.
20. Just two things do not do to me. The Hebrew, moving from the second-person plural in earlier verses to the second-person singular, makes it clear that Job is now turning in direct address to God.
then would I not hide from Your presence. That is, if You stopped intimidating me with Your overwhelming power (verse 21), I would be able to face You and make a case for my own defense.
21. let Your dread not strike me with terror. These words are only a seeming contradiction to Job’s previous assertions that he is spoiling to have his day in court with God. He is infact eager to do that, but he also feels overwhelmed by the sheer power of his divine persecutor, and so He pleads with God not to go on terrorizing him as a necessary precondition to his laying out his legal case.
23. My offense and my wrong. The order of the two Hebrew nouns is reversed for the sake of the rhythm in English.
27. stocks / … paths, / … make a mark. These are three discrete metaphors (if the feet are in stocks, logically there is no need to watch after the paths of the supposed miscreant), though they are all related as images of imprisonment or surveillance, and all three figures of speech are associated with feet (the middle image because in biblical idiom it is always feet that go on paths). It is likely that the marking of the soles of the feet refers to some sort of branding or tattooing that would be an indelible sign that the person is a felon.
13:28And man wears away like rot,
like a garment eaten by moths.
1Man born of woman,
scant of days and sated with trouble,
2like a blossom he comes forth and withers,
and flees like a shadow—he will not stay.
3 Even on such You cast Your eye,
and me You bring in judgment with You?
4[Who can make the impure pure?
No one.]
5Oh, his days are decreed,
the number of his months are with You,
his limits You fixed that he cannot pass.
6Turn away from him that he may cease,
until he serves out his day like a hired man.
7 For a tree has hope:
though cut down, it can still be removed,
and its shoots will not cease.
8Though its root grow old in the ground
and its stock die in the dust,
9 from the scent of water it flowers,
and puts forth branches like a sapling.
10 But a strong man dies defeated,
man breathes his last, and where is he?
11Water runs out from a lake,
and a river is parched and dries up,
12but a man lies down and will not arise,
till the sky is no more he will not awake
and will not rouse from his sleep.
13Would that You hid me in Sheol,
concealed me till Your anger passed,
set me a limit and recalled me.
14If a man dies will he live?
All my hard service days I shall hope
15Call out and I shall answer you,
for the work of Your hand You should yearn.
16 For then You would count my steps,
You would not keep watch over my offense.
17My crime would be sealed in a packet,
You would plaster over my guilt.
18And yet, a falling mountain crumbles,
a rock is ripped from its place.
19Water wears away stones,
its surge sweeps up the dust of the earth,
and the hope of man You destroy.
20You overwhelm him forever, and he goes off,
You change his face and send him away.
21If his sons grow great, he will not know.
And should they dwindle, he will not notice them.
22 But the flesh upon him will ache,
his own being will mourn for him.
CHAPTER 14 NOTES
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13:28. And man wears away like rot. This entire verse belongs here, even though it’s conventionally labeled verse 28 of the preceding chapter (the chapter divisions are late medieval and not intrinsic to the original biblical texts). Some scholars place this verse after 14:2. The Hebrew reads “And he wears away like rot,” with the generic term ‘adam, “man,” occurring at the beginning of the next line (14:1): “Man born of woman, / scant of days and sated with trouble.”
3. Even on such You cast Your eye. Job, having evoked traditional biblical language for the brevity of human existence (“scant of days and sated with trouble, / like a blossom he comes forth and withers, / and flees like a shadow,” verses 1–2), now asks God: how could You devote such terrible scrutiny to this ephemeral creature and how could you want to bring him to judgment? The verb rendered as “cast” is literally “open.”
4. This verse has been bracketed because it looks dubious, and the second verset is too short to scan as poetry. Some have seen this as a marginal gloss that crept into the text.
6. that he may cease. A small emendation would convert this verb into an imperative, “cease” (that is, leave him be), which would fit better with “turn away from him.”
until he serves out his day like a hired man. Job picks up the image he used earlier of human life as hard labor, with the worker longing for the day to come to an end.
7. For a tree has hope. Here the poet begins another of his fascinating forays into nature. Though he is of course aware that all things in nature eventually perish, he finds in the arboreal realm a strong image of survival that contrasts with the human condition. The cutting down of part of the trunk of a failing tree in order to allow it to regenerate appears to have been a known procedure in ancient agriculture.
9. from the scent of water it flowers. This quiet lyrical statement embodies a fine hyperbole: the very scent of water is enough to make the tree blossom.
10. But a strong man dies defeated. The noun gever usually indicates man in his virile strength, and is cognate with gibor, warrior. The adjective “strong” has been added here because there is an intended antithesis with “defeated” at the end of the verset. That verb usually means “to be weak,” but in Exodus 32:18 it indicates defeat and is contrasted with “triumph” (gevurah, another cognate of gever). Since it would make little sense for the strong man to be weak after death, the probable sense is that he dies, finally defeated by death.
11. a lake. The Hebrew yam more often means “sea,” but it can also mean “lake,” and it makes much better sense for a lake to run dry than the sea.
12. till the sky is no more he will not awake. This emphatic vision of the irrevocability of death, reiterated by Job, might conceivably be a rejoinder to a new idea of an afterlife beginning to emerge in the Late Biblical period, though the ephemerality of human life is a theme struck by many biblical writers, early and late.
13. hid me in Sheol. Job is surely not talking about survival after death, but rather, as else-where in biblical poetry, he invokes Sheol as a deep dark cavern below the ground where one might hide.
14. until my vanishing comes. Some understand ḥalifati as “my relief,” but the primary sense of the verbal root is to be gone or slip away, with “change” as a secondary sense. Perhaps the poet is playing on both meanings of the term. See the comment on 10:17.
16. For then You would count my steps. Some scholars emend this clause as “For then You would not count my steps” in order to bring it into neat parallelism with the second verset. It might, however, have a positive meaning: Amos Hakham has proposed that the image is of a solicitous parent counting the steps of a toddler.
17. sealed in a packet, / … plaster over my guilt. The most plausible reading is that in this wished-for condition in which God would finally relent, any accusations against Job would be sealed and covered up—in effect, expunged from the legal record.
19. and the hope of man You destroy. There is a pointed contrast between the solid elements of nature—mountain, rock, stones, earth—that are nevertheless overturned, and the fragility of human hope. At the same time, these metaphors suggest an analogy between the fearsome forces of destruction in nature and God’s implacability toward man.
20. goes off. Here and elsewhere, this is a euphemism for death—one that highlights the irrevocable disappearance of the man who dies.
You change his face. Abraham ibn Ezra plausibly understands this as a reference to the rictus of the face distorted in death.
22. But the flesh upon him will ache. In order to concretize the awful bleakness of death, the poet uses what may be a poetic conceit or perhaps the trace of a folk belief: the newly dead, his flesh turned rigid and then quickly the object of decay, experiences a kind of afterimage of life that is nothing but pain. In any event, the idea is clear that the dead man knows nothing of the fate of the offspring in whom he invested so many expectations but is instead locked into the anguish of his own physical extinction.
1And Eliphaz the Temanite spoke up and he said:
2Will a wise man speak up ideas of hot air
and with the east wind fill his belly?
3Who disputes through speech will not avail
and from words will get no profit.
4So you thwart reverence,
5For your crime guides your mouth,
and you choose the tongue of the cunning.
6 Your own mouth condemns you, not I,
and your lips bear witness against you.
7 Are you the first man to be born,
before the hills were you spawned?
8Did you listen at God’s high council,
take away wisdom for yourself?
9What do you know that we don’t know,
understand, that is not with us?
10The gray-haired and the aged are with us,
far older than your father.
11 Are God’s consolations too little for you,
and the word that He whispered to you?
12How your heart has taken you off,
how your eyes have prompted you,
13that you should turn your hot air against God
and let out words from your mouth!
14What is man that he should merit
and that he born of woman should be in the right?
15 Why, His holy ones He does not trust,
and the heavens are not pure in His eyes.
16All the more, one vile and foul,
man who drinks mischief like water.
17I shall declare to you, listen to me,
and what I saw I shall recount,
18what the wise men have told
and have not concealed from their fathers.
19 To them alone the land was given,
no stranger passed in their midst.
20All the wicked man’s days he quakes,
and few years are set aside for the tyrant.
21The sound of fear is in his ears,
in peacetime the despoiler overtakes him.
22He trusts not to come back from darkness,
and he is targeted by the sword.
23He wanders for bread—where is it?
He knows that the dark day awaits him.
24 Failing and foe bring him terror,
overwhelm him like a king set for siege.
25 For he reached out his hand against God,
and Shaddai he assaulted.
26He rushes against him in neck-armor,
with his thickly bossed shield.
27His face is covered with fat,
his loins are layered with blubber.
28 He dwells in ruined towns,
in houses where no one lives that are readied for rubble heaps.
29He gets no riches, his wealth will not stand,
his yield does not bend to the earth.
30He does not turn away from darkness,
his shoots the flame withers,
he turns away in the breath of his mouth.
31Let the wayward not trust in vain things,
for in vain will his recompense be.
32Untimely he will wilt,
and his boughs will not be green.
33He will shed his unripe fruit like a vine
and cast off his bloom like an olive tree.
34For the crowd of the tainted is barren,
and fire consumes bribery’s tent.
35Pregnant with wretchedness, giving birth to crime,
their belly prepares deceit.
CHAPTER 15 NOTES
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2. hot air. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “wind.” The parallel term in the second verset, “east wind,” is a hot, blighting wind that blows from the desert. It is noteworthy that in this second round of the debate, Eliphaz, whose first speech (chapter 4) began diplomatically, launches a frontal assault against Job, denouncing him as a juggler of empty words and then an impious sinner (verses 4–6).
4. take away. The somewhat odd verb, which means to remove something from a whole or to subtract, is picked up in a slightly different sense in verse 8, when Job is sarcastically asked whether he has taken away wisdom from the divine council.
6. Your own mouth condemns you. Job’s staunch defense of his own integrity as well as his challenge to God is taken by Eliphaz as clear evidence that he is an impious liar.
7. Are you the first man to be born. Again, the wisdom of the ages, and of age (compare verse 10), is invoked as an argument against what the friends construe as Job’s arrogant presumption.
11. God’s consolations … / the word that He whispered to you. No mention of such solicitous address by God to Job has been made, but the conventionally pious Eliphaz may assume that God always whispers messages of consolation, even to egregious sinners like Job.
13. turn your hot air against God / … let out words. This line is a pointed verbal echo of verses 2 and 3 and has been translated to make that clear, as it is in the Hebrew.
15. Why, His holy ones He does not trust. The holy ones, qedoshim, would be angelic beings, members of the celestial entourage. Perfection is God’s alone, and His uncompromising gaze finds defects in all other beings, celestial and terrestrial.
19. To them alone the land was given. The relevance of this whole verse to Eliphaz’s argument is unclear. Perhaps he means to say that the sages of old, from whom he and his companions have inherited their wisdom, were free from the misleading influences of foreign presences, and hence their wisdom was irreproachable.
24. Failing and foe. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “foe and distress,” but the two Hebrew terms are locked together in alliteration, tsar umetsukah, an effect the translation tries to imitate.
set for siege. The noun kidor appears only here. Guesses at its meaning have been made through proposed Semitic cognates, but the sense remains uncertain.
25. For he reached out his hand against God, / and Shaddai he assaulted. If this general portrait of the wicked man is intended by Eliphaz to refer at least by implication to Job, the image of a martial assault on God is truly extravagant. Naphtali Herz Tur-Sinai has proposed that these lines hark back to the Canaanite creation myth, in which the assailant against El, the sky god (that is the term for God used here), would be a mythic warrior allied with the primordial sea monster.
26. in neck-armor. The Hebrew simply says “in neck.” The translation, with an eye to the parallel phrase in the second verset, follows the proposal of Tur-Sinai and Pope that the word is an ellipsis for armor worn to protect the neck.
27. fat, / … blubber. The image of a fat warrior may seem incongruous, but excessive fat in Psalms is an image of wicked complacency and self-indulgence. The borderline, moreover, between being fat and robust is a little vague in the ancient Near East (one might perhaps think of the aggressive build of an NFL lineman).
28. He dwells in ruined towns. After the wicked man’s presumption in assaulting God, he is doomed to a fate of misery, living among ruins, failing in all his endeavors (verses 29–34).
30. he turns away in the breath of his mouth. This translation reproduces the enigmatic character of the Hebrew, where each word is intelligible but they make little sense together. The verb “turns away,” yasur, is identical with the verb at the beginning of the first verset, where it is used with a negative, but its meaning in this verset is unclear. The contention of many interpreters that it refers to death (“pass away”) flies in the face of its use elsewhere in the Bible, where it always refers to turning away or swerving from a set trajectory or disengaging from someone or something. Perhaps, if the received text here is authentic, it might mean that the evil man through his own empty and self-deluding talk swerves from the right path.
31. recompense. Or “transformation.” The translation is somewhat conjectural.
32. wilt. The Masoretic Text has timaleiʾ, “you will fill,” which makes little sense either grammatically or semantically. This translation assumes an emendation to yimol, “he will wilt” or “he will wither.”
1And Job spoke up and he said:
I have heard much of this sort,
wretched consolers are you all.
2Is there any end to words of hot air,
or what compels you to speak up?
3I, too, like you, would speak,
were you in my place
4I would din words against you,
and would wag my head over you.
5 I would bolster you with my speech,
my lips’ movement would hold back pain.
6Should I speak, my pain would not be held back,
should I desist, it would not go away from me.
7But now He has worn me out.
8And You crease my face, it becomes a witness,
my gauntness deposes against me.
9His wrath tore me apart, seethed against me,
He gnashed His teeth against me,
10 They gaped with their mouths against me,
in scorn they struck my cheeks,
together they close ranks round me.
11God delivers me to a wrongdoer
lets me fall in the hands of the wicked.
12I was tranquil—he shook me to pieces,
seized my nape and broke me apart,
set me up as a target for Him.
13His archers gathered around me.
He pierces my kidneys, pitiless,
He spills my gall to the ground.
14He breaches me breach upon breach,
rushes at me like a warrior.
15Sackcloth I sewed for my scabs,
and I thrust my horn in the dust.
16My face was reddened from weeping,
and on my eyelids—death’s shadow,
17for no outrage I had done,
and my prayer had been pure.
18Earth, O do not cover my blood,
and let there be no place for my scream.
19Even now, in the heavens my witness stands,
one who vouches for me up above.
20 My advocates, my companions!
Before God my eye sheds tears.
21 Let a man dispute with God
and a human with his fellow.
22For a handful of years will come,
and on the path of no return I shall go.
17:1 My spirit is wrecked,
my days flicker out.
Graves are what I have.
CHAPTER 16 NOTES
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4. din. The root of this verb h-̣ b-r looks as though it were the same as the common Hebrew verb that means “to join,” but, as J. J. Finklestein has shown, it actually derives from a different root (a palatal consonant ḥet rather than a guttural one) that indicates “noise.”
wag my head over you. Here the gesture appears to indicate mockery rather than sympathy.
5. I would bolster you with my speech. The Hebrew says “my mouth.” The switched attitude here is a little confusing. First Job said that, were his friends in his place, he would speak just as they have done, dinning accusatory words into their ears. Now he says he would comfort them. Perhaps he wants to suggest that, unlike them, he would follow accusation with genuine consolation.
hold back pain. The Hebrew says merely “hold back,” but the verb in immediate context may be an ellipsis since “pain … held back” appears in the next line.
6. my pain would not be held back. This is another slightly disorienting shift. Job, having taken up the fantasy that he and his three interlocutors would be in reversed positions, now drops it abruptly, for it has made him think again of his own unrelenting anguish. Now he returns to the familiar theme of his intolerable suffering: whether he speaks or is silent, it will not leave him.
7. You devastate all my people. The reference could well be to Job’s dead children and servants. The switch from third person to second person between the two versets is fairly common in biblical usage.
8. crease my face … / my gauntness. Job’s ravaged body, a highly visible external sign of his suffering, has been construed as incriminating evidence that he must have done something to deserve it.
9. tore me apart. This violent verb is used for predatory animals rending their prey.
my foe’s eyes glare at me. The literal sense of the verb is “to hone” or “to sharpen.”
10. They gaped. Although Job sees God as his real persecutor, here he imagines a crowd of enemies—in all likelihood, God’s henchmen—who attack him and humiliate him. The three friends have, of course, arrogated to themselves the role of such henchmen.
12. shook me to pieces, / … broke me apart. In the Hebrew, the two verbs of violent assault resemble each other phonetically and morphologically: wayefarpereini, wayefatspetseini.
14. breaches me … / rushes at me. The two versets neatly illustrate the general pattern in biblical poetry of introducing narrative development between the first verset and the second: in the martial metaphor, first the defensive walls are breached, then the warrior rushes forward through the breach in attack.
15. scabs. Many interpreters, on the basis of Aramaic and Arabic cognates, understand this simply as “skin” (this is the sole occurrence of the noun geled in the Bible). But in rabbinic Hebrew the word means the scab over a wound, and that seems more directly relevant to Job’s plight.
my horn. As repeatedly in Psalms and elsewhere, the horn is a symbol of strength.
18. let there be no place. Within the earth itself there should be no place to hide the scream or cry. The conjunction of the earth’s not covering the blood and not muffling the scream is probably a reminiscence of God’s words to Cain, “Your brother’s blood cries out [the same verbal root as here] to me from the soil” (Genesis 4:10). This allusion would implicitly cast God in the role of the archetypal murderer.
19. my witness stands. The Hebrew simply uses the implied verb “to be.” The witness up above is surely not God but rather the impartial mediator or judge for whom Job has already expressed a longing.
20. My advocates, my companions. If the received text is correct here, the only way to understand these words is as a bitingly sarcastic address to the three companions.
21. Let a man dispute with God / and a human with his fellow. The Hebrew is somewhat obscure. The meaning may be: would that a man might have a confrontation in court with God just as he would with a human accuser or legal adversary.
17:1. My spirit is wrecked. This triadic line, though set at the beginning of the next chapter in the conventional division into chapters, clearly concludes this whole section of Job’s complaint.
2 So help me, mockery is with me,
in their galling my eye wakes through the night.
3Come, stand pledge for me,
who will offer his handshake for me?
4Since their heart You hid from reason,
and so You will not exalt them.
5 For profit he informs on friends,
and his sons’ eyes waste away.
6He has made me a byword of peoples,
7My eye is bleared from anguish,
and my limbs are all like shadow.
8The upright are outraged by this,
and the innocent roused over the tainted.
9 The righteous will cling to his way,
and the clean of hands augment in strength.
10And yet, all of you, return and come,
but I won’t find a wise man among you.
11My days have passed,
my plans pulled apart,
the desires of my heart.
12 Night they would turn into day,
“Light is near”—in the face of darkness.
13 If I hope for Sheol as my home,
that I might cushion my couch with darkness,
14to the Pit I would say, “My father you are;
my mother and sister, the worm,”
15where then is my hope,
and my good—who can glimpse it?
16 Will it go down to the bars of Sheol,
altogether in the dust will it plunge?
CHAPTER 17 NOTES
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2. So help me. The Hebrew ʾim loʾ (ostensibly, “if not”) is here the formula for beginning a solemn oath.
my eye wakes through the night. The sense of the clause is unclear. The simple meaning of the verb is “to spend the night.” The phrase might suggest insomnia because of excitation.
4. heart … reason. As often elsewhere, the heart is invoked as the organ of understanding.
5. For profit he informs on friends. This verset is the first of several in this chapter that are not readily intelligible and probably reflect a glitch in scribal transmission. The literal sense of the three Hebrew words is “for-a-portion he-tells friends.” This translation, like all others, is no more than a guess.
6. spit in the face. The Hebrew tophet is obscure. The translation, mindful of a possible Aramaic cognate, interprets it as an act of humiliation parallel to “a byword of peoples,” only more extreme.
9. The righteous will cling to his way. Though in the previous verse Job mentions the outrage of the upright over his unwarranted suffering, this celebration of the staunchness and the augmented strength of the righteous sounds more like the three friends than like Job, and it is possible that the entire verse doesn’t belong here.
12. Night they would turn into day. While some critics see this verse as anomalous in context, it makes plausible sense as a withering characterization by Job of the “comfort” his three friends have been offering him. Thus, Bildad has said (8:5–7) that if Job would only seek God wholeheartedly, his latter days would be far more glorious than his beginnings. For the suffering Job, such language amounts to saying that “light is near—in the face of darkness.”
13. If I hope for Sheol as my home. This desire for release from anguish through death is perfectly consonant with the death-wish poem (chapter 3) with which Job began his complaint.
15. my good. The Masoretic Text has tiqwati, “my hope,” which is the last word of the first verset and the immediately preceding word in the Hebrew text. Repetition of this sort is not common in biblical poetry, and one suspects dittography (the inadvertent scribal duplication of a word or of letters in sequence). This translation follows the Septuagint, which appears to have used a Hebrew text that read tovati, “my good.”
16. Will it go down to the bars of Sheol. The Hebrew construct plural term badey is obscure in context. Elsewhere, bad is a pole, as in the poles used to carry the sanctuary, so “bars”—perhaps the bars that shut the gates of the underworld—might be appropriate here. This is also the surmise of the Revised Standard Version. The antecedent of “it” is “my hope” in the previous verse. Since the hope Job had expressed was to go down to Sheol, he may be saying, bitterly, that his hope is nowhere to be seen because it has plunged into the realm of extinction without him.
1And Bildad the Shuhite spoke up and he said:
2How long till you both put an end to words?
Consider, and then we may speak.
3Why are we reckoned as beasts,
besotted in your eyes?
4 Who tears himself apart in his wrath—
for you shall the earth be forsaken
and the rock ripped from its place?
5Yes, the light of the wicked will gutter,
and the spark of his flame will not shine.
6Light goes dark in his tent,
and his lamp gutters before him.
7His vigorous strides are straitened,
his own counsel flings him down.
8 For his feet are caught in a net
and he treads on a tangle of lines.
9The trap grips his heel,
the trip cord seizes him.
10A rope is hidden for him in the ground,
his snare upon the path.
11All round terrors befright him,
12 His vigor turns to hunger,
disaster ready at his side.
13Eating his limbs and skin,
Death’s Firstborn eats his limbs,
14tears him from his tent, his stronghold,
and sends him off to the King of Terrors.
15 He dwells in a tent not his,
his abode is strewn with brimstone.
16Below, his roots dry up,
and above, his foliage withers.
17His remembrance is lost from the earth,
no name has he abroad.
18 They thrust him from light to darkness,
and from the world of men drive him out.
19 No son nor grandson in his kinfolk,
and no remnant where he sojourned.
20At his fate, latecomers are dumbstruck
and old-timers are seized with dread.
21 Surely these are the dwellings of evil,
and this the place of him who knew not God.
CHAPTER 18 NOTES
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2. you both. The Hebrew verbs in this verse and the next are plural, and the translation follows Raymond Scheindlin in assuming that Bildad is addressing Eliphaz and Zophar. He would then be expressing impatience with them: how long will you go on with your ineffectual speech, behaving as though the three of us were imbeciles, when the response to Job’s outrageous stance is plain and clear, as I shall now demonstrate?
an end. The Hebrew qintsey is anomalous, and this rendering reflects a tradition of Hebrew commentators going back to the Middle Ages that links it with qeits, “end.”
4. Who tears himself apart. As the reference switches to a single person, we realize that the guilty party is Job.
for you shall the earth be forsaken. There is, Bildad angrily contends, an established order of things that Job in his egotistical presumption seeks to overturn.
8. For his feet are caught in a net. As elsewhere in the poetry of the three friends, Bildad resorts to the boilerplate language of Psalms that describes the disaster inevitably awaiting the wicked man. At the same time, one sees here the rich resourcefulness of synonymity of the Job poet, who in three lines of verse deploys six different terms for a trap.
11. they scatter at his feet. The received text reads “scatter him,” but “him” is not a logical object of “scatter.” The Septuagint reads “they trip him up at his feet.”
12. His vigor turns to hunger. More literally, “his vigor becomes hungry.” The term ʾon, “vigor,” is the same word associated with the once confident strides of the wicked man in verse 7.
13. limbs. This is the same doubtful term, badim, that appears in 17:16, so the translation is conjectural, though reference to a body part attached to skin seems probable.
Death’s Firstborn. This is clearly a mythological figure, as is the King of Terrors in the next verse. The Hebrew term for death, mawet (in the construct form mot), is identical with the name of the Canaanite god of death, Mot. The vivid cannibalistic image of Death gnawing away at the limbs of the transgressor is not conventional language.
15. He dwells in a tent not his. This could well be a continuation of the mythological imagery: the wicked man is torn from his own tent, where he thought himself secure, and dragged down to the realm of the King of Terrors, where he finds himself in an abode of chaos and dissolution strewn with brimstone (an agent of destruction).
18. They thrust him. These anonymous plural figures are emissaries of destruction, perhaps henchmen of the King of Terrors.
the world of men. The Hebrew tevel indicates the inhabited world—hence “of men” in the translation.
19. No son nor grandson. The cutting off of a man’s hereditary line is, of course, an ultimate curse in the biblical world.
20. his fate. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “his day.”
latecomers … / old-timers. The terms, ʾaḥaronim and qadmonim, refer to latter-day or recent people and to people from earlier times or predecessors. Exegetical efforts to align these terms with west and east are unconvincing.
21. Surely these. The patness of Bildad’s concluding formulation neatly reflects the confident complacency of his ethical outlook.
1And Job spoke up and he said:
2 How long will you cause me grief
and crush me with words?
3Ten times now you have shamed me,
you do not blush to spurn me.
4And if in fact I have erred,
with me shall my error lodge.
5If in fact you vaunt over me
and reprove me with my disgrace,
6know, then, that God has undone me
and encircled me with His net.
7Look, I scream “Outrage!” and I am not answered,
I shout and there is no justice.
8My path He blocked and I cannot pass,
and on my ways He set darkness.
9My glory He stripped from me,
and took off the crown from my head.
10He shattered me on all sides—I am gone.
He uprooted my hope like a tree.
11His wrath flared up against me,
and He reckoned me one of His foes.
12Together His troops have come,
laid siege-works up against me
and encamped around my tent.
13 My brothers He distanced from me,
and my comrades turned strangers to me.
14My dear ones withdrew, friends forgot me.
15Those who dwelled in my house and my slavegirls
reckoned me as a stranger,
I was an alien in their eyes.
16 To my servant I called and he did not answer,
with my mouth I pleaded to him.
17 My breath became strange to my wife,
I repelled my very own children.
18Even little ones despised me—
when I rose, they spoke against me.
19All my intimates reviled me,
those I loved have turned against me.
20My bones stuck to my skin and my flesh,
and I escaped with the skin of my teeth.
21Mercy, have mercy on me, my companions,
for God’s hand has blighted me.
22Why do you hound me like God,
and of my flesh you are not sated?
23Would, then, that my words were written,
that they were inscribed in a book,
24with an iron pen and lead
to be hewn in rock forever.
25But I know my redeemer lives,
and in the end he will stand up on earth,
26 and after they flay my skin,
from my flesh I shall behold God.
27For I myself shall behold,
my eyes will see—no stranger’s,
my heart is harried within me.
28Should you say, “How more can we hound him?
The root of the thing rests in him.”
29Fear the sword,
for wrath is a sword-worthy crime,
so you may know there is judgment.
CHAPTER 19 NOTES
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2. How long will you cause me grief. Job’s opening formulation is an explicit rejoinder to the beginning of Bildad’s immediately preceding speech (18:2), “How long till you both put an end to words.” The term “words,” milim, also appears in Job’s speech, at the end of this verse.
7. I scream “Outrage!” Screaming this word, ḥamas, would have been a desperate call for help when, say, a person was attacked by thugs. There is an implicit narrative momentum in the sequence of lines that begins here. First, Job is assailed and screams for help; then he tries to run away but his path is blocked; then he is seized, stripped, and shattered on all sides. Verse 11 summarizes this whole development, and then Job moves on from the metaphor of being mugged or attacked by brigands to a military metaphor (verse 12).
13. My brothers He distanced from me. As elsewhere, Job’s personal losses and physical affliction are painfully compounded by his becoming a social pariah, a state to which the scathing rebuke of the three companions has clearly contributed.
16. To my servant I called and he did not answer. Together with the estrangement from his social peers, Job has lost the authority that his wealth enabled him to enjoy: the people who had been his household staff—in all probability, “servant” implies slave status, like the feminine term in the previous verse—treat him like a stranger and ignore him. Even children (verse 18) mock him.
with my mouth I pleaded. Though this sounds a little awkward, the obtrusion of the mouth prepares the way for Job’s foul breath in the next verse.
17. My breath … / I repelled. Job is probably thinking of the disgusting symptoms of his disease. It is perhaps poetic license for him to invoke his children, all of whom have been killed. “My very own children” is literally “the children of my belly.”
19. intimates. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “people of my council.”
20. I escaped with the skin of my teeth. Because teeth don’t have skin, some scholars have tried to emend the text. But poetry need not be bound by anatomical logic. The verse should be read as vivid hyperbole: I was so ravaged by disease and deprivation, turned into mere skin and bones, that all I came away with was the (essentially nonexistent) skin of my teeth.
22. hound me like God. The frequently used term for “God,” ʾel, could also be understood as “a god,” and this is how Scheindlin generally treats it. But the point seems to be that there is one God who is perversely persecuting Job, not that the gods in general are inimical to man.
of my flesh you are not sated. Job represents his three reprovers as ghastly cannibals.
24. an iron pen and lead. The lead, initially puzzling, was explained by Rashi as the material used to darken the incised letters in order to make them more visible, and archaeology now offers some confirmation of this idea.
25. I know my redeemer lives. This famous line, long the subject of Christological interpretation, in fact continues the imagery of a legal trial to which Job reverts so often. The redeemer is someone, usually a family member, who will come forth and bear witness on his behalf, and the use of “stand up” in the second verset has precisely that courtroom connotation.
26. and after they flay my skin, / from my flesh I shall behold God. Amos Hakham boldly relates this strong line to Job’s wish to incise his words in stone, paraphrasing it as follows: “The scars and the bruises in my flesh are the writing God inscribes in my flesh instead of the inscription I sought to make.” If Hakham is right, Job would be representing himself here somewhat like the condemned man in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” who is meant to come to an illuminating understanding of his crime through the terrible machine that inscribes his transgression on his flesh. Job, however, does not concede that he has sinned, so the idea he expresses is that through all his suffering, through the tatters of his lacerated flesh, he will in the end behold God, come face-to-face with his divine persecutor and finally vindicate himself.
27. my heart is harried within me. The Hebrew says literally “my kidneys come to an end [or, long] within me.” This involves a prominent alliteration, kalu kilyotay, that the translation tries to approximate.
29. there is judgment. The very last word of Job’s speech is problematic. The Masoretic editors were not entirely sure whether it should be pronounced shadun or sheidin or perhaps something in between. Consequently, interpretations have varied wildly. Some see a reference to demons, sheidim, or to a pagan god. This translation follows a tradition that goes back to a couple of the ancient versions and to Rashi in the Middle Ages and which construes the enigmatic term as shedin, that there is judgment, or law.
1And Zophar the Naamathite spoke out and he said:
2So my thoughts give me a rejoinder,
3I have heard the reproof to my shame,
and a spirit from my mind lets me answer.
4This have you known of old,
from when man was set upon earth?
5For the wicked men’s gladness is fleeting,
and the tainted man’s joy but a moment.
6Though his summit ascend to the heavens,
and his head reach up to the clouds,
7 like his turd, he is lost forever,
those who see him will say, “Where is he?”
8Like a dream he flies off, none will find him,
he will melt like a nighttime vision.
9The eye that observed him will do it no more,
nor again will his place behold him.
10His sons will placate the poor,
and his hands will give back his wealth.
11His bones that were full of youth
with him will lie in the dust.
12Should evil be sweet in his mouth
and he hide it under his tongue,
13should he cherish it, not let it go,
and hold it back on his palate,
14 his food will turn in his innards—
vipers’ bile in his gut.
15Goods he swallowed he will vomit,
from his belly God will expel them.
16He will suck the venom of vipers,
the tongue of the asp will slay him.
17He will see no streams of rivers
and brooks of honey and curds.
18He will give back gain, not swallow it,
like the goods, their value, and take no pleasure.
19For he crushed, he forsook the poor,
he stole a house that he did not build.
20For he will not know quiet in his belly,
with his treasure he will not escape.
21There is no remnant of his food,
so he cannot hope to have bounty.
22When his need is filled he feels distressed—
every wretched man’s hand comes against him.
23Let him fill his belly,
He will send against him His burning wrath
to rain down upon him as he eats.
24Should he flee from the iron weapon,
a bow of bronze will pierce him.
25 Unsheathed, it comes out through his back,
the blade through his gall,
casting terror upon him.
26Sheer darkness lurks for his treasured larks,
a fire unfanned consumes him,
the remnant of his tent is smashed.
27The heavens will lay bare his crime
and earth will rise up against him.
28A torrent will take down his house,
pouring out on the day of His wrath.
29This is the wicked man’s share from God,
the inheritance God has willed him.
CHAPTER 20 NOTES
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2. by dint of my inner sense. Beginning with this clause, the language of Zophar’s entire speech is at many points unusually crabbed, and as a result some of the translation is conjectural. The term ḥush here has been construed by some to mean “hurry” or “agitation,” though it seems more likely that it carries its other meaning of “sense”—Zophar confidently declaring that his own theologically correct intuition has clearly instructed him how to answer Job.
3. a spirit from my mind. Literally, “my understanding.”
7. like his turd, he is lost forever. The preceding lines about the ephemerality of the wicked man’s success are boilerplate Wisdom poetry. Here, however, Zophar expresses his idea with scatological pungency. “Turd” makes a vivid counterpoint to “heavens” and “clouds” in the preceding line.
14. his food will turn in his innards— / vipers’ bile in his gut. This constitutes a strong culminating reversal of the extended description (verses 12 and 13) of the wicked man selfishly and sensually preserving in his mouth the sweet taste of his ill-gotten bounty.
15. from his belly God will expel them. The literal sense of the phrase is “from his belly God will reduce him to poverty [or take away all his gain].” The belly is featured prominently throughout this tirade as the bodily image of the wicked man’s greed.
18. like the goods, their value, and take no pleasure. This entire verset is extremely cryptic in the Hebrew. It might possibly mean that he will have to give back (first verset) either the goods he has wrongfully seized or their full value without having had the chance to enjoy them.
20. with his treasure. There are widely varying constructions of this phrase, but it seems likely that the bet before ḥamud, “treasure,” is a bet of agency. The sense, then, is that his ill-gotten wealth will be of no help to him on the day of disaster.
21. he cannot hope to have bounty. Again, the translation is conjectural.
23. as he eats. The literal sense of bileḥumo is “in his meat” or “in his flesh.” There are varying interpretations of the word here (some relate it to weaponry), but it would appear to carry forward the theme of the greedy man who stuffs his belly and then comes to grief.
24. a bow of bronze. This is, of course, an ellipsis for the arrow shot from the bronze bow.
25. Unsheathed. As the verb indicates, we have now switched to a different weapon, from bow to sword.
26. lurks for his treasured larks. The Hebrew uses two phonetically related terms both of which have the core sense of “hide” and the second of which often means “treasured” (that is, hidden because treasured—perhaps here the man’s children). The two Hebrew words in immediate sequence are tamun (frequently associated with traps) and tsefunaw (singular tsafun).
1And Job spoke up and he said:
2Hear, O hear my word,
and let this be your consolation.
3Bear with me while I speak,
and after I speak you may mock.
4Is my complaint directed to man,
and why should I not be impatient?
5Turn to me and be appalled,
put your hand over your mouth,
6when I recall and am dismayed,
and shuddering grips my flesh.
7 Why do the wicked live,
grow rich and gather wealth?
8Their seed is firm-founded before them,
their offspring before their eyes.
9Their homes are safe from fear,
and God’s rod is not against them.
10Their bull breeds and brings no miscarriage,
their cow calves and does not lose her young.
11They send out their little ones like a flock,
and their children go dancing.
12They carry the timbrel and lyre
and rejoice at the sound of the flute.
13 They pass their days in bounty,
and in an instant they go down to Sheol.
14And they say to God, “Turn away from us,
we have no desire to know Your ways.
15 Who is Shaddai that we should serve Him,
and what use for us to entreat Him?”
16Look, their bounty is not in their hands—
the counsel of the wicked is far from me!
17How often does the lamp of the wicked gutter
and their disaster come upon them—
does He portion out shares in His wrath,
18and are they as straw in the wind
and chaff that the storm has snatched?
19Does God set aside for His sons His affliction?
Let Him pay him back that he may know.
20Let his own eyes see his collapse,
and let him drink from Shaddai’s seething venom.
21For what will he care for his home when he’s gone,
and the number of his months broken off?
22Will he teach knowledge to God,
and will he judge those on high?
23One person dies full of innocence,
completely tranquil and at peace.
24His udders are filled with milk,
the marrow of his bones still moist.
25Another dies with a bitter heart,
and he has never enjoyed good.
26 Together in the dust they lie,
and the worm will cover them.
27Look, I know your plans,
and your violent schemes against me.
28When you say, “Where is the nobleman’s house,
and where is the tent of the wicked’s abode?”
29 Have you not asked the wayfarers,
and their tokens you cannot mistake?
30For on disaster’s day harm is held back,
on the day when wrath is unleashed.
31Who will tell to his face his way,
and for what he did, who will pay him back?
32And he is borne off to a sepulcher
and on the grave-mound someone keeps watch.
33The clods of the brook are sweet to him,
and every man is drawn after him,
and before him—beyond all number.
34And how do you console me with mere breath,
when your answers are naught but betrayal?
CHAPTER 21 NOTES
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2. consolation. Job’s use of this word is probably sarcastic: the friends, having purportedly come to “console” or “comfort” Job, have vilified him; his rejoinder now will set them straight.
5. put your hand over your mouth. This is a sign of horror (the Hebrew says “put hand over mouth”).
7. Why do the wicked live. The thriving of the wicked is the theme on which Job expands for the rest of this speech, in direct refutation of his three reprovers’ pat notion that the wicked always get their just deserts.
13. They pass their days in bounty, / and in an instant they go down to Sheol. After the elaborate picture of the wicked enjoying all the delights of worldly existence, rejoicing in their offspring (the greatest blessing in the biblical scale of values) and surrounded by material abundance, they are granted a quick and painless death.
15. Who is Shaddai that we should serve him. The formulation of this arrogant question may echo Pharaoh’s words to Moses and Aaron, “Who is the LORD that I should heed his voice?” (Exodus 5:2).
16. their bounty is not in their hands. This whole verse looks like a parenthetical interjection by Job: the riches of the wicked are not their own doing, and Job himself is far from sharing their arrogant dismissal of God. Nevertheless, they prosper.
17. portion out shares in His wrath. The Hebrew ḥavalim means both “pangs” and “shares,” but the verb “portion out” suggests that “shares” is the leading edge of the pun.
18. straw in the wind / … chaff that the storm has snatched. This image is a stock figure in Wisdom literature to represent the fate of destruction awaiting the wicked. Compare, for example, Psalm 1:4: “Not so the wicked, / but like chaff that the wind drives away.” Job’s argument, here and elsewhere, is that such language may sound good, but it does not jibe with the facts of experience.
19. Let Him pay him back. The second “him” refers to the wicked man, who, alas, is not paid back by God for his evil and hence never knows that there are consequences for wrongdoing.
20. his collapse. The Hebrew kido is anomalous, and the translation here follows an interpretive consensus that has been argued for on various grounds. One might emend the word to beʾeido, ʾeid meaning “disaster” (it occurs in verse 30) with the initial be used idiomatically before the object of the verb “to see.”
seething venom. The Hebrew means both “venom” and “smoldering wrath,” and so the translation adds “seething” to convey the double sense of the Hebrew pun.
21. when he’s gone. Literally, “after him.”
23. full of innocence. Many translations render the noun tom as something like “vigor” on the basis of the context here, but elsewhere it always means “innocence” or “blamelessness” (as in the frame-story of Job).
24. udders. The Hebrew ʿatinim occurs only here in the biblical corpus. The parallelism with the second verset requires a body part, and the Targum first understood it as udders (the established meaning of the word in modern Hebrew). It may seem incongruous to attach udders to a man, but the poet is probably thinking metaphorically of the fecundity of milch cows, and may also want to suggest a satirical image of the prospering wicked man fat from all he has eaten, with breastlike protuberances on his chest.
26. Together in the dust they lie. This idea is akin to a notion reiterated by Qohelet—that life portions out prosperity and misery arbitrarily, while in the end all share the fate of rotting in the grave.
28. the nobleman’s house, / … the wicked’s abode. Job was once a prospering nobleman. The fact that his house has been brought to ruin is adduced by the three reprovers as evidence that all along he has been wicked and now has gotten what he deserves.
29. Have you not asked the wayfarers. People who have traveled about and observed what actually happens in human affairs would be able to tell the three companions that, contrary to their complacent view, it is typically the wicked who thrive.
30. harm is held back. That is, the wicked are unscathed, even as disaster—storm, fire, marauders—sweeps away the innocent.
32. a sepulcher. The Hebrew plural qevurot, instead of the simple singular qever, “grave,” suggests something grand: even in death the grandeur of the wicked is not diminished.
33. after him, / … before him. The image is of numberless throngs of admirers of the wicked man gathered round his burial rite.
34. how do you console me with mere breath. The verb “console,” in an envelope structure, loops back to “your consolation” at the beginning of this poem. Hevel, “mere breath,” is the term repeatedly insisted on by Qohelet, meaning something utterly devoid of substance.
betrayal. This is the last, bitter word of Job’s speech: what is especially galling to him is that the three figures he thought were his friends have become his harsh denouncers.
1And Eliphaz the Temanite spoke up and he said:
2Will a man avail with God,
will the discerning avail with Him?
3Does Shaddai desire that you be in the right,
or profit if your ways are blameless?
4Is it for your reverence that He reproves you,
comes to judgment against you?
5 Why, your evil is great,
and there is no end to your crimes.
6For you take pawn from your brother for naught,
and strip the naked of their clothes.
7No water do you give to the famished,
and from the hungry you hold back bread.
8And the strong-armed possesses the land,
the privileged dwells upon it.
9Widows you send off empty-handed,
and the arms of the orphans are crushed.
10 And so there are traps all around you,
sudden fear will strike you with terror,
11or darkness, where you cannot see,
and a spate of water will cover you.
12 Is not God in the height of the heavens?
See the topmost stars that are lofty.
13And you say, “What does God know?
Through thick cloud can He judge?
14Clouds are His shelter—He does not see,
on the rim of the heavens He walks.”
15Would you keep the age-old path
on which wrongdoers trod,
16who are shriveled before their time,
their foundation pours out like a river?
17Who say to God, “Turn away from us,”
and what can Shaddai do to them?
18When He has filled their homes with bounty—
the counsel of the wicked be far from me!
19The righteous shall see and rejoice,
and the innocent shall mock them.
20Their substance is surely destroyed,
and their remnant the fire consumes.
21 Be accustomed to Him, be at peace,
and through this will your comings be blessed.
22Take, pray, from His mouth instruction,
and set His utterances in your heart.
23If you come back to Shaddai, you’re restored,
if you banish evil from your tent,
24and lay your gold down in the dust,
on a brook-bordered rock your Ophir treasure,
25and Shaddai will be your gold,
heaped up silver for you.
26For then you’ll take pleasure in Shaddai,
27You will entreat Him and He will hear you,
and your vows you will pay.
28You will decree and it will come to be,
and light will gleam on your ways.
29 When they sink low and you say “Pride,”
who casts his eyes down He rescues.
30He lets the guilty escape,
he escapes through your spotless palms.
CHAPTER 22 NOTES
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5. Why, your evil is great, / and there is no end to your crimes. Eliphaz’s entire speech is suffused with a sense of unreflective moral certitude. Since God gets no benefit from a man’s righteousness (verses 2–4), it follows “logically” that a man afflicted by God, as Job has been, is guilty of unspeakable crimes.
6. take pawn from your brother for naught. Eliphaz now launches on a catalogue of crimes that, like his poetry, is heavily formulaic: taking away clothes from the indigent (presumably, the clothes are the pawn—see Exodus 22:25), withholding bread and water from the hungry and thirsty, allowing the manipulation of the legal and economic system by the powerful, oppressing the widow and the orphan.
strip the naked of their clothes. This translation, like the King James Version, mirrors the wording of the Hebrew, which is, of course, a prolepsis: these victims become naked when they are stripped of their clothes.
10. And so. It follows as an inevitable consequence of all these unspeakable crimes that Job is condemned to terrible torment.
12. Is not God in the height of the heavens? These words begin an impious speech that Eliphaz puts in Job’s mouth: because God is high above, far removed from man and surrounded by thick cloud in His celestial abode, He surely cannot see what man does down below, and so a sinner like Job imagines he can act with impunity.
17. and what can Shaddai do to them. The first verset is the quoted speech of the wrongdoer; this second verset is essentially free indirect discourse—that is, someone’s speech conveyed in the third person.
18. the counsel of the wicked be far from me. This clause is virtually identical with 21:16. It makes more sense in context here than in Job’s speech, so one may suspect that it was inadvertently introduced into chapter 21 in scribal transcription.
21. Be accustomed to Him. This is the usual meaning of the verb hasken. The sense may be to enter into a habitual relationship of closeness with God.
blessed. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “be good.”
23. restored. Literally, “be built” (or “rebuilt”).
24. lay your gold down in the dust. Many interpreters understand this to mean, consider your gold as dust, but the preposition ʿal (“on,” or more idiomatically here in English, “in”) argues for the literal sense: Job is exhorted to strip himself of all his worldly possessions and to make God alone (verse 25) his treasure. Of course, disaster has already stripped him of his wealth; so either there is a disconnect with the frame-story, or Eliphaz is assuming that such a vicious exploiter as Job would have somehow continued to hide ill-gotten gains.
Ophir treasure. Ophir, to the south of the land of Israel, was celebrated for its fine gold. The Hebrew says simply “Ophir.”
26. lift up your face. Here this is a gesture of prayer.
28. gleam. Almost all the English versions say “shine,” but the Hebrew nagah is a specialized poetic word for giving off light.
29. When they sink low and you say “Pride.” Both this verse and the next are rather crabbed in the Hebrew and so the translation is conjectural. (To begin with, it is far from certain that the cryptic gewah means “pride” here.) The translation tentatively reconstructs the meaning as follows: the repentant Job encounters people fallen on bad times and condemns them for having been proud (as in “Pride before a breakdown,” Proverbs 16:18). When these unfortunates then embrace humility (“who casts his eyes down”), God rescues them. Though they were guilty (the meaning of ʾi-naqi in the next verse has been much contested), God enables them to escape from their disaster, granting them that favor because He takes into consideration the intervention on their behalf of the now blameless Job (“he escapes through your spotless palms”). All this is no more than an educated guess about the meaning of these two stubbornly obscure lines.
1And Job spoke up and he said:
2Even now my complaint is defiant,
His hand lies heavy as I groan.
3Would that I knew how to find Him,
that I might come to where He dwells.
4I would lay out my case before Him
and would fill my mouth with contentions.
5I would know the words that He answered me,
and would grasp what He said to me.
6With great power would He debate me?
No! He alone would pay heed to me.
7There the upright can contend with Him,
I would get away for all time from my Judge.
8Look, to the east I go, and He is not there,
to the west, and I do not discern Him,
9To the north where He acts, and behold Him not,
He veils the south, and I do not see Him.
10For He knows the way with me,
tests me—I come out as gold.
11 To His steps my foot held fast,
His way I kept, and I did not swerve.
12From His lips’ command I did not turn,
in my bosom I stored His mouth’s dictates.
13Yet He wants but one thing—and who can divert Him?
What he desires He will do.
14For He will finish out my fixed tally,
and much more of the same is with Him.
15So I am dismayed before Him,
I look, am afraid of Him.
16And God has made my heart quail,
Shaddai has dismayed me.
17For I am not severed from darkness,
and my face the gloom has covered.
CHAPTER 23 NOTES
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2. His hand lies heavy as I groan. This is the first of a series of obscure clauses in this speech. The literal sense is “my hand was heavy on my groan.” The translation emends “my hand,” yadi, to “His hand,” yado, a very small difference in Hebrew script. The preposition “on” before “groan” is understood to mean something like “in the midst of”—hence, “as I groan.”
4. lay out my case. Job again resorts to his fantasy of meeting God for a fair legal argument in court.
6. He alone would pay heed to me. The Hebrew says literally “pay [or put] in [against?] me.” An ellipsis or omission is assumed here: pay heed (sim lev). The idea seems to be that if only Job could have his day in court with God, his divine persecutor would put aside His advantage of overwhelming power and pay attention to Job’s argument in his own defense.
8. east … / west. These directional terms, like the ones in the next verse, can also refer to forward, backward, left, and right, and interpreters are divided as to which set of references is intended here. Since Job has spoken about searching out the place where God dwells (verse 3), the points of the compass seem more likely, and it makes more sense for God to “veil” (verse 9) the south than the right hand.
11. To His steps my foot held fast. It must be said that the language of this verse and the next sounds more like a conventionally pious Wisdom psalm (compare Psalm 119) than like Job. Given the relatively undistinguished poetry of this chapter and its textual difficulties, one might suspect that at least some of this text has been smuggled in from another source.
12. in my bosom. The translation reads beḥeiqi instead of the Masoretic meiḥuqi, “from my statute [tally?].” This reading is reflected in the Septuagint and the Vulgate. A scribal error might have been triggered by the occurrence of ḥuqi in verse 14.
13. He wants but one thing. The literal sense is “He is in one.”
14. He will finish out my fixed tally. The probable reference is to the tally of Job’s afflictions. The same verb and object, hishlim ḥoq, occur in Exodus 5:14 in reference to the tally of bricks of the Hebrew slaves.
and much more of the same is with Him. God has an abundance of further nasty things that he can inflict on human beings.
17. my face. The received text reads “from my face” (or “from my presence”), mipanay, but the suspect initial mem (“from”) before the word for “face” is probably a dittography induced by the occurrence of mipney (“from” or “from before”) in the first verset.
1 Why are dire times not stored by Shaddai
and those who know Him behold not his days?
2 They set aside boundary stones,
a flock they steal and pasture it.
3The orphans’ donkey they drive off, they take in pawn the widow’s ox.
9[ They steal the orphan from the breast,
and the poor man’s suckling they take in pawn.]
4They push the paupers from the road,
together the earth’s poor go in hiding.
5Why, like wild asses in the wilderness
they go forth on their task
searching for food,
the steppe offers bread to the lads.
6In the field they harvest their fodder,
glean leavings from the wicked’s vineyard,
7naked, pass the night with no garment
and no clothing in the cold.
8By the mountain stream they are soaked
and unsheltered they hug a rock.
10Naked, they go round with no garment,
and hungry, they carry the sheaf.
11In the groves they make olive oil,
they trample the winepresses and they thirst.
12From the town the folk groan,
the dying breath of the fallen cries out,
and God finds no cause for blame.
13They joined the rebels against the light,
they did not know its ways,
and they did not dwell in its paths.
14 By light the murderer rises,
he slays the poor and the indigent,
and at night he is like a thief.
15The adulterer’s eye watches for twilight,
saying, “No eye will make me out.”
He puts a mask on his face.
16They tunnel by dark into houses.
By day they seal themselves up.
They do not know light.
17 For morning to all them is death’s shadow
when they know the terrors of death’s shadow.
18 Let him be swiftly swept off on the waters,
cursed be his field in the land.
Let him not turn on the vineyard path.
19Parched land and heat steal away the snow;
20Let the womb forget him.
He is sweet to the worm.
Let him no more be recalled,
and let wickedness break like wood.
21Let his mate be barren and not give birth,
left a widow denied of good.
22 He who hauled bulls with his strength
will stand up and not trust in his life.
23 Though God grant him safety on which he relies,
His eyes are on their ways:
24They are on top a moment and are gone.
Laid low, like the weeds they shrivel,
and like heads of grain they wither.
25If it be not so, who will give me the lie,
and render my word as naught?
CHAPTER 24 NOTES
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1. Why are dire times not stored by Shaddai. In this verse, the individual words and their syntactical connection are perfectly clear, but the meaning remains obscure. “Dire” has been added interpretively to “times,” following one prevalent construction of the verse. The sense then would be, why does God fail to reserve a time of punishment for the wicked, and why does He not allow His faithful to see His days of judgment?
2. They. The reference switches to the wicked, the ones Shaddai should punish.
9. They steal the orphan from the breast. This verse, bracketed to indicate it is probably out of place, does not seem to belong between verses 8 and 10, which are part of a description of the destitute who have been forced to flee to the wilderness, but it does fit here in the report of victimizing widows and orphans.
5. like wild asses. The “like” is merely implied in the Hebrew. Those who are now like these untamed beasts are the destitute who have run off to the badlands in order to escape persecution.
the steppe offers bread to the lads. The impoverished young are driven to forage in the wilderness for whatever sustenance they can find.
6. fodder. The term, generally indicating animal feed, reflects the bleak circumstances to which these destitute refugees have been reduced.
10. hungry, they carry the sheaf. They labor for landowners, carrying sheaves of grain from which they cannot partake. The same idea is expressed in the next verse in the image of trampling grapes while going thirsty.
12. God finds no cause for blame. This summarizing clause succinctly states Job’s indictment of divine justice: the poor go hungry and thirsty, brutally exploited by the ruthless rich; multitudes of murdered people cry out in their death throes; yet God sees nothing awry.
By light the murderer rises. Some interpreters, through a rather forced invocation of a rabbinic idiom, claim that ʾor means “evening,” not “light.” But the plain meaning of the line, in complementary parallelism, is that the murderer gets up in broad daylight to commit his crime impudently, and then at night, in a different criminal style, sneaks around to do more of the same.
16. By day they seal themselves up. The reference is not entirely clear. Perhaps the clause suggests that after tunneling into the house, the thieves shut and shutter it in daylight so they can ransack its contents with impunity. This would provide a practical explanation for “They do not know light”—both night and day they work in darkness. At the same time, these words obviously catch up the larger symbolic significance of the criminals’ status as “rebels against the light (verse 13).”
17. For morning to all them is death’s shadow. In the perverted world of the criminals, they fear the light that would expose them as others fear the darkness of death.
18. Let him be swiftly swept off on the waters. The passage that runs from here to the end of verse 24 is one of the most notoriously obscure in the Book of Job. Some scholars think it belongs in its entirety either to chapter 25 (where a sizable section of Bildad’s speech has obviously been lost) or to chapter 26. Such radical transporting of chunks of text is based on risky conjecture, and so it seems best to leave the passage where it is, construing the verbs as curse-forms (their form in the Hebrew gives no clear indication of their mode): may all these dire things befall the wicked whose offenses have just been enumerated.
swiftly swept off. The Hebrew says only “swift.”
Let him not turn on the vineyard path. The wicked man, his own field cursed, is condemned to wander in wasteland, not to enjoy a pleasant stroll through any fruitful vineyard.
19. steal away the snow. The Hebrew says “snow waters,” telescoping the snow and its melting and evaporation, but that phrase sounds cumbersome in English.
Sheol, those who offend. That is, just as the desert heat melts the snow, the underworld takes away those who offend. But this entire line has probably been damaged because there are five accented syllables in the first verset and just two in the second verset, an extreme imbalance that is not admissible in biblical versification.
20. womb … / worm. In a neat encompassing maneuver, the line moves from womb to tomb in cursing the life of the wicked man.
22. He who hauled bulls with his strength. This rendering is an educated guess at the meaning of the Hebrew.
in his life. The Masoretic Text reads “in life,” baḥayin (with an unusual Aramaic ending), but some manuscripts more plausibly have beḥayaw, “in his life.”
23. Though God grant him safety. The Hebrew reads merely “he,” but the antecedent that makes the best sense of this sentence is God. The idea, then, would be that God may accord the wicked temporary security, but He continues to scrutinize their acts (the Hebrew swings from singular to plural as it does elsewhere in the passage), and retribution will come. It must be said that this view sounds more like one of the three friends than like anything we would expect from Job. Perhaps we can justify verses 22–24 as integral to Job’s speech by seeing them as statements impelled by the momentum of the preceding series of curses against the wicked: having wished them to be swept away and driven into the grave, Job now indulges in a kind of fantasy that his wishes will really be fulfilled, that the triumphant wicked will actually get their just deserts from God.
24. like the weeds. The received text reads “like all,” kakol. But the Qumran text of the Aramaic Targum shows kayablaʾ, “like the weed,” which might reflect kayablit in the Hebrew, and that reading is followed here.
1And Bildad the Shuhite spoke up and he said:
2Dominion and fear are with Him,
Who makes peace in His heights.
3Is there a number to His brigades,
and on whom does His light not rise?
4And how can man be right with God,
how can he born of woman be clear?
5Why, the moon itself does not give light,
and the stars are not clear in His sight.
6How much more, man the maggot,
and humankind the worm.
26:5The shades shudder down below,
the waters and their denizens.
6 Sheol is naked before Him,
and Perdition is without garb.
7He stretches Zaphon over the void,
hangs earth over emptiness,
8bundles water in His clouds,
the scud does not burst below,
9covers the face of the throne,
spreads His cloud upon it,
10 draws a circle over the water
to the border of light and darkness.
11The heavens’ pillars quaver,
are dumbfounded by His roar.
12Through His power He subdued Yamm,
and in His cunning He smashed Rahab.
13 With His wind He bagged the Waters.
His hand cut down the elusive Serpent.
14Why, these are but the least of His ways,
the tag end of the word that is heard of Him.
And His might’s thunder who can grasp?
CHAPTER 25 NOTES
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Bildad’s speech as we have it in the received text—only six verses—is inordinately brief, less than a third the length of the other speeches in the debate, and a section or sections of it almost certainly have been displaced or lost in the process of scribal copying. This translation follows a common proposal in transposing 26:5–14 to Bildad’s discourse here. Those verses, which are wholly devoted to a rhapsodic celebration of God’s cosmic powers, are altogether implausible as part of Job’s speech, though that is how they are assigned in the received text.
2. Who makes peace in His heights. This clause, which was later adopted in the Jewish liturgy for the conclusion of the kaddish, may well refer, as Pope has suggested, to God’s victory in a primordial battle of gods. The reference to “brigades” in the next line suggests that idea, and if in fact 26:5–14 is a direct continuation of this speech, the invocation of a triumphant warrior god there would be a further development of this mythological plot.
3. on whom does His light not rise. As the next two lines make clear, these words suggest that God’s searching scrutiny holds all beings, terrestrial and celestial, to account.
5. the moon itself does not give light. In God’s stern judgment, even the bright moon is considered to be dim.
the stars are not clear. The Hebrew uses a strategic pun because the verb zaku can mean both “to be pure” (or “innocent”) and “to be bright.”
26:5. down below. This adverb is moved here from the beginning of the second verset, where the Masoretic cantillation marks place it, to the end of the first verset, where it makes better sense and rhythm.
6. Sheol is naked before him. Even the depths of the underworld are exposed to God’s searching gaze. (Compare 25:3.)
7. Zaphon. Zaphon is the mountain dwelling of Baal, the Syro-Canaanite weather god. This mythological reference sets the stage for the invocation of the battle with the primordial sea monster in verses 11–13.
8. below. The Hebrew says “below them,” the third-person plural suffix referring back to “clouds” in the first verset.
10. draws a circle over the water / to the border of light and darkness. The essential idea is that God circumscribes the roiling sea, preventing it from surging over the dry land. The border of light and darkness would have to be the horizon, which may not be logically correct but is poetically evocative as an image of fixing a vast boundary on the sea, from the horizon to—implicitly—the edge of the land.
12. Yamm / … Rahab. These, as we have seen earlier, are different names for the menacing sea god who is subdued by YHWH (or, in the Canaanite version, Baal), Who pushes back the forces of chaos and establishes the created order.
13. With His wind He bagged the Waters. The Hebrew here is somewhat obscure, but a construction that continues the picture of a primordial battle against the sea monster seems plausible. Thus, following Tur-Sinai, the translation understands the anomalous shifrah to be a cognate of the Akkadian term that means “net,” and instead of the Masoretic shamayim, “heavens,” sam mayim, “He put the Waters [in a net, shifrah],” is assumed. The Water is given an uppercase W here because it appears to be a poetic epithet for Yamm.
1And Job spoke up and he said:
2How have you helped without power,
rescued by an arm without strength?
3How have you counseled without wisdom,
and abundantly proffered advice?
4To whom have you told words,
and whose breath has come out of you?
CHAPTER 26 NOTES
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Chapters 26 and 27 sharply reflect the damaged state of the text of the whole sequence of chapters leading to Job’s last confession of innocence. As noted in the initial comment on chapter 25, only the first four verses of chapter 26 can plausibly be attributed to Job. The formula that begins chapter 27, “And Job again took up his theme,” would seem to signal the end of the debate proper and the introduction of Job’s long confession of innocence that runs to the end of chapter 31. But verses 8–23 of chapter 27 are an emphatic declaration in the style of the three reprovers that God invariably punishes the guilty. Attempts to save these verses as Job’s discourse by reading them as irony are forced and quite unconvincing. One of the three friends must be the speaker, and the most likely suspect, as many scholars have inferred, is Zophar, whose contribution to the third round of debate is missing from the received text. A bracketed formulaic sentence introducing these lines as Zophar’s speech has been added in the translation before verse 8. Verses 8–23, however, could not be the entirety of Zophar’s speech because the passage breaks off abruptly and is about half the length of the other speeches in the debate.
2. helped without power. Some understand this to mean: help someone who has no power. Given the parallelism, however, with offering counsel without wisdom in the next line, it is far more likely to refer to pretending to help when the one offering help is powerless to do so. What remains puzzling is that the second person is singular where one would expect Job to address all three friends.
2–4. These verses break off, to be followed by a new formula for introducing Job’s speech. Either a long section has been lost, or these lines belong somewhere in a previous speech of Job’s.
1And Job again took up his theme and he said:
2 By God, Who denied me justice
and by Shaddai Who embittered my life,
3as long as my breath is within me,
and God’s spirit in my nostrils,
4my lips will never speak evil,
nor my tongue ever utter deceit.
5Far be it from me to declare you right,
till I breathe my last I will not renounce my virtue.
6To my rightness I cling, I will not let go,
my heart has not caused reproach all my days.
7Let my enemy be deemed a wicked man
and my adversary a wrongdoer.
[And Zophar the Naamathite spoke up and he said:]
8 For what hope has the tainted to profit,
when God takes away his life?
9Will God hear his scream
when disaster befalls him?
10Will he delight in Shaddai,
will he call upon God at all times?
11 Let me teach you with God’s own force,
what is with Shaddai I will not conceal.
12 Look, all of you have beheld it,
and why do you spew empty breath?
13This is the wicked man’s share with God,
the portion that oppressors take from Shaddai.
14If his sons be many, it is for the sword,
and his offspring will go without bread.
15 His survivors will be buried in the death-plague,
and his widows will not keen.
16Should he heap up silver like dust
and like mud lay up apparel,
17he’ll lay up, and the just man will wear it,
and the silver the blameless share out.
18He will build his house like the moth,
like a shack that a watchman puts up.
19Rich he lies down— it’s not taken away.
He opens up his eyes and it’s gone.
20Terror will take him like water;
by night the storm snatches him up.
21 The east wind bears him off and he’s gone,
it sweeps him away from his place.
22It flings itself on him unsparing,
from its power he strives to flee.
23 It claps its hands against him,
and hisses at him from its place.
CHAPTER 27 NOTES
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2. By God … / by Shaddai. Job begins his confession of innocence by pronouncing a solemn oath in the name of the very deity who has been persecuting him.
8. . For what hope has the tainted to profit. This speech begins with a recurrent central theme of the friends’ verbal assault on Job: the man who has polluted himself through evil acts will never really profit from them because God’s stern retribution will overtake him (as it has overtaken Job).
11. Let me teach you with God’s own force. This smug assumption that the speaker knows what God knows about good and evil, reward and punishment, is characteristic of the friends.
12. Look, all of you have beheld it, / and why do you spew empty breath? These impatient words make sense coming from Zophar as the last of the three reprovers to speak in the debate. He turns to his two friends and berates them for not making their case against Job more forcefully clear to him.
15. his widows will not keen. The plural, of course, presupposes polygamy. Presumably, the widows will not mourn because they have no use for their good-for-nothing husband.
19. it’s not taken away. The referent of the Hebrew verb is ambiguous, but it seems likely that it refers to the rich man’s wealth.
20. like water. Although some emend this word, thinking it an odd simile, it may simply refer to the way a flood overwhelms a person or sweeps him away—a very common image for death or disaster in Psalms. “Water” and “storm” would then be parallel terms for destruction in the two versets.
21. the east wind. As elsewhere (including the frame-story), the east wind, blowing from the desert, parches and blights.
23. . claps its hands … / hisses. Both are conventional gestures of scorn, but at the same time the sounds of clapping and hissing or whistling neatly evoke the violent motion of the storm wind.
1Yes, there’s a mine for silver
and a place where gold is refined.
2Iron from the dust is taken
and from stone the copper to smelt.
3 An end has man set to darkness,
and each limit he has probed,
the stone of deep gloom and death’s shadow.
4He breaks under a stream without dwellers,
forgotten by any foot,
remote and devoid of men.
5The earth from which bread comes forth,
and beneath it a churning like fire.
6The source of the sapphire, its stones,
and gold dust is there.
7A path that the vulture knows not
nor the eye of the falcon beholds.
8The proud beasts have never trod on it,
nor the lion passed over it.
9To the flintstone he set his hand,
upended mountains from their roots.
10Through the rocks he hacked out channels,
and all precious things his eye has seen.
11The wellsprings of rivers he blocked.
What was hidden he brought out to light.
12But wisdom, where is it found,
and where is the place of discernment?
13Man does not know its worth,
and it is not found in the land of the living.
14The Deep has said, “It is not in me,”
and the Sea has said, “It is not with me.”
15 It cannot be got for fine gold,
nor can silver be paid as its price.
16It cannot be weighed in the gold of Ophir,
in precious onyx and sapphire.
17Gold and glass cannot equal it,
nor its worth in golden vessels.
18Coral and crystal—not to be mentioned,
wisdom’s value surpasses rubies.
19Ethiopian topaz can’t equal it,
in pure gold it cannot be weighed.
20 And wisdom, from where does it come,
and where is the place of discernment?
21It is hidden from the eye of all living,
from the fowl of the heavens, concealed.
22 Perdition and Death have said,
“With our own ears we heard its rumor.”
23God grasps its way,
and He knows its place.
24For He looks to the ends of the earth,
beneath all the heavens He sees,
25 to gauge the heft of the wind,
and to weigh water with a measure,
26when He fixes a limit for rain
and a way for the thunderhead.
27Then He saw and recounted it,
set it firm and probed it, too.
28And He said to man:
Look, fear of the Master, that is wisdom,
and the shunning of evil is insight.
CHAPTER 28 NOTES
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1. Yes, there’s a mine for silver. This rhapsodic celebration of divine wisdom is clearly not part of the debate between Job and his three reprovers, and the strong scholarly consensus is that it is an editorial interpolation, perhaps with the aim of introducing a pious view of wisdom in this book that is such a radical challenge to the guiding assumptions of Wisdom literature. Robert Gordis, noting some affinities with the general poetic language of Job, imagines that this is an earlier composition by the Job poet, which he decided to insert here as a kind of interlude before Job’s final confession of innocence. That proposal, though beguiling, is fanciful: this looks like the work of another poet with a very different worldview. As a hymn to divine wisdom, however, it does exhibit considerable poetic force.
silver / … gold. These precious substances appear later in the poem in the list of objects of value that cannot equal the worth of wisdom. The mining of silver and gold and then the smelting of copper also introduce the notion of man’s technological resourcefulness. As the lines that follow vividly declare, man searches out all the remote places of the earth, sinking mine shafts into the depths of the ground, damming rivers, everywhere in ardent pursuit of treasure. Yet all this brilliant technology is nothing in comparison to the value of real wisdom.
a place where gold is refined. The movement from the source of silver in the first verset to the place of refining gold in the second verset participates in the general pattern of narrative development between the two halves of lines in biblical poetry.
3. An end has man set to darkness. The Hebrew says merely “he has set”; the implied antecedent, “man,” has been added for the sake of clarity. Given the image in the third verset of stone as the abode of darkness, what is probably suggested here is that man, tunneling into stone for precious minerals, opens it to the light, or, perhaps, brings torchlight down into the mines.
4. breaks under a stream. This is a poetic image of digging tunnels under rivers.
5. beneath it a churning like fire. Although it is unlikely that the poet had any notion of the earth’s molten core, he seems to have had a sense of what is beneath the surface of the earth as a realm of fluid unstable forces, while the surface above provides humankind its daily bread.
8. The proud beasts have never trod on it. The places that man the restless miner reaches in his quest for precious minerals are so remote that even wild animals do not live there. The existence of copper mines in the rocky desert region near the Gulf of Aqaba might have encouraged this image.
12. But wisdom, where is it found. All this human searching into the dark and remote places of the earth may discover treasure but not what is far more precious, wisdom.
15. fine gold. This is the first of four different Hebrew terms for gold that the poet deploys in the next five lines.
20.And wisdom, from where does it come. The use of this entire line as a refrain is in keeping with the celebratory purpose of the poem.
22. Perdition and Death. This mythological pair answers to the pair, Deep and Sea, in verse 14. The effect of both is to give a cosmic sweep to the celebration of divine wisdom: it is not to be found in the sea or the great abyss or the underworld realm of death but only with God.
25.to gauge the heft of the wind. The wind, of course, cannot be weighed—except by God.
to weigh water with a measure. Several English versions render this as “mete out water with a measure.” The point, however, is not that God doles out measures of water but rather that He alone, as Creator, can weigh the huge mass of the primordial waters.
27.Then He saw and recounted it. The past tense of the verbs indicates that this act of divine reflection comes at the end of the process of creation, a process intimated in verses 24–26. The poet may have in mind the reiterated “And He saw that it was good” in the first account of creation. The recounting, then, might be the authoritative narrative of creation in Genesis.
set it firm. This is the verb regularly used for establishing things on a firm foundation—houses, dynasties, the world.
and probed it, too. God not only set creation on a firm foundation but also, through His unique wisdom, searched out and understood every one of its components.
28. And He said to man. This clause (two words in the Hebrew) is an extra-metrical introduction to the concluding line of the poem. Extrametrical elements, especially for the introduction of direct speech, are fairly common in prophetic poetry.
fear of the Master … / the shunning of evil. The reiterated question in the refrain of where is wisdom is now given a resonant answer at the very end of the poem. But such neat confidence is alien to the Job poet, even where he evokes God’s speech at the end of the book.
the Master. The Hebrew uses ʾadonai here, and only here, in the Book of Job, which has led some scholars to think it is textually suspect. Many manuscripts read YHWH, but that divine name is also not used in Job until the Voice from the Whirlwind. Since by the Late Biblical period YHWH was pronounced as though it were ʾadonai, that may have led to the switch here, though it is hard to know which term was the original one.
1 And Job again took up his theme and he said:
2Would that I were as in moons of yore,
as the days when God watched over me,
3 when He shone his lamp over my head,
by its light I walked in darkness,
4as I was in the days of my prime—
5when Shaddai still was with me,
6when my feet bathed in curds
and the rock poured out streams of oil,
7when I went out to the city’s gate,
in the square I secured my seat.
8Lads saw me and took cover,
the aged arose, stood up.
9Noblemen held back their words,
their palm they put to their mouth.
10The voice of the princes was muffled,
their tongue to their palate stuck.
11When the ear heard, it affirmed me,
and the eye saw and acclaimed me.
12For I would free the poor who cried out,
the orphan with no one to help him.
13The perishing man’s blessing would reach me,
and the widow’s heart I made sing.
14Righteousness I donned and it clothed me,
like a cloak and a headdress, my justice.
15Eyes I became for the blind,
and legs for the lame I was.
16A father I was for the impoverished,
a stranger’s cause I took up.
17And I cracked the wrongdoer’s jaws,
from his teeth I would wrench the prey.
18And I thought: In my nest I shall breathe my last,
and my days will abound like the sand.
19My root will be open to water,
and dew in my branches abide,
20my glory renewed within me,
and my bow ever fresh in my hand.
21To me they would listen awaiting
and fall silent at my advice.
22 At my speech they would say nothing further,
and upon them my word would drop.
23They waited for me as for rain,
and gaped open their mouths as for showers.
24 I laughed to them—they scarcely trusted—
but my face’s light they did not dim.
25I chose their way and sat as chief,
I dwelled like a king in his brigade when he comforts the mourning.
CHAPTER 29 NOTES
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1. And Job again took up his theme. With the repetition of this formula from 27:1, we are back on track with Job’s concluding confession of innocence.
3. when He shone his lamp over my head. The concrete image is of God “watching over” Job solicitously, holding a lit oil lamp (which would have been a wick in oil in a shallow concave ceramic dish) above him so that he can walk safely through the dark.
4. God an intimate of my tent. Literally, “When God’s council [that is, His exclusive intimate company] was at my tent.”
5. my lads. Though the Hebrew neʿarim could refer either to Job’s seven dead sons or to his retainers, the latter meaning is more likely because the context here is Job’s recollection of the imposing standing in society he enjoyed before all the disasters befell him.
6. curds / … oil. These are, of course, hyperbolic expressions of affluence. Compare Deuteronomy 32:13: “He suckled him honey from the crag / and oil from the flinty stone.”
7. the city’s gate, / … the square. The square before the city’s gate was the place where justice was deliberated, and Job, as the leading notable of the community—compare verses 8–11—would have had a regular place there.
11. affirmed me. The verb ʾasher literally means to say ʾashrey, “happy is he.”
12. I would free the poor. Exercising his role in administering justice, Job acted on behalf of the helpless—the poor, the orphan, the widow, the man about to perish, the handicapped, the victim of wrongdoing (verses 12–17).
18. In my nest I shall breathe my last. As a consequence of a life dedicated to virtuous acts, Job thought he had every reason to expect he would die a tranquil death in the bosom of his family.
my days will abound like the sand. The Hebrew word for “sand,” ḥol, has a homonym that means “phoenix,” and many interpreters have been attracted to that meaning because the phoenix is eternal, reborn out of its own ashes. However, Job is not imagining eternal life, only a very long life, and the equation between (grains of) sand and things so abounding, or so many (the verbal stem r-b-h, as here) that they are innumerable, is a common biblical idiom.
20. within me. The literal sense of the Hebrew preposition is “with me” or “alongside me.”
my bow ever fresh in my hand. The poet probably has in mind that after very extended usage, the bowstring begins to go slack and the wood of the bow loses its spring, but this bow—a metaphor for Job’s strength—is constantly renewed.
22. At my speech they would say nothing further. This verse and the previous one pick up the theme of verses 9 and 10. Some critics have proposed moving these lines to earlier in the poem for the sake of seamless continuity, but such wholesale rearrangement of the text seems neither necessary nor warranted.
my word would drop. The “dropping” is of a liquid, and is close to “drip,” an image of blessed fructification in a semiarid region that was reflected in verse 19 and is vividly developed in verse 23.
24. I laughed to them—they scarcely trusted. This whole verse is the one obscure juncture in an otherwise transparent chapter. The interpretation assumed in this translation is that Job, expatiating to his listeners, expresses a joyfulness that they in their plight can hardly trust, yet they do not presume to object to his buoyant mood. The verb understood here as “dim” has given rise to widely divergent constructions and hence to very different readings of the line.
25. when he comforts the mourning. Some critics, puzzled by this clause, have drastically emended the Hebrew, but it seems reasonably intelligible as it stands in the received text: Job, like a king in the midst of his royal brigade, offers comfort to those of his men who have suffered losses—metaphorically, the loss of comrades fallen in battle—as in general he has rescued victims, fought on behalf of orphans and widows, and so forth.
1And now mere striplings laugh at me
to put with the dogs of my flock.
2 The strength of their hands—what use to me?
From them the vigor has gone:
3 In want and starvation bereft
they flee to desert land,
the darkness of desolate dunes,
4plucking saltwort from the bush,
the roots of broom wood their bread.
5 From within they are banished—
people shout over them as at thieves.
6In river ravines they encamp,
holes in the dust and crags.
7Among bushes they bray,
beneath thorn plants they huddle.
8Vile creatures and nameless, too,
they are struck from the land.
9And now I become their taunt,
I become their mocking word.
10They despised me, were distant to me,
and from my face they did not spare their spit.
11For my bowstring they loosed and abused me,
cast off restraint toward me.
12On the right, raw youths stand up,
and pave against me their roadways of ruin.
13They shatter my path,
my disaster devise,
and none helps me against them.
14Like a wide water-burst they come,
in the shape of a tempest they
15Terror rolls over me,
pursues my path like the wind,
and my rescue like a cloud passes on.
16 And now my life spills out,
days of affliction seize me.
17 At night my limbs are pierced,
and my sinews know no rest.
18 With great power He seizes my garment,
grabs hold of me at the collar.
19He hurls me into the muck,
and I become like dust and ashes.
20 I scream to You and You do not answer,
I stand still and You do not observe me.
21You become a cruel one toward me,
with the might of Your hand You hound me.
22 You bear me up, on the wind make me straddle,
23For I know You’ll return me to death,
the meetinghouse of all living things.
24 But one would not reach out against the afflicted
if in his disaster he screamed.
25 Have I not wept for the bleak-fated man,
sorrowed for the impoverished?
26For I hoped for good and evil ca1me.
I expected light and darkness fell.
27My innards seethed and would not be still,
days of affliction greeted me.
28In gloom did I walk, with no sun,
I rose in assembly and I screamed.
29Brother I was to the jackals,
companion to ostriches.
30My skin turned black upon me,
my limbs were scorched by drought.
31And my lyre has turned into mourning,
my flute, a keening sound.
CHAPTER 30 NOTES
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1. mere striplings. The Hebrew says “ones younger than I” or, more literally, “lesser than I in days.”
whose fathers I spurned. The society in which Job was once one of the greatest of those who dwell in the East is hierarchical in regard both to social-economic standing and to age. Even the fathers of Job’s mockers would have been beneath his notice, unfit to run with his sheep dogs, and how much more so their half-baked sons.
2. the strength of their hands—what use to me? Job’s mockers assail him in the ostensible vigor of their youth, but he imagines that it will vanish in a moment, and he proceeds to elaborate a fantasy of the striplings turned into miserable pariahs banished to the wilderness (verses 3–8).
3. the darkness of desolate dunes. The Hebrew shows prominent alliteration and wordplay: ʾemesh shoʾah umeshoʾah. The last two words would literally mean something like “desolation and desolateness.”
5. from within. The Hebrew min-gew is the first of a whole series of obscure places in this chapter. Some interpreters, arguing from a proposed Northwest Semitic cognate, understand it to mean “from the community.” In rabbinic Hebrew, gew or go can mean “inside,” and that linguistic connection seems less of a stretch than the purported Semitic cognate. “Within” then would refer to home, companionship, the boundaries of civilized habitation.
7. they bray. The Hebrew verb yinhaqu, generally used for donkeys, nicely conveys the reduction of the banished men to brutishness.
9. And now I become their taunt. Job, having vividly conjured up the wretched fate deserved by, or about to overtake, his young mockers, now bitterly turns to the unrestrained derision to which they are subjecting him.
11. my bowstring they loosed. The slackening of the bowspring is an image of deprivation of power, of unmanning.
12. they make me run off. Literally, “they send off my feet.”
15. my path. The translation reads netivati, “my path,” with several manuscripts and the Syriac version, instead of the Masoretic nedivati (“my nobility”?).
my rescue like a cloud passes on. There is no need to see, as many interpreters have done, an exotic meaning in yeshuʿati, which everywhere else means “rescue.” Job, cast into deepest desperation, sees a fleeting vision of his hoped-for rescue sailing off from him like a cloud.
17. my limbs are pierced. One might also understand this as “He pierces my limbs,” the antecedent being God.
18. With great power He seizes my garment. The wording of this entire verse is obscure, and hence any translation is conjectural.
20. You do not observe me. The received text reads “You observe me,” but various manuscripts as well as the Vulgate show the negative.
22. storm. The marginal gloss (qeri) instructs us to read the word in the Hebrew consonantal text, tushiwah, as tushiah, “wisdom” or “prudence,” but it is more likely a variant spelling of teshuʿah, “uproar” or “storm.”
24. the afflicted / … he screamed. The verse as it stands in the received text is opaque. The translation reads ʿani, “the afflicted,” for the Masoretic ʿi, “heap of ruins,” and shiweaʿ, “he screamed,” for shuaʿ, “nobleman.” If all this is correct, the idea would be that no one would abuse a helpless suffering person—so why does God persecute me in this way?
25. bleak-fated. Literally, “hard of day.”
29. Brother I was to the jackals. In a painful reversal, the fate of brutalization and banishment from society that Job conjured up for his mockers has befallen him instead.
1A pact I sealed with my eyes—
I will not gaze on a virgin.
2And what is the share from God above,
the portion from Shaddai in the heights?
3Is there not ruin for the wrongdoer,
and estrangement for those who do evil?
4Does He not see my way,
and all my steps count?
5Have I walked in a lie,
has my foot hurried to deceit?
6Let Him weigh me on fair scales,
that God know my blamelessness.
7If my stride has strayed from the way,
and my heart gone after my eyes,
or the least thing stuck to my palms,
8 let me sow and another shall eat,
my offspring torn up by the roots.
9If my heart was seduced by a woman,
and at the door of my friend I lurked,
10let my wife grind for another
and upon her let others crouch.
11For that is lewdness,
and that is a grave crime.
12For it is fire that consumes to Perdition,
and in all my yield eats the roots.
13If I spurned the case of my slave
or my slavegirl in their brief against me,
14what would I do when God stands up,
and when He assays it, what would I answer?
15 Why, my Maker made him in the belly,
and formed him in the selfsame womb.
16Did I hold back the poor from their desire
or make the eyes of the widow pine?
17Did I eat my bread alone,
and an orphan not eat from it?
18 For from my youth like a father I raised him,
and from my mother’s womb I led him.
19If I saw a man failing, ungarbed,
and no garment for the impoverished,
20did his loins not then bless me,
and from my sheep’s shearing was he not warmed?
21If I raised my hand against an orphan,
when I saw my advantage in the gate,
22let my shoulder fall out of its socket
and my arm break off from its shaft.
23For ruin from God is my fear,
and His presence I cannot withstand.
24If I made gold my bulwark,
and fine gold I called my trust,
25if I rejoiced that my wealth was great
and that abundance my hand had found,
26if I saw light when it gleamed
and the moon gliding grand,
27and my heart was seduced in secret,
and my hand caressed my mouth,
28this, too, would be a grave crime,
for I would have denied God above.
29If I rejoiced at my foe’s disaster,
and exulted when harm found him out—
30yet I did not let my mouth offend
to seek out his life in an oath.
31 Did the men of my tent ever say,
“Would that we were never sated of his flesh.”
32The sojourner did not sleep outside.
My doors to the wayfarer I opened.
33 Did I hide like Adam my wrongdoings,
to bury within me my crime,
34that I should fear the teeming crowd,
and the scorn of clans terrify me,
fall silent and keep within doors?
35 Would that I had someone to hear me out.
Here’s my mark—let Shaddai answer me,
and let my accuser indict his writ.
36 I would bear it upon my shoulder,
bind it as a crown upon me.
37 The number of my steps I would tell Him,
like a prince I would approach him.
38If my soil has cried out against me,
and together its furrows wept,
39if I ate its yield without payment,
and drove its owners to despair,
40instead of wheat let nettles grow,
and instead of barley, stinkweed.
CHAPTER 31 NOTES
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1. A pact I sealed with my eyes. After the catalogue of woes in the previous section of this final speech, Job begins a series of affirmations of the scrupulously virtuous life he led. Not only did he avoid promiscuity (verse 9), but he even strictly refrained from gazing with lust at nubile women. This profession of innocence is interrupted in verses 2–4 by a declaration—not exactly in keeping with what Job says elsewhere—that God watches wrongdoers from above and punishes them. Some scholars have proposed moving around various verses in this chapter in order to produce better continuities, but all such surgical procedures on the text are necessarily conjectural.
5. Have I walked. This line initiates a whole series that employs the Hebrew form that indicates swearing an oath.
8. sow … eat, / … torn up by the roots. In an agricultural society, these images are standard metaphors for all forms of endeavor.
10. let my wife grind for another. The verb here is a kind of violent pun. Grinding in a small stone hand mill is a domestic activity regularly performed by the woman in preparing food for her husband and family. But the crouching of other men over her in the second verset turns the grinding into a representation of the sexual act.
13. If I spurned the case of my slave. Job moves on from sexual morality to social justice. Even a slave has legal rights and may bring a suit against his master, and Job says that in the days of his prosperity he always honored those rights.
15. the selfsame womb. Job, of course, does not mean that he and the slave had the same mother but rather that they share the same human condition, each having been formed in the womb. Hence, despite the economic disparity, an existential parity obtains between them.
18. from my mother’s womb I led him. The received text says “led her,” a difference of one syllable in a suffix, which some then understand to refer to the slavegirl in the second half of verse 13. Such a distant antecedent seems unlikely, and it is more plausible to emend the suffix. The “mother’s womb” is obviously a hyperbole, Job declaring that from his earliest days he looked after the poor.
20. did his loins not then bless me. The loins, now comfortably wrapped in the garment Job provides, are the poetic enunciator of the blessing.
21. my advantage in the gate. The gate is where courts of justice were conducted. The term rendered here as “advantage” is in most other contexts “rescue,” the idea being that you come out on top.
22. let my shoulder fall out of its socket. This would be measure-for-measure justice, a retaliation for raising one’s hand against the orphan.
26. light when it gleamed / … the moon gliding grand. As the erotic language of the next line makes clear, this would be an ecstatic response to the moon, perhaps as manifestation of a deity.
27. my hand caressed my mouth. The gesture is both sensual and cultic. We should keep in mind that Job, for all his quarrel with God, remains a staunch monotheist.
28. this, too, would be a grave crime. It is fitting that the same term of condemnation used for adultery in verse 11 is presented here in connection with succumbing to the pagan-erotic seduction of the moon.
29. If I rejoiced at my foe’s disaster. Job’s profession of innocence here goes beyond the norm of biblical morality, which often (as in Psalms) is happy to express exultation when disaster overtakes an enemy.
31. Would that we were never sated of his flesh. The victim of this metaphoric cannibalism would have to be the helpless and the unhoused—perhaps explicitly the sojourner and the wayfarer of the next line.
33. Did I hide like Adam my wrongdoings. This would be the first human after eating the forbidden fruit and trying to hide from God.
35. Would that I had someone to hear me out. Job reverts to the idea of having his day in court with God that he repeatedly favored earlier.
Here’s my mark. The mark is probably the mark with a personal seal by which a person would authenticate a legal document.
36. I would bear it upon my shoulder. So confident is Job that the accusations against him are baseless that he would proudly wear the writ of indictment as an ornament.
37. The number of my steps I would tell Him. Job would readily report everything he has done because he is confident, as he said in verses 5 and 6, that he never walked in a lie or allowed his stride to stray.
like a prince. The Hebrew nagid puns on agidenu, “I would tell him,” the two words sharing the same root.
39. drove its owners to despair. Some would like to understand this as “its tenants” because Job has just referred to the soil as his, but the Hebrew beʿalim means “owners.” Perhaps the possessive attached to “soil” refers to renting soil (note the reference to payment). It is conceivable that a wealthy man like Job, besides the plots he owned outright, might have rented additional fields in order to grow crops for profit.
40. stinkweed. It is notable that the last angry word of Job’s argument in his own defense is “stinkweed,” boʾshah.
Here end the words of Job. This is a formal marker of closure and may well be original in the text. At this point, one might expect God’s response to Job. Instead, as we shall now see, someone else intervenes.
1And these three men left off answering Job because he was right in his own eyes. 2And Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite from the clan of Ram flared up in anger, against Job his anger flared, for his claiming to be in the right more than God. 3And against his three com panions his anger flared because they had not found an answer that showed Job guilty. 4And Elihu waited out Job’s words, for they were his elders. 5And Elihu saw that the three men could utter no answer, and his anger flared.
6And Elihu the son of Barachel spoke up and he said:
and you are aged.
Therefore was I awed and feared
to speak my mind with you.
7I thought, Let years speak,
and let great age make wisdom known.
8Yet it is a spirit in man,
and Shaddai’s breath that grants discernment.
9It is not the elders who are wise
nor the aged who understand judgment.
10Therefore do I say, O listen to me,
I, too, will speak my mind.
11Look, I have waited for your speech,
hearkened to your understandings,
while you tested words.
12And I attended to you,
and, look, Job has no refuter,
none to answer his talk among you.
13Should you say, “We have found wisdom—
God will confound him, not man,”
14he has not made his brief to me,
and with your words I would not answer him.
15—they take fright, they no longer respond,
words leave them in the lurch—
16I waited, for they did not speak,
for they stood and no longer
17I, too, will speak out my part,
I will speak my mind, I, too.
18For I am full up with words,
the wind in my belly constrains me.
19Look, my belly is like unopened wine,
20Let me speak that I may be eased,
let me open my lips and speak out.
21I will show favor to no man,
nor flatter any person.
22For if I knew how to flatter,
my Maker would soon take me away.
CHAPTER 32 NOTES
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2. Elihu. Although some scholars have tried to save the Elihu speeches as an integral part of the book, the plausible consensus is that it is an interpolation, the work of another poet. No hint of Elihu’s presence is made in the frame-story at the beginning, and he is equally absent from the closing of the frame in chapter 42. The poetry he speaks is by and large not up to the level of the poetry in the debate between Job and his three reprovers, and there is a whole series of Hebrew terms that appear only in the Elihu speeches. His name, though feasible in biblical usage, appears to be satirically devised as an intimation of his impatiently presumptuous character. The literal meaning of Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite from the clan of Ram is “He-is-my-God the son of God-has-blessed the Scornful One from the High Clan.”
4. waited out Job’s words. The implication is that he waited out both Job’s words and those of the three companions, but it is Job’s argument that he wants to refute.
5. could utter no answer. Literally, “there was no answer in the mouth.”
6. I am young in years, / and you are aged. This invocation of relative ages lines up with the traditional notion, repeatedly mentioned by the three companions, that wisdom lies with the elders.
8. Yet it is a spirit in man. Elihu, having listened impatiently to the ineffectual arguments of his three elders, now rejects the idea that wisdom resides with the aged and instead contends that it derives from God’s gift of the spirit in a person, without regard to age.
13. God will confound him, not man. The literal sense of the verb represented as “confound” is “push back,” “drive away.” In attributing this statement to the three reprovers, Elihu shows them admitting the failure of their own arguments.
14. he has not made his brief to me. If he had done so, Elihu contends, I would have answered him in words quite different from yours. A small emendation of the initial Hebrew word here, “not,” yields a subjunctive statement: “had he made his brief to me.”
15. they take fright. This entire verse is set out here between dashes because it is a narrative statement about the three friends and not part of Elihu’s direct address to them. Whether it is a glossing interpolation or part of the poet’s expository strategy is unclear. If the latter, we might read it as a kind of aside to the audience by Elihu.
17. I, too, will speak out my part, / I will speak my mind, I, too. Such repetitiousness is characteristic of Elihu’s speeches and of a piece with his bombastic character.
18. the wind in my belly constrains me. This metaphoric representation of the impatient urge to speak as an explosive condition of flatulence is surely satiric, at least in effect and perhaps in intent. It is extended in the image of bursting wineskins in the next line.
19. new wineskins. The wine, still fermenting in the new skins, which are not yet supple with use, threatens to burst them.
20. Let me speak that I may be eased. This verset continues the idea of speech as release from painful flatulence.
21. I will show favor to no man. As Elihu, concluding his rebuke to the three friends, prepares to launch his frontal assault on Job, he intimates that they have been too kind to this reprobate, something that he, representing himself as a perfectly objective person, will not do.
22. my Maker would soon take me away. The Hebrew verb at the end puns on “show favor,” laseiʾt panim (very literally, “to bear a face”), because “take away” (or “bear off”) is also laseiʾt.
1But hear, Job, my speech,
and hearken to all my words.
2Look, I’ve opened my mouth,
my tongue speaks on my palate.
3My heart’s truth—what I say,
and my lips utter lucid knowledge.
4God’s spirit has made me,
and Shaddai’s breath has quickened me.
5If you can answer me,
lay it out before me, take your stance.
6Why, I am like you to God,
from clay I, too, was pinched.
7Look, fear of me does not dismay you,
my urging does not weigh upon you.
8Why, you said in my ears,
and the sound of words I heard:
9“Pure I am with no wrong,
guiltless, I am free of crime.
10Look, He finds pretexts against me,
He counts me His enemy.
11He puts my feet in stocks,
He watches all my ways.”
12Look, where you fail to be right I will answer you,
for God is greater than man.
13Why do you contend with Him,
if He answers not all of man’s words?
14For God speaks in one way
or in two, and no one perceives Him:
15In a dream, a night’s vision,
when slumber falls upon men,
in sleep upon their couch.
16Then He lays bare the ear of men,
and terrifies them with reproof,
17to make humankind swerve from its acts
to put down pride in a man,
18that he save himself from the Pit
and his life from the Current.
19And he is reproved with pain on his couch—
shuddering in his bones unrelenting.
20His life-breath despises bread,
his gullet, desirable food.
21His flesh wastes away before one’s eyes,
and his bones, once unseen, are laid bare.
22And his being draws near to the Pit,
his life-breath to the Killers.
23If he had an advocate,
one spokesman out of a thousand,
to declare for man his uprightness,
24he could pity him and say, “Redeem him
from going down to the Pit. I found ransom.”
25His flesh would become sleeker than in youth,
he’d return to the days of his prime.
26He entreats God, Who grants him favor,
and he sees His face with a joyous cry
and He restores to man his right standing.
27He sings out to men and says,
“I offended, perverted what’s straight,
and it was not worth it for me.”
28He redeemed his being from crossing to the Pit,
and his life-breath enjoys the light.
twice or thrice with a man,
30to bring back his being from the Pit,
to glow in the light of life.
31Attend, Job, listen to me,
be still and I will speak.
32If there are words, answer me.
Speak, for I would find you in the right.
33If not—you, listen to me,
be still, and I will teach you wisdom.
CHAPTER 33 NOTES
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1. But hear, Job, my speech. Elihu now turns from the three friends to the man he considers to be the malefactor. Much of this speech is formulaic, and rather repetitious, and the poetry is undistinguished, lending plausibility to the surmise that this is not the work of the Job poet.
4. God’s spirit. Elihu appears to refer not merely to his own creaturely condition but to the fact (see 32:8) that God has inspired him with discernment.
7. Look. It is almost a verbal tic that Elihu begins so many sentences with the ostensive particle (hineh or hen), which in his case expresses an impatient sense that he knows it all.
fear of me does not dismay you. The self-assured Elihu is indignant that Job shows no signs of quailing before the reproof that Elihu administers, certain of its rightness.
9. Pure I am with no wrong. The speech attributed to Job, which continues to the end of verse 11, is in fact a paraphrase of several declarations of innocence and complaints about God’s relentlessness that Job made in the course of the debate with the three friends.
13. all of man’s words. The Hebrew says merely “all of his words,” but the likely antecedent of “his” is “man” at the end of verse 12, so that word has been added for clarity.
14. For God speaks in one way. The fact of the matter, Elihu argues, is that God really answers man in more than one way, but unwitting humans don’t realize they are being addressed. The particular mode of divine communication then stipulated is dream-visions.
16. terrifies them with reproof. The Hebrew here is obscure. Instead of the Masoretic yaḥtom (“He seals”?), this translation reads, with the Septuagint, yeḥitem, “terrifies them.”
17. its acts. The Hebrew uses a singular noun. A long exegetical tradition, beginning in Late Antiquity, assumes that what is implied is evil acts.
18. the Current. The translation concurs with one line of interpreters who conclude that the Hebrew shelah,̣ which can mean “weapon” as well as “stream,” is a parallel to the Pit and refers to a mythological river, such as the one known in Mesopotamian mythology that marks the boundary of the realm of death.
21. before one’s eyes. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “from sight.”
22. the Killers. If the received text is accurate, this would refer to angels of destruction in Sheol.
24. Redeem him / from going down to the Pit. This whole line is also awkward in the Hebrew and doesn’t scan as poetry. This is the least of the textual difficulties in this chapter.
25. become sleeker. The Hebrew verb is anomalous and may reflect a corrupted text, so the translation is conjectural.
27. sings out. The form of the verb is peculiar and its meaning somewhat uncertain.
31. Attend, Job, listen to me. Characteristically, this speech of Elihu’s ends not with poetic imagery or genuine argumentation but with emphatic exhortation, in a repetitious series of declarations that Job should be silent and listen to the wisdom that Elihu is about to impart to him.
1And Elihu spoke up and he said:
2Listen, you sages, to my words,
and you who know, O hearken to me.
3For the ear probes words
as the palate tastes in eating.
4Let us take us a case to
let us know what is good between us.
5For Job has said, “I’m in the right,
and God has diverted my case.
6He lies about my case,
I’m sore-wounded from His shaft for no crime.”
7Who is a man like Job,
lapping up scorn like water?
8He consorts with wrongdoers
and walks with wicked men.
9For he has said, “What use to a man
to find favor with God?”
10Therefore, discerning men, hear me:
far be from God any wickedness,
from Shaddai any wrong.
11For a man’s acts He pays him back,
and by a person’s path He provides him.
12Surely God does not act wickedly,
and Shaddai does not pervert justice.
13Who assigned the earth to Him,
and placed the whole world with Him?
14Should He set His mind on man,
his living breath He would gather to Him.
15All flesh would expire together,
man to the dust would return.
16If you understand, then listen to this,
hearken to the sound of my words.
17Would one who hates justice hold sway,
would you call the great Righteous One wicked?
18Does one say of a king “scoundrel,”
“wicked” of the nobles?
19Who did not show favor to princes
nor was partial to rich over poor,
for they all are the work of His hands.
20In a moment they die, at midnight,
a people is upturned, passes on,
the mighty swept off, by no hand.
21For His eyes are on a man’s ways,
and all his steps He does see.
22There is no dark and no death’s shadow
where wrongdoers can hide.
23For He sets no fixed time for man
to come in judgment with God.
24He smashes the limitless mighty
and puts others in their place.
25Therefore He knows their deeds,
overturns them, in a night they are crushed.
26For their wickedness He strikes them
27because they turned away from Him,
and all His ways they did not grasp,
28bringing the poor man’s scream before Him,
and the scream of the lowly He heard.
29Should He be silent, who could condemn Him?
Should He hide His face, who could glimpse Him,
whether a nation or a man?
30—rather than a tainted man ruling,
than snares for the people.
31Did he ever say to God,
“I shall bear my punishment and not sin,
32I did not see—You must instruct me,
if I have done wrong, I won’t do it again”?
33Should He by your dictates mete out justice,
for it is you who reject or choose, not I?
And what do you know?—speak.
34Discerning men will say to me
and a wise man listening to me:
35“Job speaks without knowledge,
and his words are without any sense.”
36Would that Job might be tested forever
for responding like villainous men.
37For he adds to his offense,
makes crime abound among us,
and compounds his talk against God.
CHAPTER 34 NOTES
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2. Listen, you sages. True to character, Elihu lines himself up with the sages but also suggests that he knows even better than they.
4. Let us take us a case to court. Elihu’s desire to argue his case against Job in quasilegal terms borrows from the metaphor of legal disputation that Job has frequently used and anticipates the polemic quotation of Job’s legal imagery in verses 5 and 6.
6. He lies about my case. The Masoretic Text reads “I lie,” but the yod signaling the third person may have been dropped by a scribe because the previous word ends with a yod (haplography).
sore-wounded from His shaft. The Hebrew is syntactically cramped and cryptic, literally reading “sore-wounded my shaft.” Presumably the shaft, shot by God, is “mine” because it has pierced Job’s body.
9. What use to a man / to find favor with God? These words are in fact a succinct summary of Job’s argument about the arbitrariness of God’s justice.
13. Who assigned the earth to Him. That is, God alone, having no superiors, is responsible for ruling the earth, and thus one can expect that He will do so justly.
17. the great Righteous One. The translation follows the lead of most interpreters, who understand this as a designation of God, though the Hebrew phrase tsadiq kabir sounds a little odd in biblical usage as a divine epithet.
18. Does one say of a king “scoundrel.” Elihu’s theological conservatism is reinforced by his social and political conservatism: whoever rules is right.
20. In a moment they die, at midnight. God as the world’s impartial judge works in unanticipated ways. The wicked may prosper, but then they are swept off to destruction in the blink of an eye, in the middle of the night. This assertion jibes with a view often reiterated in Psalms.
23. He sets no fixed time. The received text appears to say “He does not set still” (or “yet”). But the puzzling “still,” ʿod, is probably a haplography obscuring moʿed, “fixed time,” since the preceding word, “sets,” yasim, ends with a mem. The ayin and the waw of moʿed would then have been scribally reversed to produce an erroneous ʿod.
26. For their wickedness. Textual difficulties proliferate from here through verse 31. Instead of the Masoretic reshaʿim, “the wicked,” this translation reads rishʿam, “their wickedness.”
in a place where all can see. The literal sense is “in a place of seers.”
29. Should He be silent. If the translation mirrors the meaning of the Hebrew, which is not entirely certain, the sense is: even if God chooses to be silent and hide His presence, His justice is never in question.
30. —rather than a tainted man ruling. This entire verse remains obscure.
31. bear my punishment. “Punishment,” perhaps the most likely object of the verb, is merely implied.
33. who reject or choose, not I. Again, the Hebrew wording is rather crabbed and the meaning far from certain. The evident sense is a sarcastic challenge to Job: is it you who makes the decisions about the implementation of justice in the world and not God? The sudden switch from third-person reference to God to the first person (“not I”) is a little disorienting but an allowable procedure in biblical usage.
34. Discerning men. Elihu concludes this speech as he began it, by invoking the support of the wise for his argument.
36. like villainous men. The received text reads “in [or against] villainous men,” but the Septuagint and some Hebrew manuscripts show “like.”
1And Elihu spoke up and he said:
2Is this what you count as justice,
you say, “I am more right than God”?
3That you should say, What use is it to you,
what shall I gain from my offense?
4I will answer you in words,
and your companions with you.
5Look to the heavens and see,
and the sky that is high above you.
6If you offended, how do you affect Him,
if your crimes be many, what do you do to Him?
7If you’re in the right, what do you give Him,
or what could He take from your hand?
8On a man like yourself your wickedness acts,
and on a human being your righteousness.
9From much oppression they cry out,
call for help from the arm of the powerful.
10And none says, “Where is God my Maker,
Who gives us melodies in the night,
11instructs us more than the beasts of the earth,
makes us wiser than the birds of the heavens?”
12Then they cried out—and He did not answer—
from evil men’s haughtiness.
13But to falseness God will not listen,
and Shaddai will not behold it.
14How much more, when you say, you don’t behold Him,
the case is before Him and you await it,
15and now, His wrath requites nothing,
and He knows nothing of any crime.
16And Job—with mere breath he opens his mouth.
Devoid of knowledge, he heaps up words.
CHAPTER 35 NOTES
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3. What use is it to you, / what shall I gain from my offense? The line shifts from second-person reference to Job in the first verset to first-person citation of Job in the second verset, a switch permissible in biblical usage though disconcerting to the English reader. Job’s gaining from his offense is a little cryptic, but the evident sense is that he feels it makes no difference whether he is virtuous or sinning, and he has no special motive to offend because he gets nothing from it.
5. Look to the heavens and see. The invocation of the vastness of the heavens prepares the ground for the contention (verses 6–8) that man’s actions have no effect on God high above.
8. acts. A verb to this effect is merely implied in the Hebrew.
9. From much oppression they cry out. This sudden switch to the suffering multitudes is intended to make the argument that many undergo terrible affliction but only Job accuses God for his suffering.
10. Who gives us melodies in the night. Many modern interpreters prefer to understand the noun zemirot as deriving from a (rare) homonymous root z-m-r that means “strength.” There is nothing, however, in the immediate context to indicate that “strength” is the more likely meaning. By opting for the meaning “melodies,” one accords the poet of the Elihu passages his first line of haunting poetry in an otherwise lackluster performance.
13. But to falseness God will not listen. Job has been objecting that God refuses to listen to his complaint. Elihu’s rejoinder is that when a complaint is entirely baseless, God will of course refuse to listen.
15. and now, His wrath requites nothing. This entire line is completely opaque in the Hebrew. A very literal translation of this first verset is “And now that there is nothing, His wrath requites [or singles out].”
and He knows nothing of any crime. The word represented as “crime,” pash, is unintelligible, and the translation assumes, with many critics, that it was originally peshaʿ, “crime,” the last consonant having been somehow dropped in scribal transcription. Even so, the clause sounds garbled and scarcely in keeping with biblical idiomatic usage. A literal rendering: “And he knows nothing in [of?] crime very much.” In any case, this line is meant to be a summary of Job’s impious words.
16. And Job. The switch from second person to third person at the end of this speech has a certain rhetorical logic: Elihu, having rebuked Job in direct address, now refers to him, contemptuously, in these summarizing words in the third person.
1And Elihu went on to say:
2Wait for me a bit while I tell you
that there are still words on God’s behalf.
3I shall speak my mind far and wide,
and show that the right’s with my Maker.
4For, indeed, my words are no lie,
one perfect in knowledge is with you.
5Look, God is great, He does not despise us,
great in power and understanding.
6He will not let the wicked live,
and He grants justice to the afflicted.
7He does not take His eye off the righteous
nor off kings for the throne,
whom He seats on high forever.
8And if captives are in fetters
ensnared in the bonds of affliction,
9He tells them their acts,
and their crimes, which grow great.
10And He lays bare their ear to reproof,
and says they must turn from wrongdoing.
11If they obey and serve,
they will finish their days in bounty
and their years in pleasantness.
12And if they obey not, they will cross the Current,
and expire unawares.
13And the tainted in heart keep up anger,
they do not cry out when He binds them.
14They die in youth,
15He frees the afflicted through their affliction
and through oppression He lays bare their ear.
16He even drew you away from the straits,
a broad place unconfined beneath you,
your table heaped with rich fare.
17And you were filled with the case of the wicked,
the case and the ruling on which they depend.
18For look out, lest he lure you with riches,
lest great bribery lead you astray.
19Will your wealth matter to Him in straits
and all the efforts of power?
20Do not pant for the night,
for peoples to vanish from where they are.
21Watch out, do not turn to wrongdoing,
which you chose instead of affliction.
22Why, God looms on high in His power.
Who is like Him as a teacher?
23Who has assigned Him His way,
and who has said, “You have done wrong”?
24Recall that you exalt His deeds
which men have espied.
25All humankind has beheld Him,
man looks from afar.
26Why, exalted is God, and we know not,
the number of His years is unfathomed.
27For He draws down drops of water,
they are distilled in the rain of His wetness,
28as the skies drip moisture,
shower on abounding humankind.
29Can one grasp the spread of cloud,
30Why, He spreads over it His lightning,
and the roots of the sea it covers.
31For with them He exacts justice from peoples,
gives food in great abundance.
32Lightning covers His palms,
and He commands it to hit the mark.
33His roaring tells about Him,
His zealous wrath over evil acts.
CHAPTER 36 NOTES
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4. one perfect in knowledge is with you. Elihu is referring to himself, with characteristic lack of modesty. Ever bombastic, he begins this fourth discourse with a three-line windup (verses 2–4) entirely devoted to announcing his own wisdom.
5. despise us. The object of the verb is merely implied in the Hebrew.
power and understanding. The Hebrew says literally “power of heart,” but the heart is clearly referred to here as the organ of understanding.
9. their crimes. It is Elihu’s complacent assumption that if someone is subjected to captivity or some other terrible misfortune (verse 8), it must be because he is being punished for some crime that he has committed.
12. the Current. As in 33:18, the probable reference of the Hebrew shelaḥ is to a mythological river marking the border of the realm of death.
14. catamites. The Hebrew qedeishim is in dispute. Though it has often been understood as a term for homosexual cult-prostitutes, some scholars deny there was any practice of cultic prostitution, male or female, in the ancient Near East. The parallelism with “youth” here is obscure. If the term does refer to male prostitutes, perhaps Elihu assumes that they would have been cut off at an early age because of their promiscuity.
15. frees the afflicted through their affliction. The evident idea is that the experience of suffering leads to a new and liberating insight in the sufferers—into what they have done and how they must change.
17. you were filled with the case of the wicked. The Hebrew wording, reflected in this translation, is somewhat obscure. Textual difficulties become more and more dense as the chapter goes on.
18. For look out. With many scholars, this translation reads hameh (an Aramaicism for “look”) instead of the Masoretic ḥeimah, “anger.”
lest he lure you. The “he” would be one of the wicked.
19. Will your wealth matter to Him in straits. The translation supposes lo (“to Him”) instead of the Masoretic loʾ (“not”). In any case, the meaning of the whole is uncertain.
20. for peoples to vanish. Literally, “for peoples to go up.” The possible sense of all this is: don’t count on a sudden upheaval in the middle of the night, when whole peoples are suddenly destroyed, and your own fortune changed.
21. instead of affliction. Affliction, one recalls, is, in Elihu’s view (verse 15), an agency of moral correction.
27. For He draws down drops of water. A prime instance of God’s greatness, beheld by humankind (verse 25), is His bringing the rains to sustain life.
wetness. The term ʾeid occurs only here and in the second creation story, Genesis 2:6, where it refers to the moisture rising from the primeval earth.
29. the roars from His shelter. The shelter, sukah, is the heavenly abode of the deity in Canaanite mythology, and the roars from it are the sound of thunder.
30. His lightning. The usual sense of the Hebrew ʾor is “light,” but the Elihu poet, both here and in verse 32, uses this instead of the common word baraq.
the roots of the sea it covers. The verb here is a little odd, but the idea seems to be that God’s lightning penetrates even to the roots of the sea.
31. For with them He exacts justice from peoples. “Them” refers to the just mentioned thunder and lightning, which are the traditional weapons of the sky god in pre-Israelite mythology.
gives food in great abundance. The two versets of this line express respectively the acts of the God of judgment and of the God of mercy. He brings down a thundering assault of punishment on wayward nations but provides sustenance to humankind at large. The opposing acts are associated because the lightning occurs in rainstorms, and the gentler rains (see verses 27 and 28) water the earth to make it fruitful.
32. Lightning covers His palms. The lightning bolts rest on God’s palms before He hurls them at their target.
33. His roaring tells about Him. The translation of this cryptic verset is an educated guess, based on the surmise that this line is a continuation of the thunder imagery and that the rumbling of the thunder is heard as a manifestation of God’s awesome power. The second verset in the original sounds altogether like gibberish, an effect mirrored—inadvertently?—in the King James Version for the entire line: “The noise thereof showeth concerning it, the cattle also concerning the vapour.” This translation tries to rescue the verset from pure gibberish by emending miqneh, “cattle,” to meqaneiʾ, “to be zealous,” and revocalizing ʿoleh (“going up”?) as ʿawlah, “wrongdoing” or “evil act.”
1For this, too, my heart trembles,
and it leaps from its place.
2Hear, O hear His voice raging
and the murmur that comes from His mouth.
3Beneath all the heavens He lets it loose—
His lightning to the corners of earth.
4After it roars a voice,
He thunders in the voice of His grandeur,
and He does not hold them back as His voice is
5God thunders wondrously with His voice,
doing great things that we cannot know.
6For to the snow He says: “Be on earth,”
and rain in torrents, the rain of His mighty torrents.
7Every man He shuts in,
that all men know His deeds.
8And the beast comes into its lair,
and in its den it dwells.
9From the sky-chamber comes the tempest,
and from the winds’ dispersal the cold.
10From God’s breath the ice is made,
and wide waters turn solid.
11With heavy moisture He loads the cloud,
the thunderhead scatters His lightning,
12and round about it spins in its designs
to perform all that He charges them
on the face of inhabited earth,
13whether for a scourge to His earth,
whether for mercy, He makes it happen.
14Hearken to this, O Job,
stand, and take in the wonders of God.
15Do you know when God directs them,
and His thunderhead’s lightning shines?
16Do you know of the spread of cloud,
the wonders of the Perfect in Knowledge,
17when your garments feel warm
as the earth is becalmed from the south?
18Will you pound out the skies with Him,
which are strong as a metal mirror?
19Let us know what to say to Him!
We can lay out no case in our darkness.
20Will it be told Him if I speak,
will a man say if he is devoured?
21And now, they have not seen the light,
bright though it be in the skies,
as a wind passes, making them clear.
22From the north gold comes;
over God—awesome
23Shaddai, whom we find not, is lofty in power,
in judgment and great justice—He will not oppress.
24Therefore men do fear Him.
He does not regard all the wise of heart.
CHAPTER 37 NOTES
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1. For this, too, my heart trembles. This chapter is the completion of Elihu’s fourth speech. The prominence of thunder and lightning as manifestations of God’s awesome power is a direct continuation of the lightning theme that is at the center of 36:29–32. In evoking God’s power in the natural world, the Elihu section moves beyond hectoring exhortation and almost rises to the level of poetry, though the language in biblical terms is still relatively routine for this subject, with many parallels to Psalms. The editor of the book may have been drawn to insert the Elihu passages precisely here because this concluding section of the fourth speech is a kind of prelude to the Voice from the Whirl-wind, resembling it thematically but scarcely its equal in poetic power.
2. His voice raging. As in Canaanite poetry, often mirrored in Psalms, the rumbling of thunder is understood as the voice of the deity.
4. hold them back. This translation understands the unusual verb ʿaqev as the equivalent of the rabbinic ʿakev, “to hold back” or “restrain.” The pronoun “them” then refers to the bolts of lightning.
7. Every man He shuts in. The torrential rains compel every man to take shelter.
10. From God’s breath. In the vivid anthropomorphism of the imagery, God’s cooling breath, passing over the water, turns it to ice.
15. Do you know. This repeated question anticipates the challenge to Job’s limited human knowledge in the Voice from the Whirlwind.
18. Will you pound out the skies with Him. The prevalent notion in the ancient Near East was that the sky was a great slab (raqiʿa, the “vault” of Genesis 1, a noun derived from the Hebrew verb that means “to pound out”). Since that verb appears only here in this particular conjugation, some interpreters understand it as “soar to the skies” (the sense that this conjugation of the root has in modern Hebrew). However, the reference to the solidity of the skies in the second verset makes the sense of pounding out a metallic slab more likely.
a metal mirror. Mirrors were made not from glass but from polished bronze.
19. in our darkness. The Hebrew says, somewhat cryptically, “from darkness,” and “our” has been added interpretively. The sense seems to be that we humans in our ignorance are unable to articulate a legal argument against God, and you, Job, will surely not be able to tell us how to do it.
20. will a man say if he is devoured. Paltry man, standing before the all-powerful deity, has nothing to say in the face of the prospect of being overwhelmed and destroyed by God.
21. they have not seen the light. “They” refers to people in general. Even under clear skies, their limited human perception prevents them from seeing the bright light of the sun.
22. From the north gold comes. The claim of many interpreters that this refers to “the golden rays of the sun,” as in the New Jewish Publication Society translation, is unconvincing both because the Hebrew sounds very much like a literal reference to gold and because the north is definitely not the direction from which the sun comes. Pope has proposed that behind this verset is the image of Baal’s palace on Mount Zaphon (that is, North Mountain), a structure made out of gold, silver, and lapis lazuli. The verset would then be an apt parallel to the invocation of the glorious nimbus around God in the second verset.
23. He will not oppress. Some interpreters revocalize the Hebrew verb to yield “He will not answer.” That is, although God is just, we cannot expect Him to address mere mortals. This reading would be in keeping with man’s inability to gain access (“find out”) to the lofty deity. But the emphasis on divine justice in this verset argues for the sense of “will not oppress.”
24. Therefore men do fear Him. They fear Him (the Hebrew verb means both “to fear” and “to revere”) because He is at once lofty in power and just.
He does not regard all the wise of heart. As the Hymn to Wisdom concluded in Job 28:28, “fear of the Master, that is wisdom,” and God has no special regard for those who imagine they have attained understanding independently through the exercise of intellect. This final line would be a last rebuke to Job, who has had the presumption to think he knows how the system of divine justice should work and hence has dared to challenge God.
1And the LORD answered Job from the whirlwind and He said:
2Who is this who darkens counsel
in words without knowledge?
3Gird your loins like a man,
that I may ask you, and you can inform Me.
4Where were you when I founded earth?
Tell, if you know understanding.
5Who fixed its measures, do you know,
or who stretched a line upon it?
6In what were its sockets sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone,
7when the morning stars sang together,
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
8Who hedged the sea with double doors,
when it gushed forth from the womb.
9when I made cloud its clothing,
and thick mist its swaddling bands?
10I made breakers upon it My limit,
and set a bolt with double doors.
11And I said, “Thus far come, no farther,
here halt the surge of your waves.”
12Have you ever commanded the morning,
appointed the dawn to its place,
13to seize the earth’s corners,
that the wicked be shaken from it?
14It turns like sealing clay,
15and their light is withdrawn from the wicked,
and the upraised arm is broken.
16Have you come into the springs of the sea,
in the bottommost deep walked about?
17Have the gates of death been laid bare to you,
and the gates of death’s shadow have you seen?
18Did you take in the breadth of the earth?
Tell, if you know it all.
19Where is the way that light dwells,
and darkness, where is its place,
20that you might take it to its home
and understand the paths to its house?
21You know, for you were born then,
and the number of your days is great!
22Have you come into the storehouse of snow,
the storehouse of hail have you seen,
23which I keep for a time of strife,
for a day of battle and war?
24By what way does the west wind fan out,
the east wind whip over the earth?
25Who split a channel for the torrent,
and a way for the thunderstorm,
26to rain on a land without man,
wilderness bare of humankind,
27to sate the desolate dunes
and make the grass sprout there?
28Does the rain have a father,
or who begot the drops of dew?
29From whose belly did the ice come forth,
to the frost of the heavens who gave birth?
30Water congeals like stone,
and the face of the deep locks hard.
31Can you tie the bands of the Pleiades,
or loose Orion’s reins?
32Can you bring constellations out in their season,
lead the Great Bear and her cubs?
33Do you know the laws of the heavens,
can you fix their rule on earth?
34Can you lift your voice to the cloud,
that the water-spate cover you?
35Can you send lightning bolts on their way,
and they will say to you, “Here we are!”?
36Who placed in the hidden parts wisdom,
or who gave the mind understanding?
37Who counted the skies in wisdom,
and the jars of the heavens who tilted,
38when the dust melts to a mass,
and the clods cling fast together?
39Can you hunt prey for the lion,
fill the king of beast’s appetite,
40when it crouches in its den,
lies in ambush in the covert?
41Who readies the raven’s prey
when its young cry out to God
and stray deprived of food?
CHAPTER 38 NOTES
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1. the whirlwind. Though the Hebrew seʿarah probably means simply “storm,” this translation choice—and the consequent phrase the Voice from the Whirl-wind—have been so deeply embedded in the imagination of speakers of English after the King James Version that it seems wise not to tamper with it.
2. Who is this who darkens counsel. With God’s speech as the climax of the book, the Job poet takes a risk that only a supreme artist confident in his genius could do. He had already created for Job the most extraordinarily powerful poetry to express Job’s intolerable anguish and his anger against God. Now, when God finally speaks, the poet fashions for Him still greater poetry, which thus becomes a poetic manifestation of God’s transcendent power and also an image-for-image response to the death-wish poem that frames Job’s entire argument. The unusual phrase “darkens counsel” is not merely an indication of speaking ignorantly (as the parallel in the second verset spells out) but a rejoinder to the spate of images of darkness blotting out light in the death-wish poem of chapter 3. In pointed contrast to that poem, the opening section of the Voice from the Whirlwind introduces images of light and then traces a dynamic interplay between light and darkness.
4. Where were you when I founded earth? God’s speech moves in a narrative progression from cosmogony (verses 4–21) to meteorology (verses 22–38)—which is to say, the play of natural forces across the created world invoked in the cosmogonic section—to zoology (38:39–39:40)—which is to say, the panorama of living creatures thriving in the play of the natural forces of creation—to zoology with a mythic heightening (40:15–41:26).
5. a line. This is the builder’s line, used to construct straight angles.
7. when the morning stars sang together. The verb for singing, ron, is from the same root as renanah “glad song,” which Job (3:7) wished to expunge from the night he was conceived. The morning stars are also a counterpoint to the stars of dawn on the night of conception that Job wished never to appear. This splendid vision of the celestial beings joining in joyous song in celebration of creation is not intimated in other biblical accounts of how God created the world.
8. hedged the sea. The idea of blocking, or imprisoning, the fiercely raging sea, which continues in some of the subsequent lines, shows the trace of the Canaanite creation myth. But the verb chosen here is the same one Job used (3:23) in his complaint that God had closed off all routes to him.
the womb. This metaphor for the sea as the matrix of creation is the first of a whole series of birth images that answer to the language of the death-wish poem, in which Job expresses the desire never to have been born, for the womb to have been his tomb. Here, by contrast, an awesome surge of energy comes forth from the womb of creation.
9. swaddling bands. This utterly original metaphor depicts the sheets or strips of white mist hovering over the primordial sea, and because swaddling bands are used for infants, it extends the imagery of birth.
12. morning, / … dawn. Looking beyond the primordial sea to the earth, the poet begins, strategically, with images of light—again, precisely what Job wanted to extinguish forever.
13. to seize the earth’s corners. Evidently, it is light that takes hold of the far corners of the earth, “shaking” out, or exposing, the wicked who hide in night’s darkness.
14. It turns like sealing clay. The antecedent of “it” is the earth: just as the unshaped matter of sealing clay becomes a distinct form when the seal is stamped on it, the earth, shapeless in darkness, assumes distinct form as the light of day spreads over it.
takes color. The Masoretic yityatsvu, “take a stand,” makes no sense, and it is emended here to titstabaʿ.
19. Where is the way that light dwells, / and darkness, where is its place. The poet naturally begins with light, but in the complementary parallelism of the line, darkness also has its place. Creation, like the diurnal cycle, is a pulsing rhythm of light and darkness, whereas Job, in the egoism of his suffering, exercised an imagination only of darkness.
21. You know, for you were born then. This whole line is of course a sarcastic address to Job, whose minuscule life span could not measure up to the vastness of timeless creation. It also echoes back ironically against Job’s wish never to have been born.
23. which I keep for a time of strife. The storehouses of snow and hail are manifestly mythological locations where God stockpiles these elements as weapons for future combat against some unspecified cosmic foe.
24. the west wind fan out. The noun ʾor usually means “light,” but that sense is hard to reconcile with the verb, which may have a military connotation, as in Genesis 14:15, where it means to “fan out” or “deploy.” Some construe it as “lightning,” although that use of the term is restricted to the Elihu speeches and accords neither with the verb nor with the poetic parallelism. This translation deems likely the scholarly proposal that in this instance ʾor reflects the Aramaic ʾoriya, “west wind.”
26. to rain on a land without man. It is one of the many enigmas of God’s creation that rain pours down on places utterly devoid of human habitation. This idea is in keeping with the radical rejection of anthropocentrism, elsewhere assumed in biblical thought, that informs God’s poem.
27. desolate dunes. See the comment on the identical phrase in 30:3.
28. a father, / … begot. Again, the poet invokes imagery of conception and birth in answer to Job’s expressed desire to expunge them.
29. whose belly … / who gave birth. The birth imagery now moves from father to mother. In keeping with the boldness of the poet, it is a daring move because it evokes a virtually oxymoronic picture of hard cold ice coming out of a womb.
32. constellations. Many interpreters, going back to the King James Version and before it, construe the Hebrew mazarot as the name of an unidentified constellation, but it seems more likely that it is a dialectic variant of mazalot, which simply means “constellations.”
33. their rule. The Hebrew suffix indicates “his” or “its,” which has led some to identify God as the antecedent. But the plausible antecedent is the stars, thought to govern or predict the affairs of men. This could be a small scribal error, though fluid switching between singular and plural is rather common in biblical usage.
36. the hidden parts … / the mind. The meaning of the two nouns here, tuhot and sekhwi, have long been disputed. Some think they refer to birds, the ibis and the rooster, or even to mythological figures.
37. Who counted the skies. What is probably assumed is a multiplicity of heavens (in the Apocrypha and in some rabbinic legends they are seven in number).
the jars of the heavens who tilted. This is an original image of the source of rain. Else-where, as in the Flood story, there are casements in the vault of the heavens that are opened to let down the rain.
38. the clods cling fast together. This image of rain-soaked clods of earth turned into an amalgam of mud completes the meteorological section of the poem. After rain, snow, hail, ice, wind, and the patterns of the stars, the poet is ready to turn to the animal kingdom.
39. the lion, / … the king of beast’s appetite. The Hebrew actually switches from the singular in the first verset to a plural in the second verset (see the comment on verse 33) and then continues in the plural in the next line. The translation keeps all these references in the singular in order to avoid confusion for the English reader. Many modern translations show “lioness,” presumably because it is the lioness who does the hunting, but the Hebrew nouns in both halves of the verse are masculine.
1Do you know the mountain goats’ birth time,
do you mark the calving of the gazelles?
2Do you number the months till they come to term
and know their birthing time?
3They crouch, burst forth with their babes,
their young they push out to the world.
4Their offspring batten, grow big in the wild,
they go out and do not return.
5Who set the wild ass free,
and the onager’s reins who loosed,
6whose home I made in the steppes,
his dwelling place flats of salt?
7He scoffs at the bustling city,
the driver’s shouts he does not hear.
8He roams mountains for his forage,
and every green thing he seeks.
9Will the wild ox want to serve you,
pass the night at your feeding trough?
10Bind the wild ox with cord for the furrow,
will he harrow the valleys behind you?
11Can you rely on him with his great power
and leave your labor to him?
12Can you trust him to bring back your seed,
gather grain on your threshing floor?
13The ostrich’s wing joyously beats.
Is the pinion, the plume, like the stork’s?
14For she leaves her eggs on the ground,
and in the dust she lets them warm.
15And she forgets that a foot can crush them,
and a beast of the field stomp on them—
16harsh, abandons her young to a stranger,
in vain her labor, without fear.
17For God made her forgetful of wisdom,
and He did not allot her insight.
18Now on the height she races,
she scoffs at the horse and its rider.
19Do you give might to the horse,
do you clothe his neck with a mane?
20Do you make his roar like locusts—
his splendid snort is terror.
21He churns up the valley exulting,
in power goes out to the clash of arms.
22He scoffs at fear and is undaunted,
turns not back before the sword.
23Over him rattles the quiver,
the blade, the javelin, and the spear.
24With clamor and clatter he swallows the ground,
and ignores the trumpet’s sound.
25At the trumpet he says, “Aha,”
and from afar he scents the fray,
the thunder of captains, the shouts.
26Does the hawk soar by your wisdom,
spread his wings to fly away south?
27By your word does the eagle mount
and set his nest on high?
28On the crag he dwells and beds down,
on the crest of the crag his stronghold.
29From there he seeks out food,
from afar his eyes look down.
30His chicks lap up blood,
where the slain are, there he is.
CHAPTER 39 NOTES
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1. the mountain goats’ birth time. Continuing the images of a creation teeming with births that is a thematic rejoinder to Job’s language longing for death, the poet offers a vivid vignette of the birthing of mountain goat and gazelle.
3. burst forth. The literal meaning of the Hebrew verb is “split open,” a word choice that strikingly conveys the poet’s sense that the procreative drive in nature (and the nurturing one as well) cannot be separated from violence.
4. they go out and do not return. The separation of the young from their mothers, a biological imperative, prepares the way for the subsequent images of feral freedom in the wild, beyond the realm of human control.
13. the ostrich’s wing joyously beats. This entire verse is notoriously obscure. Modern scholars are generally agreed that the bird in question is an ostrich, though the term used here is not the usual bat-yaʿanah but rather a kind of poetic epithet, “wing of song,” or perhaps, better, “screech-wing,” a designation alluding to the loud sounds the ostrich makes. The somewhat enigmatic verb neʿelasah appears to derive from a root associated with joy, or perhaps joyful movement (in Proverbs 7:18 it appears in a verb for sex).
Is the pinion, the plume, like the stork’s? Although each Hebrew word of this verset is understandable, they make little sense together and hence any translation is no more than a guess. A very literal rendering of the Hebrew would be: “is a pinion a stork and plume.”
14. For she leaves her eggs on the ground. This notion that the ostrich abandons all the eggs she lays and does not stay to hatch them is no more than ancient folk zoology.
16. harsh, abandons her young to a stranger. The translation is an interpretive surmise. The literal, cryptic sense of the Hebrew is “She hardened [the verb is in the wrong grammatical gender] her young to [someone?] not hers.”
in vain her labor, without fear. This reproduces the Hebrew literally. The labor in vain would refer to her going to the trouble of laying these neglected eggs. Perhaps the cryptic “without fear” might mean that she exhibits no fear, though she should, about what might happen to her offspring.
17. God made her forgetful of wisdom. The ostrich, abandoning her young, is one of the enigmas of nature, suggesting that there is no readily discernible moral pattern in the order of creation. Other creatures, as the poem has already shown and will show again, lavish care on their offspring.
18. she races. The verb hamriʾ occurs only here. The Aramaic translations understood it to mean “soar” (and in modern Hebrew it is used for a plane’s taking off from the ground), but ostriches don’t fly. The translation is a guess based on context.
20. roar like locusts. The poet seems to be thinking of the great clamorous sound—a frightening sound—made by a vast swarm of locusts.
24. With clamor and clatter. The translation emulates the strong alliteration of the Hebrew, beráʿash werógez, although the second Hebrew term is closer to “rage” or a state of disturbance.
26. soar. The unusual Hebrew verb is cognate with ʾevrah, “pinion,” a poetic term for “wing,” so it is conceivable that it refers not to the act of flight but, like the second verset, to spreading wings.
28. the crag. This remote, inaccessible habitat of the bird of prey complements the uninhabited steppes where the wild ass lives.
30. His chicks lap up blood. One of the remarkable aspects of the Job poet’s vision of nature is that it so completely unsentimental. The creatures of the wild (with the exception of the peculiar ostrich) are endowed with an instinct to nurture their young. For carnivores, however, that nurture involves violence—destroying living creatures in order to sustain life in the offspring. The concluding image, then, of God’s first speech is of the fledgling eagles in the nest, their little beaks open to gulp down the bloody scraps of flesh that their parent has brought them. The moral calculus of nature clearly does not jibe with the simple set of equations and consequences laid out in Proverbs and in Psalms.
1And the LORD answered Job and He said:
2Will he who disputes with Shaddai be reproved?
Who argues with God, let him answer!
3And Job answered the LORD and he said:
4Look, I am worthless. What can I say back to You?
My hand I put over my mouth.
5Once have I spoken and I will not answer,
twice, and will not go on.
6And the LORD answered Job from the whirlwind and He said:
7Gird your loins like a man.
Let me ask you, and you will inform Me.
8Will you indeed thwart My case,
hold Me guilty, so you can be right?
9If you have an arm like God’s,
and with a voice like His you can thunder,
10put on pride and preeminence,
and grandeur and glory don.
11Let loose your utmost wrath,
see every proud man, bring him low.
12See every proud man, make him kneel,
tramp on the wicked where they are.
13Bury them in the dust together,
14And I on my part shall acclaim you,
for your right hand triumphs for you.
15Look, pray: Behemoth, whom I made with you,
grass like cattle he eats.
16Look, pray: the power in his loins,
the virile strength in his belly’s muscles.
17He makes his tail stand like a cedar,
his balls’ sinews twine together.
18His bones are bars of bronze,
his limbs like iron rods.
19He is the first of the ways of God.
Let his Maker draw near him with His sword!
20For the mountains offer their yield to him,
every beast of the field plays there.
21Underneath the lotus he lies,
in the covert of reeds and marsh.
22The lotus hedges him, shades him,
the brook willows stand around him.
23Look, he swallows a river at his ease,
untroubled while Jordan pours into his mouth.
24Could one take him with one’s eyes,
with barbs pierce his nose?
25Could you draw Leviathan with a hook,
and with a cord press down his
26Could you put a lead line in his nose,
and with a fishhook pierce his cheek?
27Would he urgently entreat you,
would he speak to you gentle words?
28Would he seal a pact with you,
that you take him as lifelong slave?
29Could you play with him like a bird,
and leash him for your young women?
30Could hucksters haggle over him,
divide him among the traders?
31Could you fill his skin with darts,
and a fisherman’s net with his head?
32Just put your hand upon him—
you will no more recall how to battle.
CHAPTER 40 NOTES
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1. And the LORD answered Job and He said. After completing the poetic sweep of the great panorama of creation from the beginning of things to the world of living creatures, God turns in direct confrontation to Job, who now (verses 4 and 5) is abashed and renounces his challenge to God.
7. Gird your loins like a man. As the LORD launches on His second speech, He repeats verbatim the opening formula of the first speech (38:3). He then proceeds to turn around Job’s language of a legal dispute (verse 8) and to ask Job sarcastically whether he is capable of exercising God’s power (verses 9–14).
10. pride and preeminence, / … grandeur and glory. The translation follows the double alliteration of the Hebrew: gaʾon wegovah … wehod wehadar.
11. your utmost wrath. The Hebrew says literally “the wraths of your fury,” but, as elsewhere, the locking together of synonymous nouns in the construct state is an intensifier.
13. the grave. The Hebrew tamun means literally “the hidden [place?],” but this is evidently an epithet for the grave (or, perhaps, the underworld), especially since the verbal stem t-m-n, also used at the beginning of the line, means both “to hide” and “to bury.”
15. Behemoth. The Hebrew word means “beast.” It is in plural form, possibly a plural of intensification or majesty, but the noun is treated as singular and masculine (indeed, spectacularly masculine) throughout. Behemoth clearly takes off from the Egyptian hippopotamus, but in his daunting proportions, his fierce virility, and his absolute impregnability, he represents a mythological heightening of the actual beast, just as Leviathan is even more patently a mythological heightening of the Egyptian crocodile. The fact that the poet probably never laid eyes on these fabled beasts but knew of them through travelers’ yarns no doubt facilitated this transition from zoology to myth. Whether there is some counterpart to Behemoth in Canaanite or Sumerian myth, as some have claimed, is a matter of dispute.
16. loins, / … virile strength. Both terms point to sexuality—the loins by metonymy and “virile strength” because the Hebrew term ʾon is characteristically used for sexual potency.
17. makes his tail stand like a cedar. The exiguous tale of the hippopotamus scarcely fills this bill, but in all likelihood “tail” is a euphemism for a different part of the male animal’s anatomy.
balls. The rare peḥadim has long been understood—and was so understood by the King James translators, who rendered it as “stones”—as an Aramaicism reflecting paḥdaʾ, “testicle.”
19. Let his Maker draw near him with His sword. More literally, “bring His sword near to him.” The verset is a little enigmatic, but it is usually understood to mean that only Behemoth’s Maker would dare to approach him with a sword.
21. the lotus … / the covert of reeds and marsh. This native habitat of the hippopotamus is distinctly Egyptian.
23. swallows. The verb usually means “to oppress.” The hyperbolic sense here may be that Behemoth demolishes a whole river in one long, easy gulp.
untroubled. Literally, “he is secure.”
Jordan. In biblical poetry, which constantly needs synonyms because of its dependence on semantic parallelism, both Jordan and the Nile (yeʾor) are used as terms for “river.”
25. Leviathan. Although associated with the crocodile of the Nile, Leviathan (Ugaritic lotan, Hebrew liwyatan) is a prime actor in Canaanite mythology as a sea monster, and in keeping with his role here in the climactic passage of the poem, he is more prominently mythological than Behemoth. There is no formal introduction or indication of transition for the Leviathan section, but the “barbs” of the last Behemoth line and the “hook” of the first Leviathan line create a linkage.
26. lead line. The Hebrew ‘agmon usually means “reed,” so this rendering is a guess based on context.
31. Could you fill his skin with darts. This notion of the absolute invulnerability of Leviathan to all human weapons—which caught Melville’s attention in Moby-Dick—is elaborated in 41:19–21.
and a fisherman’s net with his head. The translation follows the Hebrew, which in the first verset has Leviathan’s skin as the object of the verb “fill” and here has, as the object of the same verb, a fisherman’s net, into which Leviathan’s head would be put.
32. you will no more recall how to battle. The Hebrew syntax is somewhat cryptic, though the general sense seems clear. Very literally, it reads, “Recall battle, you will do no more.”
1Look, all hope of him is dashed,
at his mere sight one is cast down.
2No fierce one could arouse him,
and who before Me could stand up?
3Who could go before Me in this I’d reward,
under all the heavens he would be mine.
4I would not keep silent about him,
about his heroic acts and surpassing grace.
5Who can uncover his outer garb,
come into his double mail?
6Who can pry open the doors of his face?
All around his teeth is terror.
7His back is rows of shields,
closed with the tightest seal.
8Each touches against the next,
no breath can come between them.
9Each sticks fast to the next,
locked together, they will not part.
10His sneezes shoot out light,
and his eyes are like the eyelids of dawn.
11Firebrands leap from his mouth,
sparks of fire fly into the air.
12From his nostrils smoke comes out,
like a boiling vat on brushwood.
13His breath kindles coals,
and flame comes out of his mouth.
14Strength abides in his neck,
15The folds of his flesh cling together;
hard-cast, he will not totter.
16His heart is cast hard as stone,
cast hard as a nether millstone.
17When he rears up, the gods are frightened,
when he crashes down, they cringe.
18Who overtakes him with sword, it will not avail,
nor spear nor dart nor lance.
19Iron he deems as straw,
and bronze as rotten wood.
20No arrow can make him flee,
slingstones for him turn to straw.
21Missiles are deemed as straw,
and he mocks the javelin’s clatter.
22Beneath him, jagged shards,
he draws a harrow over the mud.
23He makes the deep boil like a pot,
turns sea to an ointment pan.
24Behind him glistens a wake,
he makes the deep seem hoary.
25He has no match on earth,
made as he is without fear.
26All that is lofty he can see.
He is king over all proud beasts.
CHAPTER 41 NOTES
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1. all hope of him is dashed. That is, any hope to vanquish Leviathan will be frustrated.
one is cast down. The translation is an interpretive inference from a single word in the Hebrew, yutal, “will be cast.”
2. arouse him. The same verb is used with Leviathan as its object in 3:8, “ready to rouse Leviathan.” One suspects it was part of the mythological scenario.
3. Who could go before Me in this I’d reward. The Hebrew is cryptic. The possible meaning is that God alone has the power to subdue Leviathan, but if a mortal man could really do it, God would abundantly reward him.
4. I would not keep silent about him. These words would seem to refer to the hypothetical hero who would vanquish Leviathan, though they are ambiguous enough that they might refer to Leviathan himself. In that case, instead of the conditional “I would not keep silent,” the translation would require a simple indicative, “I will not keep silent.” “Heroic acts,” however, sounds more appropriate for a human.
5. outer garb, / … double mail. The description of the fabled beast begins with physical features of the crocodile—here, its plated armor. The second noun in the received text is risno, “his reins,” but the Septuagint reading, siryono, “his armor,” is more plausible.
6. the doors of his face. These are, of course, his powerful jaws.
7. back. The received text reads gaʿawah, which means “pride,” but both the Septuagint and the Vulgate used a Hebrew text that must have read, more plausibly, gewah, “back.”
10. His sneezes shoot out light. At this point, the poet clearly moves from the Egyptian crocodile to a mythological fire-breathing dragon.
and his eyes are like the eyelids of dawn. This verset is one of the most arresting—and daring—moves of the Job poet. He had used this altogether striking image at the beginning of the book, in Job’s death-wish poem (3:9, and see the second comment on that verse). Now he brings it back, not hesitating to locate an image of exquisite beauty at the heart of terror. It is precisely this paradox that epitomizes his vision of Leviathan—a frightening and alien creature—yet, in God’s creation, also a thing of beauty.
11. fly into the air. More literally, “escape.”
14. power dances. The precise meaning of the noun deʾavah is a little in doubt. Some construe it as “violence” or “terror.” The verb taduts usually means “to exult.” Some ancient versions show taruts (a small orthographic difference), “runs.”
16. nether millstone. In the biblical-poetic pattern of intensification from first verset to second, the beast’s heart is at first hard as stone, then hard as a nether millstone, which would have to be especially hard and heavy in order to bear the pressure of grinding.
17. rears up … / crashes down. Both words in the Hebrew are semantically ambiguous, and so this interpretation is conjectural.
18. sword. This paradigmatic weapon then triggers a whole catalogue of weapons that would be useless against Leviathan.
20. arrow. The Hebrew uses a poetic epithet, “son of the bow.”
21. Missiles. The mysterious totaḥ appears only here, and all that is known about it is that it must be some sort of weapon. Modern Hebrew has adopted it for “cannon.”
24. Behind him glistens a wake. The last visual sighting of Leviathan is of his wake as he churns through the water and out of the field of human vision. It is notable that this whole poem, which began with the light of the morning stars and a question about where light dwells, concludes with a wake shining on the surface of the abyss.
26. He is king over all proud beasts. The same phrase, beney shaḥats, “proud beasts,” occurs in 28:8, in the Hymn to Wisdom. Since there it refers to beasts, it is reasonable to assume that the meaning here is the same. What is remarkable about this whole powerfully vivid evocation of Leviathan is that the monotheistic poet has taken a figure from mythology, traditionally seen as the cosmic enemy of the god of order, and transformed it into this daunting creature that is preeminent in, but also very much a part of, God’s teeming creation.
1And Job answered the LORD and he said:
2I know You can do anything,
and no devising is beyond You.
3“Who is this obscuring counsel without knowledge?”
Therefore I told but did not understand,
wonders beyond me that I did not know.
4“Hear, pray, and I will speak.
Let me ask you, that you may inform me.”
5By the ear’s rumor I heard of You,
and now my eye has seen You.
6Therefore do I recant,
And I repent in dust and ashes.
7And it happened after the LORD had spoken these words to Job, that the LORD said to Eliphaz the Temanite: “My wrath has flared against you and your two companions because you have not spoken rightly of Me as did My servant Job. 8And now, take for yourselves seven bulls and seven rams and go to My servant Job, and offer a burnt offering for yourselves, and Job My servant will pray on your behalf. To him only I shall show favor, not to do a vile thing to you, for you have not spoken rightly of Me as did my servant Job.” 9And Eliphaz the Temanite and Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite went out and did according to all that the LORD had spoken to them, and the LORD showed favor to Job. 10And the LORD restored Job’s fortunes when he prayed for his companions, and the LORD increased twofold all that Job had. 11And all his male and female kinfolk and all who had known him before came and broke bread with him in his house and grieved with him and comforted him for all the harm that the LORD had brought on him. And each of them gave him one kesitah and one golden ring. 12And the LORD blessed Job’s latter days more than his former days, and he had fourteen thousand sheep and six thousand camels and a thousand yokes of oxen and a thousand she-asses. 13And he had seven sons and three daughters. 14And he called the name of the first one Dove and the name of the second Cinnamon and the name of the third Horn of Eyeshade. 15And there were no women in the land so beautiful as Job’s daughters. And their father gave them an estate among their brothers. 16And Job lived a hundred and forty years after this, and he saw his children and his children’s children, four generations. 17And Job died, aged and sated in years.
CHAPTER 42 NOTES
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2. I know You can do anything. Job’s final recantation begins by a recognition of God’s omnipotence, though it might be noted that he had conceded this attribute all along in his complaint against God, raising doubts not about divine power but about divine justice.
3. Who is this obscuring counsel without knowledge? Job is directly quoting God’s first words to him in 38:2 (only substituting a synonymous verb). He does this in order to grant the validity of God’s challenge to him.
wonders beyond me that I did not know. The wonders are the spectacular vision of God’s complex creation, from cosmogony to Leviathan, that has been vouchsafed to Job through the Voice from the Whirlwind.
4. Let me ask you, that you may inform me. Job again quotes from the beginning of God’s speech to him, 38:3, in order to concede the justice of God’s position.
5. By the ear’s rumor I heard of You, / and now my eye has seen you. “The ear’s rumor” is literally “the hearing of the ear,” and picks up the imperative “hear” of the previous line. The seeing of the eye is a testimony to the persuasive power of the poetry that God has spoken to Job out of the whirlwind. Through that long chain of vividly arresting images, from the swaddling bands of mist drifting over the primordial sea at creation to the fearsomely armored Leviathan, whose eyes are like the eyelids of dawn, Job has been led to see the multifarious character of God’s vast creation, its unfathomable fusion of beauty and cruelty, and through this he has come to understand the incommensurability between his human notions of right and wrong and the structure of reality. But he may not see God Himself because God addresses him from a storm cloud.
7. you have not spoken rightly of Me as did My servant Job. The three companions had repeatedly proffered lies—about Job and about the divine system of justice—in order to preserve their pat notion of reward and punishment. They were, in effect, corrupted witnesses on God’s behalf. Though the LORD from the whirlwind roundly rebuked Job for his presumption, Job in the debate, unlike his three companions, had remained honest to his own observation of reality and his awareness of his own acts; so, even in his presumption, he had spoken “rightly” about God, had clung to his integrity. Thus God pointedly continues here to call Job His “servant,” as He did in His exchanges with the Adversary.
9. the LORD showed favor to Job. That is, God accepted Job’s intercession on behalf of the three companions because of Job’s integrity.
10. the LORD increased twofold all that Job had. As countless readers have objected, this doubling of property is scarcely adequate compensation for all Job’s sufferings, and even more so, the ten new children scarcely heal the wound of the loss of the first ten lives. But the book ends in the folktale world of the frame-story, where everything is reduced to schematic patterns and formulaic numbers, and perhaps in this world such a question cannot properly be asked.
11. all his male and female kinfolk. The Hebrew says “all his brothers and his sisters,” but the narrative context suggests that the broader biblical meaning of this kinship term is likely here.
broke bread. Literally, “ate bread [that is, food].”
grieved with him and comforted him. These are precisely the actions performed by the three companions in 2:12, but here they are actually restorative, and breaking bread together marks the return of the pariah Job to the human community.
kesitah. An evidently valuable coin mentioned in several other biblical texts, though nothing more is known about it.
one golden ring. The nezem is a large ring, worn on the ear or nose, not on a finger.
14. Dove … Cinnamon … Horn of Eyeshade. These strange and lovely names (the sons remain anonymous and no names were assigned to Job’s children in the opening frame-story) are mystifying. The Hebrew names Yemimah, Qetsiʿah, Qeren Hapukh have no currency elsewhere in the Bible. The writer may have wanted to intimate that after all Job’s suffering, which included hideous disfigurement as well as violent loss, a principle of grace and beauty enters his life in the restoration of his fortunes. Thus, the three daughters have names associated with feminine delicacy and the arts of attraction, and they are said to be the most beautiful women in the land.
15. gave them an estate among their brothers. This was not the standard biblical practice of inheritance.
16. children. Banim can mean either “sons” or “children,” but the prominent attention just given to Job’s three daughters suggests that the more inclusive sense is intended. It may be especially fitting that Job, having begun his complaint by wishing that his own birth could be eradicated, at the end is witness to a chain of births of his offspring.
