THE BOOK OF JOB
The Text of the Hebrew Bible, 1 Series Editor David J.A. Clines
THE BOOK OF JOB
John Gray
Edited by David J.A. Clines
SHEFFIELD PHOENIX PRESS 2010
Copyright © 2010 Sheffield Phoenix Press Published by Sheffield Phoenix Press Department of Biblical Studies, University of Sheffield 45 Victoria Street, Sheffield S3 7QB www.sheffieldphoenix.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without the publishers’ permission in writing.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Typeset by Forthcoming Publications Printed by Lightning Source ISBN 978-1-905048-02-1 ISSN 1747-9622
CONTENTS Preface Abbreviations
ix x Part I GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION
3
Chapter 2 JOB IN THE CONTEXT OF NEAR EASTERN WISDOM LITERATURE
5
Chapter 3 JOB IN HEBREW WISDOM
21
Chapter 4 DATE AND PROVENANCE
32
Chapter 5 LITERARY FORMS IN THE BOOK OF JOB
39
Chapter 6 THE COMPOSITION OF THE BOOK OF JOB
56
Chapter 7 TEXT AND VERSIONS
76
Chapter 8 THE LANGUAGE OF THE BOOK OF JOB
93
Chapter 9 THE ARGUMENT
108 Part II COMMENTARY
Job 1 and 2 THE PROLOGUE
119
Job 3 JOB’S EXPOSTULATION
138
1
vi
The Book of Job
Job 4 and 5 ELIPHAZ’S FIRST ADDRESS
148
Job 6 and 7 JOB’S FIRST REJOINDER TO ELIPHAZ (CHAPTER 6) AND HIS EXPOSTULATION WITH GOD (CHAPTER 7)
167
Job 8 BILDAD’S FIRST EXPOSTULATION
183
Job 9 and 10 JOB’S SECOND REJOINDER
190
Job 11 ZOPHAR’S FIRST ADDRESS
206
Job 12–14 JOB’S STATEMENT
213
Job 15 ELIPHAZ’S SECOND REPLY: A REMONSTRATION TO JOB’S OBSTINACY IN QUESTIONING THE THEODICY
235
Job 16 and 17 JOB’S REJOINDER TO ELIPHAZ
247
Job 18 THE REPLY OF BILDAD
261
Job 19 JOB’S REJOINDER TO BILDAD
267
Job 20 THE REPLY OF ZOPHAR
279
Job 21 JOB’S REJOINDER TO ZOPHAR
289
Job 22 ELIPHAZ’S STATEMENT
301
Job 23 JOB’S RESPONSE TO ELIPHAZ: HIS ARDENT DESIRE FOR CONFRONTATION WITH GOD
310
Job 24 JOB’S RESPONSE TO ELIPHAZ (CONTINUED, VV. 1-12), WITH TWO CITATIONS FROM WISDOM POETRY (VV. 13-18, 19-25)
314
1
Contents
vii
Job 25 and 26 THE INTRODUCTION OF BILDAD’S THIRD ADDRESS: INTRODUCED BY 26.2-4, CONTINUED BY 25.2-6 AND CONCLUDED BY 26.5-15
325
Job 27 JOB’S FINAL RESPONSE TO HIS FRIENDS
333
Job 28 AN INDEPENDENT POEM ON THE TRANSCENDENCE OF WISDOM
340
Job 29 JOB’S REVIEW OF HIS FORMER PROSPERITY
351
Job 30 JOB’S PLAINT
363
Job 31 JOB’S GREAT OATH OF PURGATION
376
Job 32–37 INTERPOLATION
392
Job 32 ELIHU’S FIRST ADDRESS (VV. 6-22) AFTER THE PROSE INTRODUCTION (VV. 1-5)
393
Job 33 ELIHU’S FIRST STATEMENT
399
Job 34 ELIHU’S SECOND STATEMENT
412
Job 35.1; 33.31-33; 35.2–36.25 ELIHU’S THIRD ADDRESS
423
Job 36.26–37.13 ELIHU’S CITATION OF A HYMN OF PRAISE
435
Job 37.14-24 CONCLUSION OF THE ELIHU SECTION: ADDRESS TO JOB
447
INTRODUCTION TO JOB 38–41
451
Job 38 THE DIVINE DECLARATION: PART I
455
Job 39 and 40.25-30 (EVV 41.1-6) THE DIVINE DECLARATION: CONTINUED
469
1
viii
The Book of Job
Job 40.2, 7-14 THE DIVINE DECLARATION: CONCLUSION
482
Job 40.3-5; 42.2-6 JOB’S SUBMISSION
485
Job 40.15–41.26 (EVV 34) WISDOM POEMS ON NATURAL THEMES
489
Job 42.7-17 THE EPILOGUE
503
Bibliography
508
1
PREFACE At his death in 2000, John Gray, who was Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages in the University of Aberdeen, left a complete manuscript of a commentary on the Book of Job. It came into my hands through the good ofces of Professor William Johnstone, Gray’s successor at Aberdeen, and was entrusted to Shefeld Phoenix Press by his daughter Mrs Jean Reynolds, who, with a certain degree of trepidation, personally conveyed the sole typescript copy of the book to Shefeld. The very lengthy manuscript had to be completely retyped, a heroic task which Duncan Burns undertook with his characteristic skill and enthusiasm. It needed nevertheless a number of readings of the proofs and very many editorial interventions to remove inconsistencies and minor blemishes, not least in standardizing and checking the transliteration of the Hebrew. I was glad to have the opportunity of doing the editorial work, which could not be farmed out to a copy-editor, but needed the expertise of a fellow-commentator on the Book of Job. I apologize for the unconscionable delay in completing the work, which was sadly competing for time with various other projects. The chief interest of the present volume lies in its philological observations, all of them worthy of consideration. Gray brought to his work on the Hebrew text of Job a lifetime of experience with Arabic and Ugaritic texts, and made many original suggestions for the meaning of passages. When it came to emendations of the text, which the Book of Job is sorely in need of at many places, Gray’s instinct everywhere was to accept only those where he could show that the original text had been corrupted in the old script. This was an unusual self-imposed limitation, but it had striking results. In addition, Gray conceived his work on Job as an all-purpose commentary, prexing a substantial General Introduction to the book as a whole and prefacing each section of translation and critical notes with an essay displaying his own special form-critical and theological interests. In all these essays his own distinctive approach is evident. I believe that this outstanding commentary will be a tting tribute to the sound judgment and innovative scholarship of its author. David J.A. Clines October 2010 1
ABBREVIATIONS 11QtargJob AB AV
Aq. AfO AJSL Akk. ALUOS AnatSt ANEP ANET AO AnOr Arab. Aram. ARW ASTI AuS ATANT ATD ATR BA BASOR BDB
BKAT Bib BotAT BSO(A)S BZAW CB CBQ EHAT EchB ET ETL ETR EVV 1
Targum of Job from Qumran Cave 11 Anchor Bible Authorized Version Aquila Archiv für Orientforschung American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures Akkadian Annual of Leeds University Oriental Society Anatolian Studies James B. Pritchard (ed.), Ancient Near East in Pictures Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954) James B. Pritchard (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950) Der Alte Orient Analecta orientalia Arabic Aramaic Archiv für Religionswissenschaft Annual of the Swedish Theological Institute G. Dalman, Arbeit und Sitte in Palästina Abhandlungen zur Theologie des Alten und Neuen Testaments Das Alte Testament Deutsch Anglican Theological Review Biblical Archaeologist Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Francis Brown, S.R. Driver and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907) Biblischer Kommentar: Altes Testament Biblica Die Botschaft des Alten Testaments Bulletin of the School of Oriental (and African) Studies Beihefte zur ZAW The Century Bible Catholic Biblical Quarterly Exegetisches Handbuch zum Alten Testament Echter Bible Expository Times Ephemerides theologicae lovanienses Études théologiques et religieuses English Versions
Abbreviations GB GHAT Gk. GKC HAT Hebr. HSAT HTR HUCA ICC JAOS JBL JJS JMEOS JNES JPOS JPTh JQR JR JRAS JSS JTS KAT KB KD KEH KHC KS LXX
MGWJ MT
NCB NEB
NICOT OTL OTS PEFQS PEQ PR RA RB RE RevQ RGG
1
xi
Gesenius-Buhl, Hebräisches und aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament Göttinger Handkommentar zum Alten Testament Greek Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar (ed. E. Kautzsch; revised and trans. A.E. Cowley; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910) Handbuch zum Alten Testament Hebrew Die Heilige Schrift des Alten Testaments Harvard Theological Review Hebrew Union College Annual International Critical Commentary Journal of the American Oriental Society Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of Jewish Studies Journal of the Manchester Egyptian and Oriental Society Journal of Near Eastern Studies Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society Jahrbücher für protestantische Theologie Jewish Quarterly Review Journal of Religion Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Journal of Semitic Studies Journal of Theological Studies Kommentar zum Alten Testament Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner (eds.), Lexicon in Veteris Testamenti libros (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1953) Kerygma und Dogma Kurzgefasstes exegetisches Handbuch zum Alten Testament Kurzer Hand-Commentar zum Alten Testament A. Alt, Kleine Schriften zum Alten Testament, I (1953); II (1959); III (1959) Septuagint Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums Masoretic Text New Century Bible New English Bible New International Commentary on the Old Testament Old Testament Library Oudtestamentische Studiën Palestine Exploration Fund, Quarterly Statement Palestine Exploration Quarterly Le palais royal d’Ugarit Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale Revue biblique Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche Revue de Qumran Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft 3 (ed. K. Galling; Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1957–65)
xii RHPR RHR RQ RS Theod. ThLZ TRu RSV
S SBLMS SBOT SBT Sem SGV SSEA Sym. Syr. T Ug. UT V VT VTSup WBC WO ZAW
1
The Book of Job Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses Revue de l’histoire des religions Revue de Qumran Ras Shamra Theodotion Theologische Literaturzeitung Theologische Rundschau Revised Standard Version Syriac (Peshitta) SBL Monograph Series The Sacred books of the Old Testament Studies in Biblical Theology Semitica Sammlung Gemeinverständlicher Vorträge und Schriften aus dem Gebiet der Theologie und Religionsgeschichte Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities. Publications Symmachus Syriac Targum Ugaritic Cyrus H. Gordon, Ugaritic Textbook (AnOr, 38; Rome: Pontical Biblical Institute Press, 1965) Vulgate Vetus Testamentum Vetus Testamentum, Supplements Word Biblical Commentaries Die Welt des Orients Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
Part I GENERAL INTRODUCTION
1
1
Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION
In the grandeur of its conception, its daring questioning of the traditional faith, its noble defence of ‘an honest man, the noblest work of God’, and in the existential solution of the acute problem of the relation of human justice to the justice of God in the human confrontation with ‘the dreadful yet alluring mystery’ (mysterium tremendum et fascinans) of the divine presence, and in the wonderful range of poetic diction and imagery and the rich variety of literary forms, each with its own peculiar signicance in the argument, the book of Job well deserves the appraisal of Thomas Carlyle: ‘One of the grandest things ever written with pen’ (Carlyle 1908: 67). In view of the limitations of Carlyle’s knowledge of Hebrew and cognate Semitic languages and literatures, and especially in view of the relatively uncritical view of the structure and notoriously difcult text of Job, Carlyle’s judgment, ‘There is nothing, I think, in the Bible or out of it, of equal literary merit’, may be an intuitive rather than a critical assessment, but it is also the assessment of Hebrew specialists. Cornill (1892: 229), for instance, considered it ‘the crown of the Hebrew Wisdom-writings and one of the most wonderful products of the human spirit, belonging to the literature of the ancient world like Dante’s Divina commedia and Goethe’s Faust, and, like both these mighty allembracing works, striving to explain the deepest secrets of existence, to solve the ultimate mysteries of life’. The assessment of even a Semitist like Cornill and his contemporaries, however, was but a glimpse of the truth. As we may appreciate one of our magnicent mediaeval abbeys from the ruins in which there is still something of the nobility of the original which dees spoliation and decay, so in the book of Job the imperishable beauty and truth, which still delight and inspire, lay upon us the obligation to restore with renewed energy whenever new scientic insights give us the means of doing so. In the case of the book of Job, the moment is ripe for such restoration. First this is demanded by fresh insights into analogous texts from Mesopotamia1 and a new appraisal of Egyptian Wisdom literature.2 G. Fohrer’s
1. Stamm 1946; Nougayrol 1952; van Dijk 1953: 119ff.; Kramer 1953; Kuschke 1956; Gese 1958: 63ff. Relevant texts are conveniently published by Lambert 1960. See further below. 1
4
Job 1 and 2: The Prologue
recognition of the use and adaptation of Hebrew literary forms in Job is a signicant new contribution, affecting not only the argument of the author but also the composition of his work and the recognition of redaction (Fohrer 1963a). The discovery of an Aramaic targum of Job at Qumran (11QtargJob) from the latter half of the second century BCE (van der Ploeg and van der Woude 1971), the earliest known version of the book of Job, permits a reassessment of the Hebrew text and of the later versions. C.J. Gadd’s study of the inscriptions of the Neobabylonian King Nabona’id at Harran (Gadd 1955) has given evidence for the presence of the king and probably Jewish garrisons in the oases of the Hejaz already established by the time of the appearance of the book of Job, which is supported by an Aramaic fragment from Qumran published by J.T. Milik (1956) that refers to the association of Nabona’id with Jews in the Hejaz. We would question A. Guillaume’s use of this evidence to support his thesis of the provenance of the book of Job from this community in the Hejaz and the reection of their Hebrew–Arabic bilingualism in the many Arabic cognates in the book (Guillaume 1944 and 1963), which must certainly be modied by the recognition of cognates in Akkadian, Assyrian, Ugaritic, Aramaic and Syriac often in common with Guillaume’s ‘Arabisms’. Nevertheless, those texts widen the horizon reected in the book of Job, which in fact we expect in the dispersion of the Jews after the Babylonian Conquest. The time is ripe, too, to apply our new knowledge of the literature of Canaan from Ras Shamra, with its grammatical features, poetic diction and imagery, to the many linguistic and textual problems in Job. The contribution of such Ugaritic experts as M.J. Dahood (1962) and M.H. Pope (1965) to the specic problems of Job is most welcome, though all Ugaritic experts would admit that this matter should be very critically handled. These are the outstanding, though not the only, advances in the scientic eld of OT language and literature and related studies which have permitted an impressive reconstruction of this great memorial of Hebrew thought and literature. It is the conviction that it is now possible to effect this reconstruction to such a remarkable degree of fullness and enhanced elucidation that prompts the present study.
2. For a survey of the Egyptian material with full appraisal, see Schmid 1966: 8-84, 202-23. 1
Chapter 2 JOB IN THE CONTEXT OF NEAR EASTERN WISDOM LITERATURE
Jewish tradition associated wisdom with Solomon, and it is signicant that this period is characterized by a marked degree of humanism and cosmopolitan interest in Israel. Solomon ruled a kingdom which lay athwart lines of communication between Mesopotamia and Egypt and included the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, which was so vital to the mercantile kingdoms of South Arabia and Egypt, as evidenced by the visit of the Queen of Sheba. It was important that an ofcial class should be trained to deal with foreign correspondence in affairs of state both at home and in diplomatic activity abroad. The marriage of Solomon and a daughter of the Pharaoh is evidence of this new involvement of Israel. Consequently the ‘wise men’ (a¤mîm), on whom the training of the administrative class devolved, were more and more interested in the educational traditions of Mesopotamia and Egypt, both in the methods and objectives of the older sages and in their works. Characteristic of the sapiential tradition both of Mesopotamia from the Sumerian domination in the third millennium BCE and of Egypt was the scientic interest in nature and society, which is attested by lists of phenomena according to their classication. Thus plants, animals, minerals, tools, equipment, clothes, adornment, food, drink, buildings, etc., are so listed, and society is classied according to professions both in Sumerian1 and Egyptian texts (Gardiner 1947). Such texts had doubtless great value in giving young scribes practice in writing in the complicated cuneiform syllabic script and ideogram and in hieroglyphics, but they had a deeper signicance. They are evidence of belief in a divinely appointed Order in nature and society, which the Egyptians called ma’at, and of a serious effort to recognize evidences of this Order and inculcate a respect for it. H.H. Schmid in fact speaks of such lists and wisdom texts compiled under the same presupposition as having the purpose of initiation of the students into this Order (Schmid 1966: 21-22). The use of
1. Chiera 1929; Matous 1933; Schmid 1966: 95ff. The actual classication is the contribution of the Sumerians. The Semitic Akkadians used the lists on the basis of SumerianAkkadian lexical tables. 1
6
2. Job in the Context
classied lists of phenomena of this type in Israel is no doubt the factual source of the tradition of Solomon’s encyclopaedic nature-lore (1 Kgs 5.12-13 [EVV 5.32-33]) (Alt 1937). In the Book of Job the citation of instances of God’s power and providence in the earth (38.4-7) and sea (38.8-11), the disposition of the day (38.12-15), and oods and storms (38.35-38), and in certain animals grouped according to their particular properties, such as the freedom of the wild ass (39.5-8), the untameable nature of the wild ox (39.9-12), the speed of the ostrich (39.1318), etc., is probably a poetic development of such a classied list. In this case, in view of the belief in a Divine Order which underlies such lists in the Sumerian, Egyptian and Hebrew wisdom tradition, the implication of the Divine Declaration in Job 38.2–39.30 and its relevance to the problem of the relation of Job in his unmerited suffering to the Divine Order which his faith assumed is obvious. The grouping of phenomena in nature and society according to their afnities made sages in Mesopotamia and Egypt aware also of their differentiae. Such a preoccupation with the differentiae as a problem in the context of belief in the Divine Order may be reected in the controversial dialogue between different parties such as Summer and Winter (van Dijk 1953), Dumuzu and Enkidu, the shepherd and the farmer (ANET, 41ff.), and the Palm and the Tamarisk (Lambert 1960: 150ff.), where each vaunts its own advantages and criticizes the attributes and assets of the other. This reects the exercise of value judgments and the tendency to seek evidence for the Divine Order not only in harmony but in tension between opposites. The dispute between the Palm and the Tamarisk suggests at once a rough analogy in Jotham’s fable of the trees in Judg. 9.7-15, which is probably not an isolated instance of such a text in Israel. Not only natural phenomena might be collated according to their afnities and differentiae; situations in human relationships might be also so presented. This was done in proverbs, where situations might be presented with or without imagery, usually with respect to the relationship of cause and effect. A general truth might be so expressed or a collection of proverbs might express various facets of the truth that are mutually complementary, as often in the presentation of proverbs in antithetic couplets in the Book of Proverbs, especially in Proverbs 10–15. This convention was employed to a very much more limited extent in Mesopotamia. Proverb collections are numerous in the Sumerian sapiential tradition in Southern Mesopotamia (Kramer 1956: 152-59; Gordon 1959), where again they attest the recognition of the Divine Order and the effort to adjust the philosophy and behaviour of society to conform to it in the developing situation. In the OT even in an early section of Proverbs, for instance chs. 10– 15, we notice in the sharp antithesis between wisdom and folly, and between good and evil conduct and their consequences, a sharper challenge to the individual and a more determined effort not only to recognize God’s Order, 1
The Book of Job
7
but to bring humans into conformity with it.2 This doubtless is a consequence of the adaptation of the wisdom tradition of the Near East to the ethos and faith of the Covenant community by emphasizing empiric moral facts and experiences. The stability of the existing order is also the concern of certain texts from Mesopotamia, such as the Instruction of the antediluvian Shuruppak to his son Ziusudra the survivor of the Flood (Lambert 1960: 92-95), or the Counsels of Wisdom (pp. 96-107), and from Egypt the Instruction for the Pharaoh Merikare (Thomas 1958: 155-61), the Precepts of Anii (ANET, 420ff.), the Pleading of the Eloquent Peasant (ANET, 407-10) and the Teaching of Amenemope (ANET, 421-25). These either advocated to the ruler the principles to be observed in government or made clear to future administrators the Order in nature and society which they were to labour to realize. In all this matter a Divine Order was accepted, ME in Sumerian, ma’at in Egyptian, which might have been expressed in Hebrew either by Ñeeq, ‘what is right and proper’,3 and secondarily ‘justice’, or by mišpÓ, properly ‘the government’, or ‘order’ sustained by the divine ruler.4 In this context in proverbs and precepts emphasis was laid on the general principle of cause and effect, sin and retribution, virtue and reward, as in the conventional wisdom tradition in the OT represented by Proverbs and by Job’s interlocutors. However, from an early age, sages in Egypt and Mesopotamia were embarrassed by the fact that in actual experience the Order in which they believed (and of which they saw so much evidence in nature and society) was apparently disrupted by occasional vicissitudes. In Egypt for instance the security and assurance concerning the Order, of which the state and cult in the Old Kingdom (third millennium BCE) was held to be the expression, was disrupted by the eclipse of the state at the Amorite Invasion in the First Intermediate Period of Egyptian history (c. 2300–2050 BCE). This uncertainty is reected in such a text as the Dialogue of a Man with his Own Soul (DOTT, 162-67), partly in prose and partly in verse, on the apparent lack of moral order in the world and the pointlessness of life, the note on which the Dialogue in Job opens (ch. 3), with Job’s abjuration of the day he was born. There is of course an essential difference; the two texts are in dialogue form, but the Egyptian text, where the man is tempted to commit suicide—which Job never contemplates—is prompted by the general social situation, while the Book of Job expresses the intense personal agony of one deeply involved in an acute 2. This is well emphasized by Schmid 1966: 150ff. 3. Ringgren (1947: 49, 58) recognizes the correspondence of ma’at to Hebrew Ñeqh; so Horst (RGG3, 1404) and Schmid (1966: 159), who notes the correspondence of Hebrew ‘h Ñeeq to, for example, ‘ry ma’at, signifying the creative function of humanity and society in the upholding of ma’at order. 4. This translation of Hebrew mišpÓ must be emphasized as basic in view of the signicance of the cognate ÓpÓ in Ugaritic in parallelism with mlk (‘king’) and zbl (‘prince’) in the Ras Shamra texts. 1
8
2. Job in the Context
crisis of personal belief. Fundamentally, however, the problems of the writers of both texts were the same, the discrepancy between experiential facts and the Divine Order in which both believed. In Mesopotamia too this discrepancy was felt, and it is expressed in several texts which recall the theme and indeed the diction of the Book of Job. One of these in fact is popularly known as ‘the Babylonian Job’, though the afnity is more formal and supercial than real.5 This work (Lambert 1960: 21-62), which begins with the words ludlul bl nmeqi (‘I will praise the lord of wisdom’), is known from copies of a text of four tablets (c. 500 lines) from Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh, the original probably going back to the fteenth century BCE. This is not a dialogue, but a song of praise for deliverance from various troubles. The list of these, to be sure, is reminiscent of the sufferings of Job, and the phraseology of both works has much in common. Thus the sufferer complains like Job that he is forsaken by his gods though he has been scrupulous in his religious and social duties. Arguing from his sufferings to sin, like Job’s orthodox friends, he complains: I wish I knew that these things were pleasing to one’s god! What is proper to oneself is an offence to one’s god, What in one’s own heart seems despicable is proper to one’s god. Who knows the will of the gods in heaven? Who understands the plans of the underworld gods? Where have mortals learned the way of a god?
The sufferer is popularly shunned like Job under the impression that he is under the divine curse, which was anciently believed to be infectious: My city frowns on me as an enemy; Indeed my land is savage and hostile. My friend has become foe, My companion has become a wretch and a devil. In his savagery my comrade denounces me, Constantly my associates furbish their weapons. My intimate friend has brought my life into danger; My slave has publicly cursed me in the assembly. My house ( ) the mob has defamed me, When my acquaintance sees me, he passes me by on the other side. My family treats me as an alien. 5. This is generally recognized. Thus M. Buttenwieser (1922: 10) rightly states ‘this text lacks all the essential points that give the Job story its distinctive character’. But his criticism refers only to the narrative framework of the Book of Job, and so fails to reckon seriously with the real afnities of this and other Mesopotamian texts of this type. Those texts are of the utmost value for a comparative study of the literature and thought of Israel in the ancient Near East, but it is of the essence of comparative study that more than one instance should be cited, and that due signicance should be attached to such afnities as may be established, so that the distinctive characteristics may be appreciated. J.J. Stamm (1946: 19) shows a better appreciation as well as due reserve in asking if this work brings us into the forecourt of the OT, especially the Book of Job. 1
The Book of Job
9
Compare Job 19.13-17: My brothers have withdrawn far, My acquaintances are strangers to me, My kinsmen and friends have deserted me, The sojourners in my house have forgotten me, Yea, my slave-girls treat me as an outsider, I am a stranger in their eyes. I have called to my slave, and he does not answer me, I have to entreat him with my own mouth. My breath is repugnant to my wife, And I am putrid to my own children.
Another feature common to the two works is the statement of innocence: Yet I myself was thinking only of prayer and supplication; Supplication was my concern, sacrice my rule; The day of the worship of the gods was my delight, The day of my goddess’s procession was my prot and wealth… (cf. Job 29.717).
This close correspondence incidentally may indicate that the author of the Book of Job was familiar with this and similar Mesopotamian texts, for example the ‘Babylonian Theodicy’ (see below, pp. 10-15), but the explanation is that in this particular both these texts and the Book of Job reect the conventional language of the Plaint of the Sufferer in fast-liturgies in Mesopotamia and Israel, and are variants of this common literary type.6 The Babylonian sufferer in such texts is never confronted by God except through a dream-revelation, nor does he, like Job, challenge such an encounter. In fact his hope of relief is quickened by a dream, and in the text cited he is freed from all his diseases by ‘the lord of wisdom’, that is Marduk, the lord of exorcism. This sudden relief may have suggested the complete rehabilitation of Job in the epilogue to the book (Job 42.7-17), which of course is quite external to the theological substance of the complete Book of Job.7 In this Babylonian text the essential difference from the Book of Job is obvious in spite of undeniable afnities. The closest afnity of the Babylonian text with the OT is with the Plaint of the Sufferer in the Psalms, both in form and in content. These list the sufferings of the subject in similar hyperbole, posing also the problem of the suffering of one who can condently state his 6. So Dhorme (1926: lxxxvi), who, however, fails to recognize all the characteristic elements in the Mesopotamian genre and the possibility that the author of Job deliberately adapted it. 7. H. Gese (1958: 63ff.), recognizing the ‘happy ending’, categorizes such texts as Klagehörungs-paradigms (‘the type “the Plaint of the Sufferer” heard’). He recognizes three main elements, the statement of the sufferer’s unhappy situation, his plaint and his relief, and goes on to suggest that the Job-tradition which was the source or the extant Book of Job conformed to this type, the author retaining the theme of the rst and nal components of the prototype, but adapting the plaint as a controversy in the Dialogue in the book. 1
10
2. Job in the Context
exemplary conduct. Both record their deliverance by God, to whom vows are made and paid (see Lambert 1960: 61, ll. 91ff.; cf. Ps. 107.22), and thanks are rendered. The theme of such Mesopotamian texts in fact is that of Psalm 107 with its list of sufferings and its refrain: They cried unto the Lord in their trouble, And he delivered them from their distress.
Signicantly, both these texts include a hymn of praise to God for his deliverance and all his great works (Ps. 107.32ff.; cf. Lambert 1960: 59-61, ll. 33ff.). More specically, since like the Mesopotamian texts and Job it is conscious of the problem of the theodicy, Psalm 34 may be cited, beginning like the Mesopotamian text with the theme of praise: I will bless the Lord at all times, His praise shall continually be in my mouth.
The discussion of the moral problem of an innocent orphan wronged in an order believed to be under the government of just gods is presented in dialogue in the ‘Babylonian Theodicy’ (Lambert 1960: 63-91), known from texts in Ashurbanipal’s library but dating from c. 1000 BCE. The text opens with the miserable case of the orphan bereft of his parents by the act of God, which recalls the problem stated by Job (3.23): (Why is light given) to a man whose way is hidden, And about whom God has set obstructions?
The answer in the ‘Babylonian Theodicy’ is that of orthodox theology: death is the common lot of all, but He who waits on his god has a protecting angel, The humble man who fears his god accumulates wealth…
Compare the words of Eliphaz in Job 4.7-8: Recall, what man if innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright ever cut off ?
In contradiction, the Babylonian sufferer cites his sufferings in all their varied detail, with which we are familiar in Job and the Plaint of the Sufferer in the Psalms and in Mesopotamian fast-liturgies. This evokes a rebuke from his friend: But you ( ) your balanced reason like a madman, You make (your ) diffuse and irrational…
Compare the preface to the speech of Eliphaz in Job 4.4-5: Your words would raise the fallen, Would strengthen bowing knees; But now when it reaches you you cannot bear it, And when it comes to you you are non-plussed. 1
The Book of Job
11
Like Job’s friends the friend of the Babylonian sufferer can simply reiterate the traditional doctrine of retribution and reward, which the sufferer counters by citing the fact of the prosperity of the impious: The savage lion who devoured the choicest esh, Did it bring its our-offering to appease-the goddess’s anger? ( ) the nouveau riche who has multiplied his wealth, Did he weigh out precious gold for the goddess Mami? (Have I) held back offerings? I have prayed to my god, (I have) pronounced the blessing over the goddess’s regular sacrice…
Compare Job 21.7-13: Why do the wicked live, Prosper and grow mighty in power? Their seed is established in their presence, And their offspring stand fast before their eyes; Their houses are safe from fear, No rod of God is on them; Their bull engenders without fail, Their cow calves and does not cast her calf. They send forth their little ones like a ock, And their children skip about; They sing to the timbrel and the lyre, And make merry to the sound of the pipe. They nish their days in prosperity, And go down to Sheol in peace.
The friend of the Babylonian sufferer nevertheless reasserts the principle of reward and retribution and urges that the ways of God are beyond scrutiny: You are as stable as the earth; but the plan of God is remote…
Compare Job 36.26–37.24: Behold God is great, and we know him not; The number of his years is unsearchable. Lo, God is great beyond our knowledge, The number of his years is unsearchable… To the Almighty we cannot attain, Great in power and justice… Wherefore let men fear him; He does not regard any who are wise in their own conceit.
The debate in the ‘Babylonian Theodicy’ ends with the friend’s concession that the social disorders are the result of human nature created and tolerated by the gods, and the sufferer is content with the prospect of his friend’s sympathy and the hope of the god’s eventual mercy. The ultimate result is the same as in Job, but is much more facile. The Mesopotamian sage with academic detachment acquiesces in the situation; the theologian in Job agonizes over the paradox of the suffering of the innocent and the Order of God, and nally nds 1
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2. Job in the Context
satisfaction in the fact that though God gives no answer which is intellectually satisfying he is not aloof from the sufferer. The traditional view that suffering implied sin and alienation from God was exploded in the conclusion of Job, and when the sufferer in Job rose above this traditional fatalism he found fresh hope in the living fellowship of God: As the ear hears I had heard of you, But now my eye has seen you.
Another such text is that published by J. Nougayrol (1952) as ‘Une version ancienne du “Juste Souffrant” ’, hereafter cited according to its enumeration in the Louvre AO 4462. This text, from the sixteenth century, is fragmentary. Nougayrol considers that it began with a description of the prosperity of the subject, the loss of which he deplores, and with the description of his calamity. This would suggest an analogy with the Prologue in Job. The actual text begins with a statement by his friend supporting the description of the subject’s sufferings. The sufferer then states his innocence, mentioning the support of his friend in his afiction: Does brother not belong to brother? Is a friend not bitten when his friend is bitten?
Job may refer to this traditional role of the friend in such a text as this in his animadversion on his friends’ lack of sympathy in 6.14ff.: He who withdraws his loyalty from his friend Forsakes the fear of the Almighty.
The sufferer then states that in spite of his adversity he has remained faithful to his god. He acknowledges his god’s blessings which he has enjoyed and of which he is now deprived, as Job remembers his former blessing (ch. 29), with which he contrasts his present misery (ch. 30). In this also the Babylonian sufferer is supported by his friend. Then the sufferer’s plaint is heard and his faith vindicated in a Divine Declaration: Thy démarche is worthy of a man. Thy heart is innocent.
This strikingly recalls the divine approval of the words of Job in 42.7, referring, we believe, to the source material of the Dialogue of the present Book of Job, which the writer has adapted. The god continues: The years are fullled, the days have redeemed thy suffering. Hadst thou not been called to life, how wouldst thou have come to the end of this serious illness? Thou hast known anguish, fear in its full extent. Until the end hast thou borne thy heavy load. The way was blocked; it is open to thee. 1
The Book of Job
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The road is levelled; grace is granted to thee. In the future forget not thy god, Thy creator when thou hast recovered thy health.
Nougayrol considers that the text ended with a description of the rehabilitation of the sufferer, but here the text is fragmentary. Apart from the afnities of thought and expression with the Book of Job which have been noted above, there is a striking afnity in pattern in the initial disaster after prosperity, the plaint of the sufferer describing his grief in detail, the protestation of innocence and the Divine Declaration heralding the rehabilitation of the sufferer. The differences between this text with its happy ending and the Book of Job are at once apparent, of course, but the epilogue in the Book of Job (42.11-12) agrees with the Mesopotamian text, and the divine approval of the words of Job in 42.7 indicates that the present Dialogue has been considerably adapted from a source which after H. Gese we believe to have been the literary prototype of the source of the Book of Job, probably mediated through the Plaint of the Sufferer,8 which is attested in the OT in the Psalms, notably, so far as concerns this subject Psalms 37 and 73, and in Jeremiah and Lamentations. That there was such a literary type to serve as an ultimate source for the Book of Job is indicated by a Sumerian text from c. 2000–1700 published by J.J.A. van Dijk in 1953 (see van Dijk 1953 and Kramer 1955). Like the text ludlul bl nmeqi (‘I will praise the lord of wisdom’) and Psalm 34, the text opens with the exhortation to the man to praise constantly the exaltation of his god, which suggests Job’s sentiment (1.21): Yahweh gave, Yahweh has taken; Blessed be the name of Yahweh,
and the advice of Elihu to Job (36.24): Remember to extol his work Of which men have sung.
The text continues with the call to the sufferer, ‘a man’ (cf. Job 1.1, ‘There was a man…’), to state his plaint to God. He is aided by his wife and friends, as the wife and friends of Job in the source used by the writer of our present Book of Job may have abetted Job in his occasional questioning of God’s moral order, as Job 2.9 and 42.7 indicate—though, as 42.7 suggests, Job, like the Mesopotamian sufferer, resists the temptation to let this note predominate. As in the other texts cited above, the sufferer, like Job in ch. 31, exculpates himself of social sins, and addresses his plaint to his god, hoping for relief.
8. This well exemplies the peculiar adaptation of literary types in the book of Job from the situation with which they were traditionally associated, which Fohrer has noted as an original feature of the method of the author of the Book of Job in his Studien zum Buch Hiob (1963b: esp. pp. 70ff.), which may certainly be said to have given a new orientation to the study of the book with very fruitful results. 1
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2. Job in the Context
The text ends with the statement that his god had ‘heard the right words of the suppliant’ and had rehabilitated him, turning his sufferings into joy. The Mesopotamian prototype indicates that the epilogue in Job is simply a survival of the writer’s source which he did not adapt as he did the Dialogue, conscious no doubt of the value of his source for those not sufciently mature to appreciate the searching philosophy of the Dialogue. H. Gese (1958) has admirably emphasized the afnity and difference between the Book of Job and those wisdom texts of Mesopotamia. The connection between the situation of the sufferer and sins of omission and commission which they emphasize according to the conventional ethical theory of the day is voiced by Job’s friends (4.8ff.; 5; 8; 15.17ff.; 18.1ff.; 20), even though the divine economy in the moral order is admitted to be inscrutable; Job’s friends also represent the Mesopotamian wisdom tradition in emphasizing the limitation of humans before the Almighty and Omniscient (4.17–21; 15.2-16; 25), and in their urge to Job to cast himself on God’s mercy (5.8-22; 22.21ff.). All these traditional positions are disputed by the author of Job. He questions the conventional faith in the theodicy (Job 6.15ff.; 13.1ff.; 16.2ff.; 19; 21); the insignicance of a human before God reects on God, who condescends to inquisition and afiction with such a one (7; 9-10), and whether Job must nally abase himself before the Almighty and inscrutable. If Job must do this he has at least maintained his innocence (16.18-19; 31) and won the assurance that he is not beneath the notice of God. Those texts from the sages of Egypt and Mesopotamia by no means exhaust the sapiential material available to the sages of Israel; they are only those most relevant to the Book of Job. Afnities of thought and phraseology are striking, though the sense of the whole differs markedly from Job’s bold, almost blasphemous questioning of the divine economy. What is most important, however, is the afnity between the Mesopotamian texts and the Book of Job in literary form or pattern, within which the writer of Job adapted the tenor of what we believe to be his prototype. This will be largely the theme of our study of the Composition of the Book of Job (see below, pp. 56-75). Common to those Mesopotamian texts, as to the other sapiential texts we have cited both from Mesopotamia and Egypt, is the assumption of a Divine Order in which all in nature and society is integrated. Those texts that most resemble the Book of Job reveal in some degree the embarrassment of their authors in face of reality, for instance the suffering of the innocent with the consequent impairing of their moral potential, which seems to contradict the Divine Order. The unpalatable fact of the suffering of the innocent, which contradicts the ethical principle of retribution and reward in the Divine Order, is not equally prominent in all the Mesopotamian texts cited. The emphasis on this element seems to depend on the nature of the text. In ludlul bl nmeqi, for instance, the opening and conclusion obviously suggest a text intimately related to the cult, that is to say not a wisdom text proper. Here the suffering of the innocent and the moral problem it raises is frankly admitted, but it is 1
The Book of Job
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connected with the confession, or in this case the protestation, of the worshipper’s innocence, and serves to emphasize his dependence on the grace of God. On the other hand, the problem of the suffering of the innocent is much more emphasized in the ‘Babylonian Theodicy’, where the sufferer to be sure nally depends on God’s grace, but that dependence is acquiescence rather than real faith. This, as the sharp dialectic indicates, is a wisdom text proper. It is not so easy to decide the nature of the other two, though the introduction of the sufferer in ‘the Sumerian Job’ as ‘a man’ rather indicates a wisdom text serving a philosophic discussion of a hypothetical case, even though, like certain wisdom psalms in the OT, for example Psalms 22, 37 and 73, it takes the form of a cultic text. In this case, as in those psalms in the OT, the fact that the emphasis falls not on the problem of the suffering of the innocent but on the revelation of God’s grace indicates that the purpose of the text was not to accentuate the problem but to defend the belief in God’s Order by seeking a solution beyond philosophy in religion. This is the solution also in the Book of Job, though both the problem and the religious experience in which a solution is found are much more intensive than in any of the Mesopotamian texts. All those texts indicate how intimately wisdom in the ancient Near East was connected with religion. The ‘Babylonian Theodicy’, which is so strongly critical and most humanist in character, still concludes with acquiescence to the Divine Order. The text ludlul bl nmeqi, which is the most liturgic, seeks rst, like the author of the Book of Job, to solve the moral problem by humanistic argument before nally seeking the answer in religion. The problem is posed, as we have seen, by the observation: What is proper to oneself is an offence to one’s god… Where have mortals learnt the way of a god?
But this is also a statement of the relative nature of humanity and its system of values, a philosophic argument cited in defence of the Divine Order, which is accepted as absolute. It is to be noted that Job, though embarrassed by the discrepancy between the justice of humans (with its principle of sin and retribution and virtue and reward) and the justice of God, does not quite abandon his belief in the Order of God and the validity of the human conception of justice within it. Otherwise there would be no point in his reiterated appeal for a hearing in open tribunal with God. Like the Mesopotamian writers, the author of Job nds the nal solution in religion. Only in Job is the orthodox doctrine of the theodicy subjected to a more thorough and severe criticism, so that the sufferer is isolated with his God beyond all social conventions and doctrine to nd the solution of his moral problem in that living confrontation and communion beyond the limitations of tradition in religion. Again the answer to the problem of Job, as in its Mesopotamian counterparts, is given in the Divine Declaration, where the sufferer is assured of communion with God. But, as distinct from the Mesopotamian texts, God in Job so far respects the capacity of the 1
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2. Job in the Context
sufferer as to give him sufcient evidence to make a solution of his problem at least partly intelligible intellectually, though full conviction is the result of his existential experience of the living God. The Mesopotamian matter which we have cited suggests such a prototype for the source of the Book of Job, though the saga style of the Prologue and Epilogue rather suggest a popular version of such a work. That literary works of this character from Mesopotamia were not unknown in Palestine is now indicated by a fragment of the Gilgamesh Legend from the thirteenth century found at Megiddo.9 More relevant to the present subject, Mesopotamian sapiential texts are among more recent discoveries at Ras Shamra. Akkadian and Sumerian wisdom texts have been found in the vicinity of the palace at Ras Shamra. The texts found include proverbs (Nougayrol 1968: 273-300), fragments of the Gilgamesh Legend (pp. 300-10), which is also a sapiential text despite its epic form, and, what is particularly relevant to our problem of the innocent sufferer, a text from c. 1300 in Akkadian script and language (pp. 264-73) which carries it back to the age of Hammurabi in the opinion of Nougayrol (pp. 266f.). The new text most closely resembles ludlul bl nmeqi among the Mesopotamian texts cited. It opens by presenting the sufferer as non-plussed; neither oracles nor the consulting of livers and entrails nor omens nor dreams explain his sufferings with relation to his deserts nor indicate an end to them. His nearest kinsmen implore him to bow to his fate (cf. Job’s wife), while at the same time offering him solace. Nevertheless they mourn him as one whose ill is irremediable. Signicantly, in view of the afnity with ludlul bl nmeqi, the sufferer anticipates revival through the grace of Marduk. The anticipated relief suggests again the theme of his sufferings, and here the language is reminiscent of Job and the Plaint of the Sufferer in the Psalms: I knew no more dreams, and sleep no longer embraced me, I lay all the night awake;10 In the midst of my dreams the grave ever dogged me; I was ever the prey of the ill I had suffered…11 For sustenance I had tears instead of food.12
As Job blesses the name of the Lord even under the stroke of calamity (Job 1.20), the sufferer, like the author of ludlul bl nmeqi, praises Marduk, without whom, he confesses, he would have had no breath to voice his plaint.
9. See Goetze and Levy 1959. The Gilgamesh Epic, despite its form and entertainment value, is nevertheless a humanist text on the sapiential subject of the natural limitations of humans despite the high aspirations of ‘the glory, jest and riddle of the world’. 10. Cf. Job 7.4. 11. Cf. Job 7.13-15. 12. Cf. Job 3–24; Ps. 42.3. 1
The Book of Job
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The very consciousness of suffering is evidence of the care of his god. Job never makes this declaration of faith in the biblical book, but it is voiced by Eliphaz in his argument ‘Happy is the man whom God reproves…’ (Job 5.1721), which like the Ugaritic text freely admits the ill to which humanity is subject, but holds rm faith in the grace of God. The intensication of suffering as evidence of the persistent grace of God is also the theme of Elihu’s argument in the addendum to the Book of Job (chs. 32–37) in Job 33.14-30, culminating in the declaration (33.29-30): Behold, God has done all these things, Twice, three times with a man, To bring back his soul from the pit That he may see the light of life.
The declaration of faith leads on to praise of the sufferer’s god. The conception of the sufferer nding the solution to his troubles, even against the evidence of facts, in praise of God is familiar in the Book of Job, not only in Job’s heroic blessing of the name of God in his utter destitution (Job 1.20), but in the speech of Elihu (32.6–37.4), in the undertones of hymns of praise inspired by the New Year liturgy with its central theme of the Kingship and Ordered Government of God (36.5-23; 36.26–37.13) and the explicit injunction (36.24): Remember to extol his works Of which men have sung.
Though Job is not named in any such text from Ras Shamra, the antiquity of the tradition of the worthy sufferer attested in this sapiential text seems to corroborate the antiquity of the Job-tradition, as indicated in Ezek. 24.14, 20, where Job is associated with Dan’el, now known from the Ugaritic Legend of Aqht as a gure of the heroic past in the second millennium BCE. This association, moreover, is not only an argument for the antiquity of the Jobtradition, but also for its currency in the urban culture of Canaan. The afnities of the Book of Job with the sophisticated sapiential tradition of Mesopotamia are not to be denied. But what of the characteristics of folktale,13 saga or epic14 in the Prologue and Epilogue?
13. J. Wellhausen (1914: 207 n. 2) proposed a folk-saga; K. Budde (1896) envisaged this as a Volksbuch, but K. Kautzsch (1900) more cautiously proposed that the narrative framework of the Book of Job was the modication of an older folktale rather freely adapted by the author of the Book of Job; so also Hölscher 1937: 4f. 14. N.M. Sarna (1957) in particular noted the regular cadence, verbal repetition, conventional round numbers and rare vocabulary and forms familiar in the poetic epic in the Ras Shamra texts. The same conventions, however, with the exception of the last two features, are also characteristic of the prose of the earlier narrative sources of the Pentateuch, which in turn may have been inuenced by the oral tradition of the Canaanite epic. 1
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2. Job in the Context
The view has been widely canvassed that the original of the Book of Job was a popular tradition of a worthy man reduced to destitution, yet maintaining his faith despite the dissuasions of wife and friends until his eventual vindication. This of course is to reverse the roles of Job and his friends in the Dialogue of the extant book (as the divine appraisal of the words of Job and the condemnation of those of his friends in 42.7 may indicate), and to lay the emphasis in their assumed original less on the problem expressed in the Dialogue than on the edifying theme of the fortitude and faith of Job and his nal vindication. The Mesopotamian texts we have cited, however, though emphasizing the nal deliverance of the sufferer, do not minimize the trial of his faith, with which we are familiar in the arguments of Job. Those texts thus suggest the possibility that the author of the Book of Job had at least available a more sophisticated prototype than the popular folk-tale. This is further suggested by the form of those Mesopotamian texts, the worthy man reduced from his former comfort, his moral impasse, the divine intervention, or theophany, the sufferer’s acknowledgment of divine grace. The recognition of those essential elements in the Mesopotamian texts on the same problem as the Book of Job is most important in the debate on the authenticity and signicance of corresponding elements in the structure of the Book of Job, particularly the theophany and Divine Declaration, which has been taken as secondary.15 Nor is the analogy between the Book of Job and the comparable Mesopotamian texts remote and fortuitous. The new text from Ras Shamra is evidence that the Mesopotamian tradition was cultivated also in Canaan two centuries before the time of Solomon, when particularly Israel was introduced to the sapiential prototype. At least one Egyptian wisdom text, the Protest of the Eloquent Peasant on social injustice (ANET, 407-10) and the Aramaic Proverbs of Ahiqar (Cowley 1923: 204-48; ANET, 427-30) are introduced by an engaging story in narrative prose, though to be sure the Prologue and Epilogue of Job show more characteristic features of oral saga or folk legend. Those are familiar in the stories of the patriarchs in the older narrative sources (J and E) in the Pentateuch, with which the narrative framework of Job has been compared. Such features in the stories of the patriarchs, however, do not preclude their sober, edifying purpose. Thus the story of Joseph, communicated in simple, dramatic, colourful prose, is none the less a wisdom text on the subject of God’s providence in the vindication of a worthy sufferer (von Rad 1953; 1958: 272ff.). In view of the theme of the ordeal of the worthy sufferer in the Mesopotamian sapiential tradition as known from the evidence of the new text from Ras Shamra and of the features of popular folk-narrative in the Prologue and Epilogue to the Book of Job, it is possible that there was a 15. Alleging that the Divine Declaration is inconclusive P. Volz (1921) took the Divine Declaration as secondary. J. Hempel (1930: 179) came to the same conclusion on the grounds that it does not sufciently answer Job’s appeal in ch. 31. In the nature of the case, however, in such a critical work as the Book of Job no such simple and satisfying answer can be expected. 1
The Book of Job
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popular version of the tradition of the ordeal of the worthy sufferer current in Canaan, probably rst adapted as an edifying legend on the theme of the sufferer’s fortitude and the nal vindication of his faith. The sapiential original may have been transmitted in oral tradition in the two centuries when the culture of Egypt and Mesopotamia in the cities of Canaan suffered eclipse between the Philistine and Aramaean irruptions (c. 1200 BCE) and the renaissance under Solomon. In this popular form the Job legend was apparently rst adapted in Hebrew tradition and may have gained currency along with the patriarchal traditions, particularly that of Joseph, with the teachings of the sages of Israel. The citation of Job as a gure of remote antiquity like Noah and Dan’el, of exemplary righteousness (Ezek. 14.14) and of saving efcacy (Ezek. 14.20; cf. Job 42.8), indicates that the popular version of Job, including Prologue and Epilogue, at least to 42.11, was current until the middle of the sixth century BCE. However, the sages also knew the literary prototype in the Mesopotamian tradition of the worthy sufferer, which they elaborated with emphasis rather on the moral problem of the Dialogue than the nal vindication in the Epilogue. The role of Job in the Dialogue as rst adapted in the Hebrew tradition (Job 42.7, on which Alt based his view that the roles of Job and his friends in the present form of the book were reversed) is quite ambiguous. The passage might indeed indicate that Job maintained his faith and the orthodox doctrine against the criticisms of the friends; but it might equally well indicate the divine disgust at the too facile acceptance of the traditional faith and ethic, with the friends’ wilful dismissal of the facts in defence of orthodox doctrine, which was actually a limitation of the government of God (Gordis 1965: 305), and the divine approval of Job’s franker approach and deeper concern. It is signicant that in the new text from Ras Shamra the friends of the sufferer, in urging him to bow to his fate, comforting him and mourning for him as if foredoomed to death, play the same role as in the Prologue and Dialogue in Job. The fact that the sufferer’s spiritual agony, though not so acute or sustained as in the Book of Job, was already expressed in the Mesopotamian texts we have cited, and indeed was familiar in the tradition of Israel in the Plaint of the Sufferer in the fast-liturgy, suggests that this is seriously to be reckoned with in the immediate source of the present Book of Job. In the latter the greater intensity of the author’s concern for the moral problem of the suffering of the worthy man is expressed by the concentration of the criticism of the orthodox position in the person of Job in the Dialogue, and of the arguments for the conventional faith in the ripostes of Job’s friends. This quasi-dramatic arrangement, which results in a more systematic marshalling of theses and antitheses, is peculiarly the contribution of the author of Job and is symptomatic of the tradition of the sages which nds more pointed expression in the Elihu addendum (Job 32–37). The Mesopotamian texts end in rehabilitation or the revelation of the divine favour; in the theophany in Job no such rehabilitation is visualized, but God’s answer is a challenge. This in itself is sufcient evidence that the subject is not 1
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2. Job in the Context
alienated by his suffering as the orthodox ethic assumed. So long as humans are confronted by God their suffering is bearable in the purpose of the eternal, which they may glimpse in the prospect of wonders beyond wonders that speak of the concern of God for all his creation and leave even the fullest revelation of God that humans have experienced unexhausted and inexhaustible.
1
Chapter 3 JOB IN HEBREW WISDOM
The Book of Job is included in the third part of the OT canon, the Writings, where, with Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, it is regarded as comprising that part of Hebrew Wisdom which was accepted as canonical. The humanistic character of wisdom (o¤mh) in Israel has often been stressed. It is the technical skill of the craftsman such as Bezalel and those associated with him in the building and furnishing of the Tabernacle (Exod. 28.3; 35.25, 31; 36.1) and goldsmiths (Jer. 10.9) and sailors (Ezek. 27.8; Ps. 107.27). It applies to women skilled in lamentation, implying improvisation (Jer. 9.16 [EVV 17]), and to music and psalm-composition (1 Kgs 5.10-12, cf. 1 Chron. 15.19; Ps. 49.4-5 [EVV 3-4]) and soothsaying where real sagacity and resource were usually cloaked under the guise of traditional superstition (Gen. 41.8; Isa. 44.25). Skill in politics in war and peace is also denoted by o¤mh (Isa. 10.13; 29.14; Jer. 49.7). The essentially humanistic or intellectual character of o¤mh is clearly indicated in the account of Solomon’s reign. In the tradition of Solomon’s dream at Gibeon and its sequel (1 Kgs 3.4ff.), the famous judgment between the two mothers, it denotes the capacity of discernment and the ability to decide a case, like the Arabic verb akama, with its participle kimu(n) (‘governor’). At this time in fact the ‘wise’ (a¤mîm) probably rst acquired status in Israel in association with the new governing class in Solomon’s administration, and as those engaged, like the scribes in the Egyptian bureaucracy, in preparing young men to succeed them. In the Egyptian analogy, practical knowledge of the details of administration, conduct towards superiors and inferiors and prudential advice to secure and maintain success and to help in emergency were all communicated as the ripe fruits of experience and mature reection. The ability to observe and classify according respectively to differentiae and afnities was cultivated in Egypt by the observation of natural phenomena and their classication, which is probably the source of the tradition that Solomon ‘spoke of the trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall; he spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of sh’ (1 Kgs 5.13 [EVV 4.33]).1 This 1. Alt 1953. R.B.Y. Scott (1955) emphasizes rather the signicance of Hezekiah’s reign in this connection (cf. Prov. 25.11), but admits the possibility of an earlier origin under Solomon. 1
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scientic classication according to common characteristics, which extended beyond nature to society, is exemplied notably in the numerical clusters of common cases in Prov. 30.15-16, 18-19, 21-23, 24-28, 29-31 and in Job in the list of nocturnal criminals (Job 24.13-17) and of the creatures provided for and endowed by God irrespective of human economy (Job 38.39–39.30). In all this discipline the empiric familiarity with facts is essential, and to this extent wisdom was a secular asset, a gift of God perhaps, but to be cultivated by human ingenuity and industry. This wisdom might be in the calculating prudence of the careerist or political opportunist, the savoir faire or often the unashamed expediency of the man whom Noth well characterizes as klug (‘astute’) rather than weise (‘wise’), ja vielleicht schlau (‘indeed perhaps even cunning’) (Noth and Thomas [eds.] 1955: 233), a notable instance of which was the cold cunning of Solomon to which David commended Shimei for vengeance (1 Kgs 2.9). But the ‘wise men’ (a¤mîm) who passed on the fruits of their experience in the Davidic monarchy, for all their worldly wisdom, were really interested in a stable society which was still, in spite of secular developments in the monarchy, a development of the sacral community of Israel. Thus they inculcated the well-tried social virtues of industry, moderation, sexual temperance and religious conformity, which best equipped the individual to be successful because he was responsible and trusted in the community, but also above all preserved that stability of society which was the aim of the state. It must be emphasized that the questioning of the principles conventionally recognized in religion and ethics, which is so distinctive a feature respectively of Ecclesiastes and Job, was no part of Wisdom in this early period of the history of Israel. People must accept the situation in state and society as they found it, seeking by personal example to keep them true to the traditional standards. Insofar as the situation might deteriorate, Ecclesiastes and Job did not vainly inveigh, but counselled patience by sobriety and selfcontrol so that people might survive what they could not immediately amend, or accept the situation with dignity, or even perhaps by their perseverance turn the situation to legitimate account. This is the attitude of Job in the Prologue to the Book, and of his friends in the Dialogue. The writer of the Dialogue through Job is of course much more critical, since he has a much deeper personal involvement. In animadverting upon the fabric of society towards the end of the monarchy in Judah, Jeremiah (18.18) and Ezekiel (7.26) refer to revelation, divine direction and ‘counsel’ from prophets, priests and wise men (a¤mîm) respectively as vital to the guidance and indeed existence and coherence of the state. Israel had come into being as a sacral community, a covenanted people chosen as the instruments of God’s purpose. Its development therefore, whatever secular factors it necessarily involved, was conditioned by the will of its God interpreted through traditional experience conserved and expressed through the institutions of religion, which was the function of the priests, or by fresh revelation from God relevant to the contemporary situation, which was 1
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experienced by the prophet and communicated by him to the people. The function of the sage (¤m) was humanistic. He was not the intermediary between humans and God either objectively within the context of the cult as the priest, nor as the direct mediator of an inspired dynamic word as the prophet. To be sure, he felt that he, like the prophet, was guided by the Spirit of God, which gave him insights beyond the common knowledge and prejudices of others; but his experience of the spirit of God did not, as in the case of the prophet, involve him in the compulsive communication of an oracle. His role was to analyse and assess the situation in society, primarily in Israel, but also in a wider context. He was of course heir to the tradition of Israel as a sacral community (von Rad 1958–61: I, 431) with its religious institutions and prophetic communication of the will of God, and his function was to preserve the well-tried social institutions and values, of which the sages of Israel gave due notice in the dictum ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ (Prov. 1.7; 9.10; cf. Job 28.28). However, he was neither ecclesiastic nor prophet, but a shrewd, observant humanist in whom the spirit of God took the form of sanctied sobriety. He studied society, deduced principles of conduct both social and individual, and he related society to its environment in nature, from which he deduced many sound principles which could be protably applied in society. The references in Jeremiah and Ezekiel attribute ‘counsel’ (‘Ñh) to the sage as the divine direction (tôrh) was the function of the priest and the divine word (dr) was the province of the prophet. ‘Counsel’ (‘Ñh), however, means more than ‘advice’ though that is included. Counsel relates also to the purpose of God and may actually denote it, as in Isa. 5.19; 19.17; 46.10; Psalm 33; Job 38.2; 42.3. It denotes also the ability to ascertain it and mediate it and to carry it out. This was ideally the function and privilege of the ancient king as God’s vassal or vice-gerent, so that yô‘Ñ may be a royal title (Pedersen 1926: 128), as in the royal titulary in Isa. 9.5 (EVV 6). Insight into the divine plan and purpose and the function of carrying it into effect in the community, though the duty of the royal vice-gerent, might also be discharged by prophets admitted into God’s intimate counsel or by sages, who at least in the Davidic monarchy worked to sustain the order in the state and community of Israel, which was of course basically a sacral community. This sober religious undertone in the wisdom of Israel which, for all its wealth of utilitarian precepts, was formerly considered to be the characteristic of Hebrew wisdom (Fichtner 1933: 87ff., 95ff., 123; Baumgartner 1933: 27), has been well emphasized by Ringgren (1947: 127ff.; 1962: 10), von Rad (1958–61: I, 415ff.), Gese (1958: 33ff.) and H.H. Schmid (1966: 3ff.). It is well illustrated in the Book of Job, where the writer, for all his trenchant criticism of the answer of conventional wisdom and piety, feels his way to a solution in the traditional religious experience of Israel.2 This is reected in his use of the 2. Baumgartner cites Job as an instance of later Hebrew Wisdom, which was strongly impregnated with religion (1933: 27-29). 1
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3. Job in Hebrew Wisdom
forms in which that experience was expressed, the Hymn of Praise, the Oath of Purgation before God and the Plaint of the Sufferer,3 in the framework of which his problem is posed and answered. Thus the sage (¤m) in Israel sought by analysis of society in the context of nature and history to discover the purpose of life, or perhaps we should say to verify what religion revealed of that purpose, and to promote and coordinate all forces conducive to it and to discourage all that militated against it.4 Thus, in their own society of ancient Israel, the sages did what the priests did through the law and what the prophets did through the word, all seeking, each in their own way, to conserve an integrated society according to the will of its God. The sages, however, were more involved in the practical and often mundane problems of the realization of the integrated society. Heirs of the spiritual tradition of Israel, they yet imposed on themselves the limitation of scientic humanism in their moral philosophy, so far as that was possible for sober persons in Israel, where the sage’s provision for a sound society had so largely been anticipated by the priest and prophet since the settlement of Israel in Palestine. In spite of the involvement of the ‘wise men’ of Israel in the practical problems of the training of an administrative class, they were keenly interested in the moral philosophy of the empiric order, both in the context of their practical function and through their own interest in the fundamental problems of life—an interest which they shared with the professional sages of Egypt. Thus they looked at nature and society in broad perspective and, though aware of the fact of suffering and unrequited sin in a world believed to be under the wise and benevolent government of God Almighty, saw more to support the traditional belief in God’s order (mišpÓ) than to contradict it. So long as the state survived, the community integrated under the king as God’s executive was a visible token of God’s order, where the traditional communal ethic was upheld. However, on the collapse of the state and the social order this traditional ethic with its balance in favour of the principle of reward and retribution within God’s order could no longer be maintained on traditional evidence. But customary views of life die hard, and the long-inured sense of solidarity now found expression as a guilt-complex under which, after the catastrophe of 586 BCE, people were content to accept fatalistically the fact that they were doomed to suffer for their fathers’ sins. This attitude, which paralysed moral effort, was apprehended by Ezekiel (ch. 18) as an outstanding danger of his time, and his effort to emancipate the individual from the 3. A. Weiser (1959: 12) relates the thought of the writer in these to the religion of the covenant-community of Israel, speaking of them as the reection of the writer’s ‘personal Drama of Salvation’ (persönlicher Heilsgeschichte). This is none the less true even where those forms are adapted, or even parodied, in Job. 4. So in Egypt de Buck (1922) stresses the purpose of wisdom to recognize and sustain ma’at, or Order. H.H. Schmid (1966: 20-24) goes further, maintaining that the cultivation and propagation of wisdom had a creative function with respect to ma’at. 1
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trammels of this morality must have been supported by the rediscovery of the Prophets with their critical attitude to institutions, their moral discrimination and their qualication of the current social ethic by their doctrine of the responsive remnant as the object of God’s grace in the general doom of the people. It was natural that in this period Hebrew Wisdom should have endeavoured to apply the principles of the traditional Hebrew ethic, with its insistence on condign rewards and punishments to the individual, as Ezekiel had done in his modication of the principle ‘the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on the edge’. But however generally applicable this principle might be in effect, even in the case of the individual, its universal validity was obviously impaired by the sufferings of individuals beyond their deserts. The fate of the Jews after the fall of Jerusalem and the triumph of the materialistic power and policy of paganism itself suggests the nal inadequacy of the traditional doctrine of reward and punishment. The inadequacy of the traditional ethic, already felt in certain psalms of the type the Plaint of the Sufferer and by Jeremiah (e.g. 12.1-2), was exposed notably by the writer of the Book of Job, which marks a new departure in Hebrew Wisdom. The writer reaches the positive conclusion that suffering beyond one’s deserts bears no invariable relationship to the traditional doctrine of the theodicy and implies no alienation from God, who is still accessible to humans. The sage in Job is sufciently faithful to the sapiential tradition to counsel not rebellion on the basis of human ego-centric interest and limited knowledge and experience, but acceptance of the situation under the providence of God (of which nature beyond human control or interest provides so many instances) and is prepared to move forward to the ever-fresh encounter with God in response to which humans gain fuller knowledge of the divine nature and purpose. For this purpose, God’s intelligent master-plan which motivated his creation (the okmh of Prov. 8.22-31; Job 11.6, 13, 20; 15.8; 28.12ff.) was the business of the sage in Israel to discern in nature and society not only as a clue to the ultimate truth, but as the guide to the practical fullment of the life of the individual and society by the legitimate use of life’s opportunities in maximum cooperation with the Creator. But the master-key to the knowledge of the purpose of God insofar as it could be known to humanity was the living experience of God himself. Job is associated with Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in the Wisdom literature of the OT. Apart from a general afnity between the poem on Wisdom in Job 28, which is an interpolation in the Book of Job, and the poem on Wisdom as God’s instrument in creation in Prov. 8.22-31 in the latest section of Proverbs, there is little matter for comparative dating common to Job and Proverbs. Nowhere in Proverbs is there a strenuous and sustained preoccupation with a fundamental theme as in Job. Generally such coherence as there is in Proverbs is in the praise of Wisdom, which in the pre-exilic sections of the book is that empirical ability to assess a situation which on its more mundane level 1
26
3. Job in Hebrew Wisdom
amounts to practical savoir faire as a key to success in business or administration and on its higher level keeps a person patient in adversity and prevents one compromising one’s ideals in a hasty judgment which may abet moral perversity. With this prudential wisdom the writer of Job, with his agonizing problem, has little in common, though as a result of his experience and his ultimate confrontation with God we see that the writer of Job knew the signicance of patience in suffering which the sages of Israel taught. From the criticisms of Ecclesiastes we may gather that there were various schools of wisdom among the Jews and various methods of philosophic engagement and communication. Ecclesiastes at the end of the fourth century BCE certainly had its more orthodox contemporaries, whose views are represented probably in the rst book of Proverbs (chs. 1–9). Possibly there were more critical views at all periods when wisdom ourished, but in the pre-exilic sections of Proverbs there is no evidence of them, and the view of sin and retribution, virtue and reward which dominates Proverbs is probably a fair index to the dominant philosophy of the sages throughout the Hebrew monarchy. On the basis of experience, the author of Job, like Ecclesiastes, questions the hitherto predominating wisdom tradition, exposing its inadequacy in ruthless dialectic. To hymns of praise extolling God’s order in nature and society Job opposes hymns of praise emphasizing the destructive aspect of the rule of God; to didactic poems on the end of the wicked he opposes similar poems on the prosperity of the wicked and the hopeless misery of the poor. He cites edifying proverbs on the theme of sin and retribution and exposes their inadequacy in the light of hard facts. The self-sufciency of the sages in Proverbs, however, in their practical commission, should not disguise the fact that they were aware of the ultimate imponderables in God’s purpose for his creation. To say nothing of the implications of the hymn on Wisdom as God’s instrument in creation (Prov. 8.22-31), the theme recurs even in the wisdom of the monarchic period that humans may propose and strive for an end with all their resources and energies but it is God who ultimately disposes in his higher wisdom (Prov. 12.15; 16.1, 2, 25; 21.2). But the preoccupation of the sages with the practical task of education led to their emphasis on the pragmatic potentiality of humans in society. The preoccupation with the problem of the worthy sufferer in Job, however, which called the doctrine of condign punishment and reward in question, occasions a greater emphasis on the ultimate purpose of God’s creation which is ultimately beyond human knowledge and control. In the arguments of Job’s three friends this is invoked as an argument for patience in suffering and suspension of judgment in the situation of the worthy sufferer or the apparent impunity of the wicked, or it is used as a rebuke to the presumption of Job to criticize the prevailing doctrine of the theodicy. It is used in the statements of Job in the Dialogue to emphasize the transcendence of God beyond all meaningful contact with humans. But ultimately in the author’s conclusion in the Divine Declaration it is used, illustrated by instances of God’s benecent providence in nature beyond human control and apart from 1
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his convenience, to inspire in the worthy sufferer a new hope, beyond the salutary but inadequate doctrine of retribution and reward, that in the living encounter with the Creator one may discover more of the purpose of life and new tokens of the care of one’s God. Faith in God’s moral government and the optimism of current piety had already been questioned, probably during the monarchy, in the psalms which voice the plaint of the community or of the individual on behalf of the community, and which may have been part of the royal liturgy in public fast and penitence. Here the sufferings of the subject were stated, usually with a protestation of innocence; the subject then turned to God and declared one’s faith, rendered thanks either for deliverance or in anticipation of it, or else would vow a vow of thanksgiving. The detailed and cumulative enumeration of sufferings, often gurative and hyperbolic, probably derives ultimately from primitive counter-incantations, which are extant in Mesopotamian texts, an essential feature of which was the counteraction of malicious spells by the use of corresponding terms. In the context of the Hebrew Psalms, however, the detailed list of the sufferings enhances the power and grace of God in deliverance experienced or hoped for. Often, however, they express the agony of the subject not merely under the stroke of sufferings, but in doubt of God’s moral government. This is the problem of the author of Job, who makes extensive use of the literary type we have just described, a fact which should warn us against the literalistic or biographical interpretation of the poetic dialogue in the book. Unfortunately, it is not possible to date the psalms of this type precisely and while the convention was established during the monarchy (e.g. Ps. 44) it continued long after the Exile. Psalms of this type, which pose a moral problem to conventional faith, were peculiarly suited to the moral philosophy of the sages of Israel, and Psalms 37 and 49, which like Job show concern about the suffering of the innocent and the prosperity of the wicked, are either sapiential productions or individual thanksgivings, psalms and prayers which have been inuenced by the thought and form of wisdom literature. Here, however, the moral problem is not a scandal to faith as in the argument in Job. The prosperity of the wicked is admitted, but it is only for a season and their end is miserable. This is echoed in the arguments of Job’s friends, for example, Bildad in the gure of the plant on stony ground which wilts with sunrise (8.16-18) and the statement of Zophar 20.4ff.: That the jubilation of the wicked is but for a short time, And the joy of the impious but for a moment.
Compare Prov. 24.19-20: Fret not yourselves because of evil-doers, And be not envious of the wicked, For the evil man has no future, And the lamp of the wicked is put out. 1
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3. Job in Hebrew Wisdom
The last saying is cited by Bildad with approval (Job 18.5-6) and questioned by Job as belied by experience (21.17). The moral scandal of the prosperity of the ungodly, which Job states at length (e.g. 21.7-21), is posed as a problem to the pious in Psalm 73, who confesses that it has been a problem only to humanist philosophy (Ps. 73.2-3, 15-16, 21-22), to be solved in communion with God in worship and in sacrament (Ps. 73.17). The intensely personal character of this psalm suggests a comparatively late period after the rebuilding of the Temple in 516 BCE. It is thus of limited use for the dating of the Book of Job, but the two indicate the intensication of the moral problem of the prosperity of the wicked and the suffering of the innocent, and though the psalmist poses the problem and nds the solution within the context of the cult, which the author of the Book of Job as a humanist denies himself, both reach assurance in communion with God. The problem of the suffering of the innocent had thus been already set in focus and all the adaptation required by the author of Job was simply to withhold the statement of faith and thanksgiving characteristic of the Plaint of the Sufferer. He thus questions traditional piety as well as traditional ethics, orthodox religion as well as orthodox philosophy, which is done with less intensity, but with more nesse, in Ecclesiastes. The tremendous seriousness of the challenge of the writer of Job to orthodox faith and wisdom and his intense concentration and involvement in contrast to the scientic detachment and diffuse interest of the ‘gentle cynic’ Ecclesiastes suggests the priority of the writer of Job as the rst major thinker seriously to challenge orthodox belief in Israel. Although the Book of Job is rightly grouped with Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in the OT and is as practical as the former and as critical of orthodox faith and ethics as the latter, it transcends the limits of a strictly sapiential work. Like Ecclesiastes and unlike Proverbs Job is concentrated on a single theme, a man’s reaction to unmerited suffering, believed to be caused directly by God. The problem of Job is the paradox of a man created in the image of God, tried beyond endurance yet not allowed to understand the reason or purpose of his suffering or to enjoy the relief of death he so earnestly desired, the natural object of God’s special care yet the butt of afiction (Job 7.17-21; cf. Ps. 8), a potential blessing to society (ch. 29), yet having his effectiveness crippled by his calamity which encourages the worst elements, who defy God’s order (ch. 30). But, unlike the Book of Ecclesiastes, Job is not the reection of lectures in the schools in spite of the form of sapiential controversy in which much of the book is cast. There is in fact a distinctive character about the Book of Job that has led a number of scholars5 to question its nature as a typical sapiential
5. E.g. P. Volz (1911: 25ff.), J. Fichtner (1933), J. Baumgartner (1933: 187ff.). M. Buttenwieser (1922: 38-40) characterized Job as a drama of the human soul rather than a wisdom text, and C. Kuhl (in RGG3, col. 359) declares that the Book of Job is not primarily a wisdom text but ‘carmen sui generis, expressing the experience of its author’. The same 1
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work. If, as Ecclesiastes, Job poses a problem, the fact of suffering in what faith declares to be the wise and benecent economy of Almighty God, that is not suffering as such nor even the suffering of a worthy man objectively considered; it is rather, as Westermann (1956: 2ff.) has noted, the agonizing of a worthy man on his personal sufferings, and to this the academic question is strictly secondary, a situation which is reected in the literary form which predominates in these parts of the book where Job expresses himself, namely the Plaint of the Sufferer, which Volz so strongly stressed in stating ‘the poet has not written a treatise but a plaint’ (Volz 1911: 26). This is cited with approval by Westermann (1956: 3), who goes on to emphasize the character of Job’s statement in chs. 3 and 29–31 as a Plaint of the Sufferer, which is mainly the character of Job’s part in the Dialogue proper in chs. 4–27, which Westermann after Bentzen characterizes as the ‘dramatization of the Plaint of the Sufferer’, as envisaged in Pss. 41.10 and 51.13ff. (1956: 5f.).6 We should agree with this general assessment, though in its minimizing the element of disputation in the speeches of Job in favour of the Plaint of the Sufferer we must not be inuenced by the mere lack of theses and antitheses in the Dialogue according to the method of Western logic. This is after all not the method of Oriental disputation, which depends on repeated and increasing emphasis of its point with variation of expression rather than on logical argument, as Köhler rightly observed (1953: 153), and though Job’s statements are predominantly in the style of the Plaint of the Sufferer they are nonetheless poignant citations of fact in indictment of the traditional doctrine of the divine economy urged by the friends. Nevertheless it is fair to say that the sapiential controversy, conducted often in the style of forensic debate, is more distinctive of the speeches of the friends and of God’s reply than of the statements of Job, though even here the convention of legal or sapiential disputation is more marked in the introduction to the statements of the three friends and of God than in the substance, as Köhler has done well to note (p. 156). As the book proceeds, the statements of Job give increasingly the impression less of a disputation than of the audible reection of the author, who at all points reects his nurture in the religion of Israel, thinking aloud and voicing his experience in great spiritual travail. Thus Job’s replies to his friends repeatedly terminate in questions, expostulations and prayers to God (e.g. 7; 9.25-31; 10; 13.20-28; 14.13-22). Even in the rst round of debate (chs. 4–13), where Job appraisal is given by C. Westermann (1956) and S. Terrien, who states ‘le héros se rebelle et devient un prophète’ (1963: 41). 6. Westermann, correctly in our opinion, understands the speeches of Job’s three friends, despite their predominant literary character of sapiential disputation, as intended for Job’s comfort and so understood by him throughout (13.4; 16.25; 21.2, 24; 26.2-4), giving the sufferer the opportunity to relieve his feelings and, we should add, being apologetic for the divine economy in moral principles even in suffering, which despite its limitations in the mechanical doctrine of retribution offers more encouragement than the view that humanity is at the mercy of blind chance. 1
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3. Job in Hebrew Wisdom
srebuts the orthodox arguments of his friends, the writer is more and more concerned with Job’s relationship to God and less with doctrine about God and human suffering. The friends and their doctrine recede more and more into the background, leaving Job increasingly in isolation with God, who alone and in such concentrated and exclusive fellowship can give the answer to the innocent sufferer. Here we may prot from the study of Baumgärtel (1933), who, though rather too severely limiting what he terms ‘the original dialogue’ to one round of debate between Job and his three friends (which is included in the rst round of the extant book, with a monologue from Job of which Baumgärtel nds vestiges in 16.6, 9, 12-17, 18-21; 19.1-29; 23.2-7, 10-17; 31.35, 37), has succeeded in bringing the problem of the book into clear focus. As a result we see that the book has both an academic and an existential aspect, reecting the inuence of the current doctrine of retribution on the thinking and faith of the author. His mouthpiece Job thinks as much in the context of that doctrine as his friends, as was natural considering the fact that it was of the essence of the faith of Israel inculcated in the tradition of the will and nature of God revealed in the covenant experience and sacrament and expressed in the message of the prophets and in the fast-liturgy. Thus the author through Job accepts the fact that in the divine economy sin occasions suffering. Maintaining his innocence, Job in effect exposes the logical fallacy of his friends in concluding that all suffering is occasioned by the sin of the sufferer, supporting his thesis by sharp criticism of the traditional view of the theodicy expressed in current proverbs and didactic poems in the sapiential tradition on the basis of the known facts both of unmerited suffering and unrequited sin. Job, however, holding, as he and his contemporaries did, that God was immediately responsible for his sufferings, commits the same logical error as his friends in arguing from his sufferings to, if not sin, then what God had imputed to him as sin, falsely as his conscience assures him. It is this logical fallacy in the application of the current doctrine of retribution that raises the academic problem of the book. However, on the same principle, Job’s consciousness of his innocence leads him to appeal to God for a direct confrontation in the rm conviction that, from all that tradition had taught him of the nature of God, he would be acquitted and indeed that God himself would sanction his vindication (16.19f.; 19.25f.; 23.6f.). Though this is a logical conclusion to the premises of the traditional belief in the nature of God on the basis of what was believed to be his own revelation and of Job’s innocence, it was, in the face of the former conclusion, equally logical, that God who had aficted him had unjustly condemned him, an act of faith. It is this persistent, growing faith that makes the Book of Job more than a sapiential exercise, richer and more serious than a mere academic criticism of the current doctrine of the theodicy. It is in Job’s nal appeal to God (chs. 29–31), to whom also ch. 3 is less directly addressed, as Westermann well emphasizes (1956: 6), that the true character of the Book of Job is to be recognized. The sapiential disputations of 1
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Job’s three friends, though sustained rather by intensifying emotion than by progressive argumentation, the introduction to Job’s statements in the same literary convention, his replies in the same style and in ch. 29 the forensic form of his nal appeal to God, put the book into the formal category of sapiential literature, which is recognized by its expansion in the poem on wisdom (ch. 28) and the review and supplementation of arguments in the Elihu addendum (chs. 32–37). But within this category the book is sui generis; the author is personally committed to a degree unparalleled in Hebrew Wisdom literature. His book is no didactic treatise, however earnest; it is the direct reection of the most intense spiritual experience of a soul in ordeal, beyond the help of any impersonal system of theology, whose life and hope can be renewed only in renewed fellowship with God himself. Well may Weiser describe the Book of Job as ‘this unique book which the poet has written in his own heart’s blood’.7 The personal involvement of the sage moreover has elated the poet, so that ‘we have in this book no mere transcript of some polemical discourses of wise men… The book gives rather a sublimation of that sort of thing. There were poets at that time in Israel, and one of them touched the experience of such a crisis with his magic wand’ (Kraeling 1938: 24). The result is a singular monument of poetic genius, which in its detail and general impression has continued to arrest thinking people and to evoke admiration throughout the ages.
7. Weiser 1959: 10; cf. J. Strahan 1913: 13: ‘His theology is charged with whitehot emotion, and emits ashes of prophecy’, an appraisal which recalls that of S. Terrien (see above, n. 6). 1
Chapter 4 DATE AND PROVENANCE
The obvious terminus post quem for the Book of Job is the conception of the Ón in the Prologue, still a supernatural gure in an ofcial capacity of ‘public prosecutor’ under the permissive will of God as in Zech. 3.1 and an intelligence agent who ranges through the world (cf. Zech. 1.10), which is verbally reected in Job 1.7. This establishes a terminus post quem for the narrative framework of the book c. 520 BCE. The afnity of 42.12ff. with the Pentateuch in its P recension might suggest a later date, in the fth or even the fourth century.1 This, however, is a midrashic expansion to the Epilogue, of which 11QtargJob from the latter half of the second century BCE2 takes no notice, so that it is of no relevance for the date of the denitive Book of Job. If the Prologue gives evidence of a terminus post quem both for the narrative and for the Dialogue, however, it is not so easy to date the Dialogue precisely. If indeed 19.23f. refers to the inscription of Darius I (521–486 BCE) on the rock of Behistun, the evidence would carry us no further than the reference to the Ón in the Prologue. Given the likelihood of an Israelite version of an older Job tradition of the narrative framework (see below, pp. 56-75), with which Ezekiel (14.20) was familiar3 in the early half of the sixth century BCE, it is likely that the nal version if the present Prologue was the work of the sage who developed the Dialogue. The language of the Dialogue does not settle the question of the date. Granted, there is a substantial element of Aramaic in grammatical forms and vocabulary, which might be expected in the Persian period in the sixth century BCE. However, the Aramaic and Syriac words (which elucidate Hebrew words which as such are out of place in the context by the canons of what was 1. O. Eissfeldt (1965: 208) dates the P recension of the Pentateuch after the Deuteronomistic History and Malachi (c. 470 BCE) but before Chronicles (c. 350 BCE) and the whole Pentateuch including P by the time of Nehemiah on the evidence of Neh. 8–9 (398 BCE). 2. Van der Ploeg and van der Woude 1971. A study of the script indicated a date in the first half of the first century CE, while a comparison of grammatical forms with Daniel and the Genesis Apocryphon from Qumran (first century CE) indicates a date for the work as distinct from the manuscript in the first half of the second century BCE. 3. Suggested by the association of Job with Noah and Dan’el [sic], hence with the Ugaritic tradition. 1
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familiar in Hebrew philology) and Arabic and Ugaritic words (which have the same effect) indicate that such cases need signify no more than homonyms in Hebrew which have not so far been recognized in the substantial, though limited, range of Classical Hebrew. The thought of the Dialogue with relation to other parts of the OT may possibly suggest a date, though this question must be handled with reservation. The OT, despite a certain unity of outlook, is not a book bearing on one theme progressively developed in which the parts are merely in disarray, but a library which reects the predominating interests of its various authors with relevance to their several situations. Nevertheless, at certain times crucial issues emerge. Thus the attitude of the writer of Job to the doctrine of sin and retribution suggests a time when that was being questioned. Ezekiel’s questioning of the traditional view of communal as distinct from personal retribution (Ezek. 18.24) seems to be re-echoed in Job 21.19-21, quoting the conventional doctrine that ‘God stores up iniquity for their sons’ and adding ‘Let him requite the man himself that he may feel it’. The mitigation of the traditional mechanical view of sin and retribution in the more positive conception that ‘God has no pleasure in the death of the wicked’ but ‘that he should turn from his way and live’ (Ezek. 18.2) indicates the same conclusion. The disciplinary signicance of suffering towards amendment is also emphasized in Isa. 40.2 (cf. Job 5.17 and 33.16ff. in the Elihu addendum). Ezekiel’s preoccupation with those questions became more urgent after the fall of the state in 586 BCE, and the mood of the time is reected in the Deuteronomistic History, which was completed after 561 BCE.4 The problem of the suffering of the object of God’s particular notice would certainly have particular point after the liquidation of the Covenant community,5 and the nostalgic picture of the security and prosperity of the community integrated in the blessing of the chief so movingly drawn in Job 296 reects the sense of loss so acutely felt after the fall of Jerusalem, when the poet in Lam. 4.20 declares: The breath of our nostrils, the Lord’s anointed Was taken in their pits, He of whom we said, ‘Under his shadow We shall live among the nations!’
The urgency of the problem of the suffering of the innocent and the prosperity of the ungodly, which upset the belief in the doctrine of sin and retribution, virtue and reward, nds piquant expression in Jeremiah and Habakkuk (e.g. 1.3), and imagery in certain passages in Job (3.3ff.; 10.18-22; 21ff.) and Jeremiah (20.14-18; 12.1-3) might suggest a date for the Book of 4. Indicated by the reference in 2 Kgs 25.27 to the accession of Awil-Marduk in that year. 5. Cf. the view that Job is the personification of Israel in the Exile, supported by Kraeling 1939–40; Susman 1946. 6. J. Pedersen’s fine study of this passage (1926: 213-16) should be noted. 1
4. Date and Provenance
34
Job near the time of Jeremiah (rst half of the sixth century BCE or soon after). But both writers drew on a common source, the Plaint of the Sufferer (e.g. Ps. 10.12-22) and the fast-liturgy with application in the Wisdom tradition (e.g. Pss. 37, 49 and 73), which were familiar in Israel throughout the Monarchy and were attested in Mesopotamia since the second millennium BCE.7 On the problem of the suffering of the innocent in Job Terrien has stressed that no notice was taken of vicarious suffering, which nds its classical expression in the servant Songs in Deutero-Isaiah (especially Isa. 52.13–53.12), and concludes that the book of Job was anterior to this passage (Terrien 1963: 28f.). However, the prophet addresses a challenge to the community to exploit its humiliation by fullling in itself the former function of the king in rites of penance for the community; the author of Job is agonizing over a personal problem. He is concerned with the reason and the signicance of suffering only insofar as he rejects the mechanical doctrine that it is the natural and inevitable consequence of sin. True to the traditional function of the sage in Israel and the Near East, he is interested primarily in the practical question of the reaction of a worthy man to suffering in a world believed to be under the wise, just and benecent rule of God. He is concerned with the discipline of the individual to avoid hasty and impassioned judgment and to maintain one’s faith and dignity even under the stroke of unmerited afiction, realizing that there were tokens of a higher Order under Providence by faith in which one might learn to endure one’s lot. We cannot then admit the absence of the doctrine of atonement through vicarious suffering in the Book of Job as a reason for dating the Book before Deutero-Isaiah. Dhorme adduces the analogy between the Book of Malachi (c. 450 BCE) and Job in the embarrassment of even the pious before the prosperity of the ungodly, for instance, in Mal. 2.17 and 3.13-15: You have said, ‘It is vain to serve God. And what is the good of our keeping his charges, Or of walking in mourning before Yahweh of Hosts?’ Henceforth we consider the arrogant blessed, Yea, evil-doers prosper, Yea, they even put God to the test and escape.
This is, signicantly, the prophet’s complaint of the faithless conduct of commonalty, and not the daring questioning of the critical philosopher. Orthodoxy represented by Job’s friends had not yet dared to press the embarrassing fact of the prosperity of the wicked. This might suggest a terminus ante quem for Job’s daring démarche, before the addition of the Elihu speeches (chs. 32– 37) and probably the poems on Behemoth (40.15-24, 31-32; 41.1-3) and Leviathan (40.25-30; 41.4-26 [EVV 40.25-30; 41.1-6, 12-34]). If we may revert to the evidence of the Ón in the Prologue, we would stress that, sinister as he may be, he is not yet Ón of 1 Chron. 21.1, which 7. See above, pp. 5-20. 1
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would suggest a terminus ante quem for the Book of Job c. 350 BCE. We might further suggest that Job’s trenchant criticism of the doctrine of sin and retribution, virtue and reward, mark a protest against the tendency to over-stress the doctrine, which crystallizes in its mechanical application in Chronicles in the untimely fate of the good King Uzziah whose leprosy was said to be the consequence of his infringement of priestly ofces (2 Chron. 26.16-19), the captivity of the reprobate Manasseh (2 Chron. 33.1-11) and his restoration to Judah after prayer (2 Chron. 33.12f.) and the untimely death of the reforming King Josiah since he refused, the Chronicler alleges, to believe the claim of his antagonist Pharaoh Necho of a divine commission from Yahweh in his expedition against the Babylonians (2 Chron. 38.21-24). On such evidence we conclude that the Book of Job, excluding the later addenda of the Elihu section (chs. 32–37), and the poems on Behemoth and Leviathan, and 42.12ff., which we regard as a midrashic expansion, was substantially composed between 450 and 350 BCE. Such amplications as the Elihu speeches and the midrashic expansion indicate continued preoccupation with the denitive Book. This may be reected in the Wisdom poems (e.g. 24.13-18) and hymns of praise (e.g. 25.2-6; 26.5-14) and the poem on Wisdom (ch. 28), which intervenes between Eliphaz’s arraignment of Job (ch. 22) and Job’s reply (ch. 23), Job’s nal protest of innocence to his friends on oath (ch. 27), his apologia pro vita sua (ch. 29), his nal plaint (ch. 30) and his oath of purgation (ch. 31) before the Divine Declaration (38.2–39.30; 40.1, 7-14). Beside the date of the Book in relation to the general literary deposit and particular sapiential tradition of Israel, the question of local provenance is rather academic. To limit the evidence to the Prologue, Dialogue and Divine Declaration, the references to vines and olives (24.10f.), the migrant stork (39.13) and hawk (39.26) would indicate Palestine. The writer’s familiarity with snow, ice, hail (38.22-38) and winter torrents swollen with melting snow might suggest the Lebanon or Anti-Lebanon. Tur-Sinai, unduly, we consider, claiming an Aramaic original subsequently rendered into Hebrew, claimed a Mesopotamian provenance. To be sure, there are many references to Mesopotamian mythology throughout the book, for example Marduk’s mastery of Rahab and monstrous allies (9.13), ‘the land of no return’ (10.21), with the gates and gate-keepers of death (38.17), the foundation of the earth on the lower deep (38.4) and the possible reference to the inscription of Darius I on the rock of Behistun (19.23f.). This Mesopotamian matter, however, was known to Hebrew poets and nds expression more and less in the prophets and Psalms, while familiarity with the Behistun inscription may be owing to Jewish merchants on their trading ventures. A. Guillaume contended for provenance from the Hejaz (1963, 1964a, 1964b). The setting is indeed in ‘the land of Uz’, conceivably in the Hejaz, with the imminent possibility of the sudden ghazzu, which left Job destitute (1.15-17), with other ock-masters in the Dialogue (15.21). The possible identication of the Sabaeans (1.15) with tribesmen from the Wadi Sheb in the 1
36
4. Date and Provenance
Hezaz and the raid by the Kasdim, possibly garrison troops such as Nabona’id actually settled in the Hejaz, seems to reect a historical situation, if only to lend verisimilitude to the setting in ‘the land of Uz’. This land was traditionally associated with Edom and with wisdom, selected by the Hebrew sage to emphasize the independence of the cult and revealed religion in Israel in the solution of moral problems. The writer is obviously familiar with the landscape of the desert and its oases, with his references to the caravans of Teima and Sheba (6.18-20), the ibex (39.1) and the onager (39.13-18). There was certainly a Jewish settlement at Teima in the sixth century BCE, to which the Prayer of Nabona’id from Qumran refers (Milik 1956), which was highly populated and inuential in the Hejaz in the time of Muhammad. But here again all detail can be explained on the assumption of caravan trade through the region, to which Ps. 107.4 refers. In fact all those local references necessarily do no more than indicate that the writer of Job and his circle were one way and another familiar with the Near East from the Hejaz to Egypt and Syria and even Iran, which was traversed by caravans, with which the writer or some of his circle may have travelled. We must, to a certain extent, admit Guillaume’s case for the very substantial number of words in Job, where the meaning of the text, obscure by the canons of Classical Hebrew, has been elucidated through Arabic cognates, especially in pairs of seemingly identical words in parallelism. However, in such cases the Arabic word which restores the obvious sense may be no more than the cognate of a Hebrew homonym so far unknown, or at least unrecognized by scholars in the limited corpus of extant Hebrew literature. Such Hebrew words, not only in Job but throughout the OT, may be elucidated by the recognition of cognates in Akkadian, Aramaic, and Syriac and Ugaritic. Not only so, but the recognition of Arabic cognates to Ugaritic words from the fourteenth century BCE severely modies Guillaume’s conclusion. For instance, the stock title of El in the Ras Shamra texts lÓpn ’il dp’id corresponds verbally to Arabic ’allhu ’l-laÓf dh f’id (Allah the Kindly, the Compassionate). A stronger case might be made for the composition of the Book in Egypt. From the latter days of Jeremiah, Egypt was known as the home of most of the inuential Jews who remained after the deportations to Babylon, and here Jewish literature tradition ourished, including the Wisdom tradition represented by the grandson of Ben Sira, who settled in Egypt and translated his grandfather’s work after 132 BCE. By the same token of course the work of Ben Sira himself attests the activity of sapiential circles in Palestine in the third century. Given the activity of Jeremiah in Egypt and the interest in the preservation of his work it may be no coincidence that Job’s curse on the day of his birth (3.3-11) should so clearly echo Jer. 20.14-18. The conception of sleep and repose in the grave for which Job longs recalls the plaint of him who was weary of life (ANET 3, 407, cf. 33). Job’s puzzling declaration, ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked I shall go back thither (šammh)’, 1
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nds its best explanation in our opinion in the Egyptian reference to death as ‘yon place’ (ANET 3, 34). The same passage in Job (3.14f.) refers to the burial of ‘kings and counsellors’, who built arbôÓ for themselves, possibly ‘places in the desert’, the pyramids on the desert plateau beyond the cultivable strip of the Nile Valley or the well-furnished tombs (‘houses of eternity’)8 of the Pharaohs and their ofcials in the desert Valley of the Kings at Luxor. In view of the age-old profession of grave-robbing, the rich contents of such tombs (3.15) might be familiar to the author of Job. The watch kept over the tombs of the notables (21.32) is also explicable in view of tomb-robbery. The allusion to the long cortège of such a burial (21.32) could well reect specically the Egyptian wisdom text which contrasts the cortège of the dead notable, including rich grave-offerings, with the corpse of the poor man carried out without ceremony on a reed mat. Again Job’s wish to be ‘weighed in a just balance’ that God might know his integrity might well reect the scene from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, where the soul of the defunct is weighed against the feather of Maat, Truth (ANEP, pl. 639). In the gure of the reed (papyrus) ourishing so long as it is rooted in the marsh Egyptian words are used— g¿me’ (Egyptian km’i) and ’au (Egyptian h h)—and the reference to reedskiffs (9.26; cf. Isa. 18.2) surely refers to such craft on the Nile, which are well attested in ancient Egyptian painting and tomb sculpture (Breasted 1917). The reference to the ‘wisdom’ of ÓuôÓ, for which the parallel e¤wî (‘cock’) indicates a bird, the ibis sacred to the wise god Thoth (Egyptian dhwÓi), the activity of which is associated with the vital Nile ood, points in the same direction, though the plethora of creatures of the desert and the migrant birds of Palestine suggests an origin in a comprehensive bestiary of the same category as the classied lists of natural phenomena such as those including Solomon’s encyclopaedic nature lore (1 Kgs 4.33), which probably derived from such lists in Egypt.9 In the description of the nature and habitat of the hippopotamus (Behemoth) and the crocodile (Leviathan), the name behmoÓ is not as generally in Hebrew ‘beasts’ or ‘beast par excellence’; it is a Hebrew transliteration of Egyptian p ’ihmw (‘river-ox’), while in the introduction to the passage on Leviathan ‘Can you draw out (timš¿¤) Leviathan?’ (40.25 [EVV 41.1]) there is probably a wordplay between the Hebrew verb and the ancient Egyptian word for ‘crocodile’, which has survived in Coptic ’imsa, whence the loanword in Arabic timsa. Finally, in a description of the crocodile’s eyes like the beams of the rising sun (41.10 [EVV 18]) we note Fohrer’s observation that the crocodile’s eyes were the hieroglyphic sign for the beams of the rising sun (Fohrer 1989: 530 n. 9). Moreover, à propos of the statement that the crocodile is king over other beasts (41.26 [EVV 34]) it is signicant that the
8. So Dhorme, ad loc., who, with Budde, Duhm, G.B. Gray, Stevenson, Weiser and Fohrer, thinks of the pyramids. G.R. Driver (1950d: 349) however, cites Ethiopic and S. Arab. mrb (‘castle’). 9. Gardiner 1949. For similar lists see Matous 1933 and von Soden 1934. 1
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4. Date and Provenance
crocodile was the hieroglyphic sign for ‘king’ (Erman 1894: 180). Although the passages on Behemoth and Leviathan are later addenda to the denitive Book of Job, which may indicate a recension in Egypt, there is strong evidence for Humbert’s view of the Egyptian provenance of the denitive Book (1929: 75-105). When all this is said, however, we should emphasize strongly that the local provenance has but supercial bearing on the distinctive thought of the book. There were by the Persian period settlements of Jews in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria and Lebanon and the caravan towns of the Hejaz, with known literary interests in Mesopotamia and Egypt. But, wherever they might be and whatever calling they might adopt as holding no land, like the Murashu Sons of Nippur with their far-ung trading and nancial interests, or those with similar interests in the Hejaz, like the later Arab Quraish in Mecca, their real cultural and spiritual home was the tradition of their Hebrew scriptures. In comparison with the odd reection of possible physical background, the familiarity with the Law, the Prophets and their own Wisdom tradition (attested in verbal citation, literary types, their characteristic expressions and association of ideas), used so naturally to reinforce the arguments of Job and his interlocutors, and the development of the mature thought of their Hebrew forebear, reduces any inuence of their physical environment to the minimum and makes the question of the local provenance of the Book of Job merely academic.
1
Chapter 5 LITERARY FORMS IN THE BOOK OF JOB
The Book of Job has an aesthetic appeal and an arresting power far beyond any other known work of Hebrew Wisdom. Like Ecclesiastes, but unlike Proverbs, the Wisdom of Solomon or Ben Sira, it is preoccupied by a single central theme and it arrests by its bold and realistic challenge to accepted dogma. In Job, however, unlike Ecclesiastes, the challenge is presented not in academic detachment with the faint personal note of mild regret or of gentle cynicism, but as the expression of intense personal conict between faith and experience. This tension nds dramatic expression in work which by its dramatic form, its deep concern with a central issue, its serious and realistic questioning of conventional thought and faith, has been aptly compared to the tragedies of Euripides.1 Job is a sapiential work dramatically presented in which the interest of the reader is engaged by the literary art of the drama, the swift succession of scenes in the Prologue set alternatively in heaven and earth, with the crescendo account of Job’s calamities, culminating in his exemplary declaration of faith (2.10): If we accept good from God Shall we not accept calamity?
We nd the good man at the nadir of his experience cursing the day he was born and content to renounce life as meaningless (ch. 3). In response Eliphaz intervenes in the normal role of the sage who seeks to adjust others to their circumstances and convince them that calamity is not a fortuitous accident to which they are helplessly and hopelessly exposed, but betokens God’s government according to regular moral principles, according to which humans may protect themselves (chs. 4–5). The drama is continued in the cut and 1. So H.M. Kallen (1918), who regarded the book as the imitation of a tragedy of Euripides. Since the rst tragedy of Euripides was produced in 455 BCE it is unlikely that the inuence of Euripides had time or opportunity to penetrate to the Near East during the Persian period in which we should date the denitive Book of Job and probably its recensions. Actually in Mesopotamian Wisdom literature and in the Hebrew Plaint of the Sufferer there were native Semitic prototypes, so that in our opinion the afnity claimed with the tragedies of Euripides, though striking—without being complete—is fortuitous. 1
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5. Literary Forms in the Book of Job
thrust of the Dialogue between Job and his friends (chs. 4–23).2 As Job makes it increasingly plain that his friends’ assertions of orthodox doctrine are inadequate to his case, the event of a third party is adumbrated, that of God, to whom Job makes a dramatic appeal in his apology for his blameless life (ch. 29), the statement of his sufferings and the consequent crippling of his potential in society (ch. 30) and the ultimate appeal in his oath of purgation (ch. 31). Finally there is the dramatic entry of God in the Theophany and Divine Declaration, which, far from giving a dogmatic answer, sustains the interest of the reader by giving simply glimpses into ultimate truth and by consequent assurance and rebuke, leaving Job in a state of tension as to his adequacy to question God in view of the limitations of his experience and reason and his grasp of the boundless possibility of the grace of God in the scope of his own dimension. However, the drama of the Book of Job is never merely formal. In the statements of Job throughout, the personal note prevails. It is a strange reader indeed who, whatever his or her interest, philosophical, aesthetic or even critical, fails to be engaged in the intensely existential thinking of the author, which transcends the limits of logical debate and the canons of formal drama. This clamant personal experience of the author of Job must be borne in mind in our consideration of the question of the formal character of the book, which we shall nd to be conditioned, though limited, by the literary tradition of Israel. Views which regard Job as a tragedy on the Classical Greek model,3 or a dialogue like Plato’s Dialogues (Fries 1904), or even an epic like Homer’s, fail entirely to recognize the literary forms of Israel and the ancient Near East, which offer much closer analogies, and date mainly from the time when the higher levels of culture in antiquity were arrogated for Greece through lack of knowledge of, or even interest in, the culture of the further East. Appreciative of the native milieu of the book, H. Richter suggests that its structure reects the process of ancient law in Israel.4 This he reconstructs as the preliminary efforts of the parties and assessors to settle the matter out of court by getting one party to admit his liability, helping him to make this admission without loss of face rather than forcing him. This failing, the next step is to arraign him before the court with the help of witnesses, the process being completed when the accused has admitted the evidence against him and 2. On our delimitation of the Dialogue to two rounds of debate involving Job and his three friends, and a third section involving Job and Eliphaz in chs. 22–23, with Job’s nal dismissal of his friends with an oath of purgation and his declaration of the consequences of perjury (ch. 27), and an assembly of miscellaneous fragments and poems (chs. 24, 25, 26), see pp. 56-75. 3. This was the view of Theodore of Mopsuestia. Afnities with Aeschylus, particularly Prometheus, have been emphasized by M. Jastrow (1920: 185ff.), J.J. Slotki (1927–28), J. Lindblom (1939: 280ff.) and H.G. May (1952: 240ff.); with Sophocles by R. Lowth 1847: 372ff. (but dependence rejected). 4. Richter 1959: 11-58. This view is developed from the theses of L. Koehler (1930–31). 1
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accepted the sentence of the judge. This admission may be expressed, as eventually Job admits that he had no reply to God’s challenge to his presumption to dispute the divine economy on equal terms (40.4-5; 41.2-6), or it might be signied by his silence (40.4-5). But if the defendant was not convinced of his guilt and in turn could not convince his accusers of his innocence, and in default of actual evidence, he might still appeal to God, reinforcing his appeal by an oath of purgation (as Job does in chs. 29–31). Finally in the Book of Job God replies to this appeal, convicting Job of seeking to subject him to the limitations of temporal social conventions and dogmas against the evidence of his free grace and power, humanity in its familiar environment being but one object of his concern (38.2–40.14). To the nal verdict of God here implied Job declares his submission (40.4-5; 42.2-6) and the case according to the legal form postulated by Richter is closed. This legal procedure is conjecturally reconstructed from Babylonian texts from the second millennium BCE, from texts from Ptolemaic Egypt and from passages in the OT admittedly sporadic and formally as widely divergent as the patriarchal narratives and the Plaint of the Sufferer among the Psalms, where Richter follows Hans Schmidt in his view that such psalms as Pss. 4; 5; 7; 26; 27.1-6, 7-14; 31.1-9 (EVV 1-8); 52; 109; 142 and possibly Pss. 11; 13; 54; 55.1-19 (EVV 1-18); 56; 59; 94.16-23 and 140 are relevant to the nal appeal to God when a case proved inconclusive in secular justice.5 His schema of the structure of the Book of Job certainly recognizes the dramatic character of the work, for which the forensic case would be an admirable medium, and it does full justice to the use of legal forms and diction. Richter’s emphasis on the forensic pattern, however, seems to us to do less than justice to the full signicance of other literary forms in the book, the recognition of which, in all their rich variety and peculiar adaptation in Job, is the great merit of Fohrer (1963b: 68-86) and to a lesser extent of Westermann (1956). The recurrence of the forensic convention, so readily adaptable to sapiential disputation, in the speeches of Job’s three friends, in the introductions to Job’s statements, his argument in chs. 12 and 21 and in his nal appeal to God (chs. 29–3l), and in the introduction to the Divine Declaration (38.1-2) is not to be denied. Against this formal aspect of the Book, however, is to be set the substance of the denitive Book, Job’s despairing wish for death and oblivion (ch. 3), the expostulations and arguments of his friends and his rejoinders (chs. 4–23), Job’s increasing orientation to God and his nal impassioned appeal (chs. 29–31) and the Divine Declaration (38.2–40.14). In Job’s statements here 5. Schmidt 1928. In the psalms adduced by Schmidt the subject protests his innocence in contrast to ‘penitential psalms’, where the sufferer acknowledges that his suffering is caused by his sin. The relevance of the latter to the fast-liturgy is likely, though the former also may have relevance to the same situation, expressing the humiliation of the innocent sufferer and his dependence on divine deliverance. Here the motif of the accusers, which Schmidt took literally, may be a gurative expression of the popular conception that suffering is the consequence of sin. 1
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5. Literary Forms in the Book of Job
Westermann rightly recognizes features characteristic of the Plaint of the Sufferer, and feasibly suggests that the arguments of the three friends are less designed to provoke disputation than to give Job an opportunity to relieve his feelings, which he does mainly in the literary convention of the Plaint of the Sufferer (Westermann 1956: 5ff.). But throughout Job’s plaint, as in his initial curse of the day of his birth (ch. 3), there is an undeniable note of controversy in his setting the grim facts of his experience against God’s purposeful creation and moral economy, which nally succeeds in revealing the inadequacy of orthodox doctrine and traditional morality in the existential situation of the sufferer, who is thus eventually brought into confrontation with God for his answer. Nor is the Theophany and Divine Declaration foreign to the Plaint of the Sufferer, formally corresponding to the divine response or oracle, which is either expressed or implied in certain of the plaints of the sufferer in the Psalms, and is an even more regular feature of Mesopotamian texts on the subject of the worthy sufferer, the afnities of which with the Book of Job we have noted (see above, pp. 5-20). But being a rebuke leading to conviction rather than merely an assurance, its afnity with the legal convention must not be excluded. The role of Job’s three friends might be regarded as the amplication of the theme of the sufferer’s alienation from his friends which is more vaguely mentioned in the plaints of the sufferer in Pss. 41.10 and 51.13. Or it may correspond to the role of the friends of the sufferer in the Mesopotamian texts who, either by contradiction or agreement, help the sufferer to express his plaint. This may indicate that the denitive Book of Job is the ‘dramatization of the Plaint of the Sufferer’, as Westermann and Bentzen (Westermann 1956: 11; Bentzen 1959: 177) term it. This certainly does more justice to the peculiar nature of the work, with its intensity, which is unique in Hebrew Wisdom literature. This is the view of the book that we prefer, though we should beware of applying it too mechanically in view of the rich variety of literary forms each with its own characteristic implications to those in ancient Israel familiar with such forms in their traditional Sitz im Leben. Nor can anyone familiar with such forms in Hebrew literature be unaware that forensic language and forms are frequently used in the Plaint of the Sufferer, just as the harrowing details from the Plaint of the Sufferer are used in presenting a case at law, the protestation of innocence being common in both conventions. Thus we admit Richter’s emphasis on the forensic features in Job, though nding that Westermann’s view of the Book as the dramatization of the Plaint of the Sufferer does fuller justice to its nature, which seems to us to be conrmed by the Mesopotamian wisdom texts with which Job has afnity. Steinmann, speaking more generally, describes Job as ‘a voluminous legal dossier in an abortive case’, where the accused is interrogated before he is judged guilty,6 but when he verges on blasphemy, is acquitted and rehabilitated. The work, he 6. Steinmann 1955: 289: ‘Par un étrange paradoxe ce volumineux dossier juridique est celui d’un procès avorti’. 1
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suggests, did not conform to any preconceived pattern, but developed as a reection of the writer’s own dialectic (Steinmann 1955: 270ff.), embellished by a rich variety of literary forms, particularly the Hymn of Praise and the Plaint of the Sufferer (pp. 56ff.). This view is largely the consequence of Steinmann’s conception of the present Book of Job as composed in four stages: the rst consisting of Prologue, Dialogue and Job’s monologue, ending at ch. 31, the second an expansion of this by the speeches of Elihu (chs. 32– 37) as the answer to the problem of the Dialogue, the third a parallel edition of the second, but with the answer in the Divine Declaration and the Epilogue instead of in the Elihu section, and the fourth, the present book, the fusion of those editions (pp. 273ff.).7 However, we prefer to think of the denitive Book, without the addendum of the Elihu speeches, the poem on Wisdom (ch. 28) and perhaps a secondary expansion with inserted poems in chs. 24–27 (see below, pp. 56-75), as conceived according to a literary prototype, either as legal process or, as we prefer, the Plaint of the Sufferer or the Mesopotamian wisdom texts on the subject of the worthy sufferer—however this may need to be qualied. Thanks, however, to the poetic genius of the author and particularly to his intense involvement in his problem, we have a work which transcends the limitations of any traditional literary type and which in consequence has been justly described as sui generis. The framework of the book in the Prologue (chs. 1–2) and Epilogue (42.7ff.) is the vivid narrative form of the saga or popular folk-tale with edifying purpose. The use of such narrative to introduce a more sophisticated wisdom text has analogies in the Protest of the Eloquent Peasant (ANET 3, 407-10) in Egyptian Wisdom literature and in the introduction to the Aramaic Proverbs of Ahiqar (ANET 3, 427). The narrative, however, as used by the author of Job was adapted from an earlier work and has retained many features of oral saga or folk-legend. Of those we may note round numbers in the account of Job’s wealth, seven thousand sheep, a thousand camels, ve hundred yoke of oxen and ve hundred she-asses (1.3), which were doubled on Job’s rehabilitation (42.12); the quick succession of the bringing of bad news, with verbal reiteration while the previous messenger ‘was yet speaking’; and the total loss of Job’s oxen and asses (1.14), sheep and shepherds (1.16), camels and herdsmen (1.17) and family (1.19), with the messengers as sole survivor in each case. The crescendo effect of this account and the further account of Job’s bodily afiction hold the hearer in suspense and key one up for the sufferer’s reaction, uncertain whether that is to be the fortitude of faith, as in the source (1.21; 2.10), or the despair of the realist, which Job’s wife counselled (2.9). The hearer is also held in suspense for the solution of the sufferer’s problem. These features are familiar in Hebrew tradition in the patriarchal narratives in the older sources of the Pentateuch, with which the narrative framework of Job has been compared. The E source particularly, 7. This is the view of the composition of Job proposed by van Hoonacker. 1
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5. Literary Forms in the Book of Job
with its moralizing tone, is reminiscent of the Prologue and Epilogue of Job. This suggests the art of the professional story-teller, of the Arab rwi, a conspicuous gure in the coffee-halls of the East before the advent of gramophone, radio and television. Thus Muhammad introduced the Surah of Yussuf in the Qur’an: ‘We will recount to you the best of stories’. The story itself, however, had an edifying value like the story of Joseph in Genesis, emphasizing the guidance of providence in the vicissitudes of a worthy man (von Rad 1953: 120ff.). The saga features we have noted in the narrative framework of Job, however, are also features of the Ugaritic Legends of Krt and Aqht in the fourteenth century, and the association of Job with Dan’el [sic] in Ezek. 14.14, 20, may well point to a Canaanite popularization of a Mesopotamian wisdom text such as we have noticed at Ugarit in the fourteenth century BCE (see above, pp. 5-20) as N.M. Sarna has suggested (Sarna 1957; Spiegel 1945), with a Hebrew version reecting the early patriarchal narratives in the ninth century. Whatever the respective roles of Job and his friends may have been, the present book gives no certain clue, and it must sufce for us to recognize the saga and edifying tale as the survival of the source-material in the narrative framework of the Book of Job in the Prologue and Epilogue (chs.1–2; 42.111), with Midrashic addenda much later than the completion of the book. The narrative source so developed in the Israelite monarchy was adapted in the Persian period in the scenes with the sÓn and his trials of Job in the Prologue, probably by the author of the Book (Fohrer 1963b: 26ff.), but preserving the character of the source. The moral problem in the Dialogue of the Book was no novelty in Israel. As has already been noted, it is implicit in the Plaint of the Sufferer, where it is particularly poignant, as for example in Ps. 73.3-12, and while such psalms cannot be dated precisely, the adaptation of this literary type by Jeremiah in the sixth century indicates that it was already familiar in Israel. Assyrian analogies indicate that this literary category was an element in the ritual of fast and penance, where the king represented the community (Frankfort 1948: 260ff.; Mowinckel 1962: I, 46, 61, 225ff.), so that the sufferer in the Hebrew psalms of this type was quite possibly the king as a ‘societary gure’.8 The Plaint of the Sufferer, whether communal or individual, follows a welldened pattern. The sufferings are stated usually both literally and guratively, and this cumulative list is followed by a cry for help. Here, as in Mesopotamian laments, it is to be noted that the plaint is not a querulous questioning of God’s order, but emphasizes the worshipper’s dependence on God.9 A marked feature of the Book of Job, which it is the merit of Fohrer (1963b: 70ff) to have recognized and duly emphasized, is the originality—and 8. The phrase coined by H.W. Robinson. 9. The cumulative list of sufferings was possibly developed from the counterincantation, the principle feature of which, as is evident from counter-incantations from Mesopotamia, the systematic countering of malicious incantations be the verbal repetition of the various evils which had been wished upon the sufferer; see e.g. Jastrow 1898: 272. 1
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indeed daring—with which this and other traditional forms are applied to circumstances quite other than those with which they were originally and traditionally associated. Thus the writer of Job adapts the Plaint of the Sufferer as an indictment of God’s moral government. In the traditional Plaint of the Sufferer, God’s former mercies may be recalled, either as the grounds of hope in extremity or, as in the Communal Plaint in Psalm 44, as a foil to present distress. This is the signicance of Job 29. But in association with Job’s plaint in ch. 30 the emphasis on the social potential of Job’s prosperity makes the plaint less of a lament than an arraignment of his divine opponent. Another feature of the Plaint of the Sufferer is a confession of guilt, which is rather general (e.g. Pss. 38.5, 18; 51.5; 79.8; 130.3), or perhaps a protestation of innocence, which may in fact be elaborated as a separate psalm, as in Psalm 131. This latter element is naturally elaborated in Job. There is also a statement of faith in the providence of God, in which the nest example, again elaborated as an independent psalm, is Psalm 23. This has its counterpart in Job’s trusting submission to God in 40.3-5 and 42.2-6, though in form this reproduces rather the legal convention of the acceptance of the verdict, as Richter contends.10 The relief anticipated in the Plaint of the Sufferer may be heralded by a reassuring oracle, as in the Communal Plaints (Pss. 60.8-11 [EVV 6-9]; 85.9ff. [EVV 8ff.]), mediated by a cultic prophet on behalf of God. This last element is represented in the Book of Job by the answer of the Lord in person,11 though characteristically it is adapted by the author as a challenge rather than an assurance of the relief sought by the sufferer. As the experience of God’s presence, however, seen now ‘with the eye’ rather than merely heard (42.5), with innite possibilities of new insight, new life, new hope, this is even fuller than the oracle in the Plaint of the Sufferer. While the whole of the Book of Job may be regarded as an expansion of the theme of the Plaint of the Sufferer12 (all the characteristic features of which it employs or adapts), there are certain passages in it which conform in detail to this type, such as those just noted and particularly 16.7-17; 19.7-20 and 30.9-31. The Plaint of the Sufferer, however, in the Book of Job has not the same signicance as in the Psalms or in the Mesopotamian fast-liturgies and such wisdom texts as ludlul bl nmeqi and the others cited above. There its purpose is to signify the abasement of the subject and his dependence on the mercy of God, which he either anticipates or has experienced. In Job, as H. Gese (1958: 76) has well observed, Job’s plaint is not designed to evoke the mercy of God except in 10. Richter 1959: 125f. Fohrer also admits this (1963b: 23), though as an alternative to the view that Job’s statement here corresponds to the assurance of the sufferer that he will be heard in the conclusion to the plaint. 11. The failure to notice all the formal characteristics of the Plaint of the Sufferer in the Book of Job led Dhome (1929: xlviii) to treat the Divine Declaration as a later insertion, like the Elihu speeches. 12. A. Gese (1958: 63ff.) suggested that the book of Job is an adaptation of the Klagehörersparadigma. 1
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death or vindication. Thus it has a controversial note, which is foreign to the Plaint of the Sufferer in its cultic Sitz im Leben. We may add that, as well as highlighting the contrast with Job’s righteous conduct, the list of his accumulated sufferings is adduced as an excuse for his questioning of the moral order of God. This particular application of the Plaint of the Sufferer, with its characteristic elements in Mesopotamian and Hebrew literature (the Psalms), agrees with the adaptation by the author of Job of other literary forms proper to a particular Sitz im Leben, where he uses the traditional association of ideas not always to reinforce those ideas, but also to contradict them in the light of experience. Dhorme, in his otherwise excellent commentary, has failed to notice this tendency in his cavalier dismissal of the inuence of Mesopotamian wisdom texts, to which he sees only a supercial resemblance in the Book of Job (Dhorme 1929: lxxxvi). The appreciation of the signicance of the Plaint of the Sufferer and of other literary forms in the Book of Job and the writer’s highly original adaptation of them to his argument is the great contribution of G. Fohrer (1963a) to the study of Job and the nerve of his magisterial commentary on the Book. We may consider the particular signicance of such passages in the context of the Book of Job. In 16.7-17 and 19.8-13 Job describes the intensity of his suffering in a series of highly colourful and concrete gures characteristic of the Plaint of the Sufferer. In the Plaint of the Sufferer, the afictions at the hands of the sufferer’s enemies are a prominent feature. In Job, however, God is the persecutor. He has worn the sufferer out and shrivelled him up so that his emaciation attests his sufferings and the enmity of God (cf. 19.20; 30.30; Pss. 22.15 [EVV 14]; 18 [EVV 17]; 102.4 [EVV 3]); opponents take up the hue and cry against him and gape at him (cf. Pss. 22.8 [EVV 7]; 35.21); he is buffeted on the cheek (cf. Lam. 3.30); he has sown sackcloth on his skin (cf. Pss. 35.13; 69.12, EVV 11); and in spite of all this, Job declares he is innocent (cf. Ps. 73.13). In the context of Job 16 this citation from the Plaint of the Sufferer emphasizes the intense suffering of Job, which justies the urgency of his questioning of God’s moral Order to which his friends object with unseasonable philosophic detachment (16.1-6), and the protest of innocence with which it closes leads naturally to Job’s claim that even if his sufferings, as they are likely to do, prove fatal, his case be still left open for vindication (16.1822). In 19.7-20, in continuation of his complaint that God has prejudged his case (vv. 7ff.), Job emphasizes his sufferings at the divine hand in a list of sufferings typical of the Plaint of the Sufferer (vv. 7ff.). All his friends are estranged from him and even his family (vv. 13-19; cf. 30.10a; Ps. 38.12 [EVV 11]), and he is reduced to skin and bone (v. 20, cf. 30.30; Ps. 22.15, 18 [EVV 14, 17]). In the sequel Job questions the right of his friends to pursue him like God, and, claiming perhaps the same indulgence as the mentally ill, who are regarded as ‘touched by God’ (cf. v. 21), he claims pity rather than censure. Job’s lament in 30.9-3l describes his sufferings in an accumulation of gures familiar in the Plaint of the Sufferer. He is a byword to all, even the lowest of 1
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society (v. 9; cf. Pss. 44.15 [EVV 14]; 69.12 [EVV 11]); good people are appalled; he is surrounded by enemies; they spit upon his face (vv. 10ff.); God has loosed his tent-cord (v. 11; cf. Jer. 10.20); he is prey to terrors (v. 15); night racks his bones (v. 17); God has cast him in the mire (v. 19; cf. Ps. 69.3 [EVV 2]); he goes about black (v. 28; cf. Pss. 38.7 [EVV 6]; 42.10 [EVV 9]), the companion of jackals and ostriches (v. 29); his lyre and his pipe are turned to mourning (v. 31). So Job described his persistent misery as a contrast to his prosperity in ch. 29. The subject is introduced by the popular attitude to suffering, which reects the conventional view of suffering as the natural consequence of sin and the withdrawal of the divine blessing. This is the attitude of persons who share the leader’s loss of the blessing (30.1-8) as they had previously enjoyed his share of the blessing (ch. 29). Here it must be emphasized that the recognition of the incorporation of typical passages from the literary category of the Plaint of the Sufferer does not necessarily militate against the authenticity of these passages in Job, but it does suggest that the various references to suffering need not be literal and biographical. There are other passages of this nature, which Baumgärtel (1933) regards as secondary to the Dialogue (e.g. 3.3-12, 13-19, 20-26; 7.1-10, 12-21; 8.12-19; 9.4-10, 25-31; 10.1-22; 12; 13.23-27; 14.1-22). It is difcult to see why 3.327, Job’s curse of the day of his birth (vv. 3-12) and the advantages of nonexistence (vv. 13-19) and the questioning of the purpose of life in misery (vv. 20-26), should be removed and the statement retained in v. 1 that Job cursed the day of his birth. The following speech of Eliphaz (chs. 4–5) has as much relevance to the one as to the other, and if 3.3-26 had not stood in the Book of Job critics would certainly have demanded an opening speech from the protagonist. From a dramatic point of view Job’s explosive curse of his life is natural after this pent-up emotion (1.20-22; 2.9-13). Job’s speech is also the introduction to the sage’s argument deploring the life of the wretched vv. 3ff., and questioning the purpose of life in misery in two passages (vv. 13-19, 2026), each introduced by ‘Why?’ (lmmh) like the Egyptian Dispute over Suicide (ANET 3, 405-407) and the Babylonian Theodicy (Lambert 1960: 6391). Actually 3.1 is to be taken with the prose narrative in ch. 2 and, as 3.2 indicates, 3.3-26 is the introduction to the Dialogue. The fact that the Book of Job is the production of a poet of original genius and one well versed in the native literature of Israel and probably also in the wisdom literature of the Near East, who was also a philosopher engaged not in presenting a preconceived conclusion but in experimental and creative thought, must seriously modify any view of such passages as secondary. The imprecation with elaboration of the calamity invoked is a well-known literary category, best known in the OT in Balaam’s oracles on Edom (Num. 24.18), Amalek (Num. 24.21-22) and developed in the folk-oracles in Amos (1.3–2.3). As applied to the subject’s own life it is paralleled in Jer. 20.14-18, but it is 1
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questionable if this can be regarded as a distinct literary category, in spite of the close verbal correspondence between Job 3.3-12 and Jer. 20.14-18. In vv. 1-10, which Baumgärtel also regards as secondary, vv. 1-2 deals generally with the brevity of human life, proceeding then to the particular misery of Job (vv. 3-6) and then, with apparently an apostrophe to God, to the brevity of his life and the imminence of death. This adds point to Job’s appeal for the sympathy of his friends rather than their censure, which is the theme of 6.1430, and to his claim on God for mercy and relief rather than apparently pointless persecution as if he were not a man responsive to God, the sea or seamonster (tannn), known in the Ras Shamra texts as the inveterate enemies of God’s Order. The sequel, Bildad’s reply that God does not pervert justice, but that suffering implies sin (8.2-4), might seem to connect directly with 6.29-30, but his insistence on the availability of God’s mercy on repentance (8.5-7, 2122) and humanity’s vital need of it (vv. 11ff.) is the direct reply to Job’s complaint of the pointless brevity of human life and the indiscriminate hostility of God. The author adopts the Plaint of the Sufferer with its enumeration of sufferings in 7.1-10 as the traditional appeal to God, specically in the sequel (vv. 11-21), since his case has proved beyond the understanding and sympathy of his friends. The passage 9.25-31, in the tradition of the Plaint of the Sufferer on the theme of the brevity of life and the agonizing problem of God’s apparent indifference to human righteousness, does seem to be a self-contained passage which breaks the sequence of thought between v. 24 (which states that God is indifferent to justice) and v. 31 (which states that he is inaccessible to the innocent sufferer who claims justice). After the statement that God destroys innocent and wicked alike, sudden death mocking the innocent (9.22-23), vv. 25-31 seems tautological. The explanation is possibly that the latter passage, a Plaint of the Sufferer, was suggested secondarily by vv. 22-23. 10.1-22, in contrasting the sufferer’s relationship to God with his relationship in arbitration or in inquisition with humanity (vv. 4-6, cf. 9.23), reverts to the theme of 3.11-13 (10.18-19), and echoes the theme of the pointless brevity of human life (v. 20, cf. 9.25-26), which may suggest that 9.25-31 is secondary. Verses 8-17 introduce fresh argument that God’s creation and providential care for humans as moral beings (v. 12) are inconsistent with human sufferings in spite of their merit. In 10.2-20, as in many passages which have been regarded as secondary, Job addresses not the friends but God, and so, it is claimed, they do not relate directly to the Dialogue. There is nevertheless usually some connection with the thought of the context and allowance must be made for the intensity of the author’s thought, which all the while was creative, questing for a solution of his major problem beyond the strict connes of the orthodox arguments advanced by Job’s friends. Other passages in Job have been regarded as secondary because they are self-contained expressions of general truth, including 3.20-23, 7.1-2 and 14.112, 18-22. These may well be citations from wisdom literature which in the 1
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sequel are applied to Job’s own case. Thus the general truth of 7.1-12 is particularized in Job’s case in vv. 3-10. 14.1-2 expresses, perhaps in citation, a general truth, which the author uses to question God’s censorious judgment of mortals (v. 3); v. 4 implies humans’ limitation, and v. 5 God’s determination of the human life-span; v. 5 states the author’s claim that in the brief life which God has given humans he should, it is implied, if his creation of them has any point, allow them to live in peace since, the passage continues (vv. 712), death brings annihilation and oblivion. The author continues his argument that if he could hope for life beyond the grave with a correspondence with God, he would be content to endure all the hardships of life (vv. 13-17). This hope sinks with the nal declaration of the mortality and nal annihilation of humans (chs. 18–22). Here, though the argument points the statement of a general truth with the author’s own experience in the role of Job, it is impossible to determine whether ch. 14 is a later expansion from wisdom literature supported by the general statement of human evanescence in 13.28, or a number of citations to which the author adds his own annotations, or whether the whole (both general truths and particular elaborations) are the work of the author as poet and philosopher. The references throughout the book and the variety of literary forms indicates the author’s wide repertoire, and there is no indication that his work was conned to the strict dialogue and his adaptation of his source. At any point he may well have inserted a passage of his own work, either composed ad hoc or an independent piece, which he considered appropriate in the context. Another distinctive literary category in the Book of Job is the Hymn of Praise, in, for example, 5.9-16, 9.4-10, 12.7-10, 13-25, which Baumgärtel regards as secondary, and 26.5-14. The Hymn of Praise is well known in Mesopotamian liturgy, a characteristic being the attering invocation of the god by all his conceivable titles or epithets and references to his exploits, which ensured that, whatever his mood, the worshipper could not fail to use the proper means of address. In the Hebrew version of the Hymn of Praise, in place of this plethora of divine titles God was addressed as the Creator, or, in the adaptation of the liturgy of the Canaanite New Year festival, as the one who, like the Canaanite Baal in the Ras Shamra texts, had prevailed over the powers of Chaos, exemplied in the unruly waters of the sea or river oods or in the water-monsters such as Rahab, Tannin or Leviathan, or in the sustaining of nature or the social order, or as the God who had overthrown the Egyptians and delivered Israel from the land of bondage. This in the liturgy of the New Year festival was a means of engendering fresh faith in God’s providential Order as well as being an expression of homage to God. In Israel the reference to such exploits took the place of divine titles in the Mesopotamian counterpart, but a formal correspondence remained in the Hebrew Hymn of Praise in the reference to the divine exploits by a series of participles of the verb (cf. Ps. 104; Amos 4.13; 5.8-9). These characteristic features distinguish the Hymn of Praise in the Book of Job. 1
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The Hymn of Praise in the context of Wisdom literature is nothing extraordinary. Its theme, as in the Psalms, being generally the providence of God in creation and history, it might be cited in Wisdom literature either for criticism or in support of argument for the divine economy. Thus for instance a Hymn of Praise is cited in the wisdom Psalm 8 on the theme of humanity so insignicant in the universe yet the consummation of God’s works (cf. Ps. 144.3, a Royal Psalm). The Hymns of Praise in Job are very apposite in their context whether in support or in criticism of the divine economy. Thus in 5.9-16 Eliphaz checks Job’s wild lament and nihilistic philosophy in ch. 3, where incidentally Job uses the form of the Hymn of Praise to extol death and oblivion (3.17-19). So Eliphaz maintains the doctrine of God’s Order in nature and society and commends Job to commit his case to God by the traditional confession of faith whereby the worshippers approached God in condence and hope. The Hymn of Praise in 9.4-10 is plainly relevant to its context. Bildad has just advanced the orthodox view of the providence of God expressed in the doctrine of sin and retribution, holding out the hope of the divine mercy on human repentance. Job’s reply is to admit the might and unfathomable wisdom of God in nature. But by the same token God is inscrutable and inaccessible in the personal need of humans, as the immediate context states (vv. 3, 11-12). In reply (in 12.7-10, 13-25) to Zophar’s presentation of the orthodox view of God’s providence and the possibility of grace (ch. 11) Job admits the doctrine of Divine Providence in the same literary convention but emphasizes the destructive rather than the constructive aspect of providence (vv. 13-25). This section, which is actually a parody of a Hymn of Praise, is particularly characteristic of the author’s originality in adapting familiar literary forms to new signicance according to their context in his argument. In Scripture the citation of a verse or even a phrase is often evocative of a much larger passage and its characteristic context. Thus Job’s question ‘Am I Sea or Tannin?’ (7.12) is to be understood as evoking a well-known theme of the Hymn of Praise, God’s triumph over the primeval powers of Chaos. Thus the author animadverts on the providence of God who would thus treat a righteous person, a moral being who aspired to realize the image of God within oneself, and on the abuse of his almighty power in breaking a mere mortal who might more ttingly have been the object of his mercy. Certain forms of prophetic communication are also adapted in the Book of Job. The communication of Eliphaz, for instance, in 4.12-16 employs the form of the prophetic declaration of a theophany and the ensuing oracle adapted as a sapiential statement (4.17-21). The apparent indictment of Job for palpable sins (22.6-9), and the punishment for them introduced by the formula ‘Therefore’ (lkn) is the traditional prophetic form of indictment, probably adapted from the controversy (rî) originally sustained by an advocate for God in the sacrament of the Covenant (Gemser 1955: 128ff.) (cf. Judg. 6.7-10 and, 1
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with a detailed list of offences, Amos 2.6-12; Hos. 4.1-2; Ps. 50.17-21). This passage, however, is not, as in the true prophetic tradition, directed at a particular person or community, least of all Job, of whom Eliphaz alleges no particular sins here, upbraiding him not for sin but for impatience and despair (4.3-6). Eliphaz does eventually charge Job with particular sins, mainly of omission (ch. 22), but this is the forensic tradition, and is to be understood as giving Job a concrete charge to answer and in preparation of his oath of purgation (ch. 31). Throughout the book, where the theodicy is called in question and Job asserts his claim to be allowed to state his case at the bar and be answered in open court by God, the gures, phraseology and literary forms of law abound, duly emphasized by Richter, perhaps overemphasized at the expense of the wide range of other literary forms equally prominent in Job. Nevertheless the legal forms and gures are impressive, as we should expect in a book of this kind, which opens with the activity of the ‘public prosecutor’ in the heavenly court and ends with God’s counter-challenge to Job: Gird up your loins like a warrior That I may question you and you shall declare to me… (38.3)
The most striking and signicant of the legal forms is Job’s great oath of purgation. This convention was well attested in antiquity. In cases between two parties where no witness was available, an oath was taken at the sanctuary by which the parties invoked grave penalties upon themselves. This was known in Mesopotamian law (The Code of Hammurabi §§103, 106, 107, regarding claims of merchants and travelling agents; §249, where a hired ox is alleged to have died a natural death; and §266, when a shepherd claims to have lost beasts entrusted to his care by the attack of beasts of prey). The last case was settled also in Israel by oath of purgation at the sanctuary (Exod. 22.9), like alleged adultery (Num. 5.16-28) and other unspecied cases (1 Kgs 8.31ff.; 2 Chron. 6.22ff.). A particularly close formal correspondence with Job 31 may be observed in Psalm 7. See further H.H. Schmidt (1928). Nearer the time of Job the oath of purgation at the sanctuary was known in the JudaeoAramaean colony at Elephantine by Aswan.13 The negative confession of various sins in similar context was projected into the judgment in the hereafter in the Egyptian Book of the Dead (ANET 3, 34-36), in connection with the ceremony of weighing the heart of the defunct against the feather of ma’at (Order, Truth), which Dhorme cites (1928: 412) à propos of Job 31.6: Then may (God) weigh me with just balance, And let him know my innocence.
Actually Job’s oath of purgation itself shows a variety of literary forms, which Fohrer (1963a: 84 n. 24) has classied as: 13. Volz 1912. The passage is in Pap. 27 of Sachau’s edition. 1
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1.
the solemn assertion of innocence, invoking a covenant to which the subject is a party (31.1-4), 2. an adjuration stating the conditions under which the specied curses would be operative (vv. 5-35, 38-40b, 16-17, 18, 19-20, 21-22). 3. an adjuration stating the conditions under which the curse would be operative, but not specifying the curse (vv. 24-34). In view of our arrangement of the text here, however (see below, Introduction to ch. 31), we should include vv. 24-35 in the second category, thus eliminating Fohrer’s third class. The enumerations of twelve different sins is signicant here, having an exact analogy in the twelve sins upon which a curse was endorsed by the sacral community at the Covenant Sacrament in the tradition of Shechem (Deut. 27.15-26). The sins of course are not the same as in the days when the community was thus safeguarded against absorption into the life and religion of Canaan; they relate to the individual, dening his duties as the Decalogue (Exod. 20.2-17; Deut. 5.6-21) had dened them, as a member of the covenantcommunity of Israel. The passage is valuable as indication of the relevance and development of such codes as the Decalogue among Jews in about the middle of the fth century BCE. Formally ch. 31 is a self-contained unit, but its adaptation in the Book of Job indicates clearly that it is integral to the structure of the book. It ttingly marks the culmination of Job’s repeated appeal from the opinion of conventional morality to God himself. In the law of Israel and the ancient Near East the sanctuary was the nal court of appeal in the oath of purgation. This invoked the immediate activity of God. In the context of the author’s literary model, the Plaint of the Sufferer, God intervenes to help the sufferer who had implored his mercy. In the author’s adaptation of his prototype God intervenes in response to Job’s daring challenge in his oath of purgation. As the culmination of Job’s dearest desire for confrontation with God and as anticipating the theophany and divine address (38.1–40.2, 6-14), Job’s great oath of purgation in ch. 31 is indispensable in the structure of the book. By the same token the speeches of Elihu (chs. 32–37), whatever the value of their content and their representation of continued thought in the circle of the author of Job, are an intrusion which barbarously disregards the dramatic climax of the book. Throughout the book, by his highly original adaptation of traditional literary types to reinforce ideas traditionally associated with them, but more often with the opposite signicance in the style often of parody, the author has kept the reader on the alert. So he does to the end. Here, where we expect the Divine Declaration as an assurance in the convention of the Plaint of the Sufferer, or an acquittal or condemnation in the legal response to Job’s oath of purgation, we have instead a counter-challenge, introduced by the language and literary form of a legal summons (38.1-3; 40.2, 7-8).14 But here again the writer shows 14. The language is probably the reminiscence of belt-wrestling as a legal ordeal, which is attested in a legal document from Nuzu cited by Gordon 1950–51. 1
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his familiarity with the wide range of literary forms. God’s argument and counter-challenge is not sustained in legal forms, but in forms familiar in the sapiential tradition, where students were trained both to discriminate and recognize afnity by means of classied lists of natural phenomena, each item elaborated as a little Hymn of Praise to the Creator and all combining to praise his providence which reaches to realms beyond human power or comprehension, but into which they have a glimpse which may encourage them to hope beyond the full evidence of experience. The passages, on the various natural phenomena moreover in their interrogative form, have afnity with a form of controversy in Egyptian wisdom literature. In a sapiential work like Job characteristic literary forms of wisdom literature are naturally used. The whole argument is in the form of the philosophic dialogue with thesis and antithesis as in the Egyptian Dialogue of a Man with his Own Soul (Thomas [ed.] 1958: 162-67) and the Babylonian Theodicy.15 The Book of Job is the only example of Hebrew Wisdom in the form of a dramatic dialogue, but it has a variation in the experimental method of Ecclesiastes, where the sage states hypotheses and then proceeds critically to test them. This is the method adopted in Job 21.17ff., where a number of proverbs typical of the conventional moral philosophy are cited—for example, ‘How often is the lamp of the wicked put out?’ (cf. Prov. 13.9; 20.20) and ‘God stores up iniquity for their sons’—and are then exploded by the citation of actual experience. The didactic poem is used to emphasize the principle of sin and retribution in Zophar’s speech in 20.4-29. This may have been incorporated en bloc from a different context, but Job’s riposte (21.7ff.), with a parody on the impunity of the wicked and the indiscriminate fate of wicked and innocent in death, clearly indicates that the passage was integral to the book. This passage recalls the question of the prosperity of the wicked which is cited as a scandal to the faithful sufferer in the psalms of the type the Plaint of the Sufferer (Pss. 10.5ff; 73.3-9; 17.17; 49.7; 52.9b), as Fohrer observes (1963a: 74). The didactic declaration on the fate of the wicked and the blessing of the upright is familiar in couplets and in antithetic parallelism in Proverbs, e.g. 14.11: The house of the wicked will be destroyed, But the tent of the upright will ourish.
This theme may be amplied in an elaborate gure like the antithetic gures in Ps. 1.3ff., where the Homeric simile in v. 3 recalls that in Job 6.15-21. So the blessing of the righteous who has sought God’s pardon and the fate of the obdurate wicked are set in antithesis in 11.14-20. Thus in Job there are didactic declarations at length and with a wealth of concrete detail and imagery on the wicked and their fate (in Job 4.8-11; 5.2-7; 8.8-19; 11.20; 15.17-35; 18.5-21 15. See above, p. 7. 1
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and 20.4-29), which Job parodies, describing the prosperity of the wicked (21.7-16), and on the blessing of the righteous (in 5.17-27; 8.5-7; 11.13-19 and, after this model, ch. 29). Such passages are generally used respectively as sober admonition or as encouragement by Job’s friends in support of the theodicy, but, as has been indicated, the author may characteristically give them an original turn in the mouth of Job. Here as in his use of other literary types he is not bound by the circumstances with which the literary form was traditionally associated, but it is only by the recognition of the traditional Sitz im Leben that the particular point of his usage of the literary type is appreciated. The hymn on the fundamentality of Wisdom (‘Where shall Wisdom be found?’) in Job 28 is already known as a distinct literary type from the Hymn to Wisdom as God’s instrument of creation in Prov. 8.22-31. In another context in the book, for instance, in the context of God’s speeches, the passage might have been considered original, but in its actual context it must be regarded as secondary, a commentary on the limitations of traditional wisdom. The classication of rebels against the light in Job 24.13-17 has its literary prototype in the classied categories in Prov. 30.18-19 (things which leave no trace of their course), 30.24-28 (creatures small but effective), 30.29-31 (beings stately in their gait) and 30.21-23: Under three things the earth trembles, Under four it cannot bear up: A slave when he becomes king, And a fool when he is lled with food, An unloved woman when she gets a husband, And a maid when she supplants her mistress.
Such classied lists of natural phenomena and social categories have already been noted as a feature of Mesopotamian and Egyptian wisdom literature (see above, pp. 5-8). The citation of classied instances of God’s creation in the Divine Declaration (38.2–40.2, 6-14) shows the same inuence of this sapiential type, being reminiscent particularly of the Onomesticon of Amenemope (probably thirteenth century BCE) (Gardiner 1947) ‘on all the works of Ptah (the creator-god) in the sky and what pertains thereto, on the earth and what is in it’, the afnities of which, with the Divine Declaration, have been particularly stressed by von Rad.16 The same ultimate inuence of Egyptian wisdom tradition may be noticed in the interrogative form of the passages on the works of the Creator which constitute a challenge to Job in the Divine Declaration. Von Rad (1955: 298301) cites the analogy of the Egyptian Papyrus Anastasi I (thirteenth century 16. Von Rad 1955; Richter 1958a. Richter would include the passages on the hippopotamus and the crocodile in this category, their fuller categorizations being of the same nature as the lists of natural phenomena according to their characteristics, their fulness being justied by their position as the culmination of the classied lists in ch. 39. 1
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BCE)
(ANET 3, 477-78), where the scribe Hori humiliates a rival scribe by addressing a series of ironical questions, and challenges him on knowledge of details of scribal expertise and knowledge. A feature of this text is the challenge couched in the imperative as well as in the interrogative, as in Job 40.10-14: Pray deck yourself with pride and exaltation, And put on glory and splendour! Pour out your overowing anger And lay low every haughty man you see. If you see any proud man abase him, Pull down the wicked from their place; Hide them in the dust together, Imprison their persons on the lowly ground; And I will render you praise That your right hand has wrought deliverance for you.
The use of the challenge in the imperative, along with the ironical question in the Egyptian sapiential prototype in Papyrus Anastasi I and the extension in the Onomasticon of Amenemope from the world of nature to society, might be cited as a strong argument for the view that in Job there is but a single Divine Declaration and not, as in the extant text, two speeches. Apart from the formal afnity of the Divine Declaration in Job with the Egyptian prototypes there is common to both Hebrew and Egyptian texts the interest in the Divine Order in nature and society (Egyptian ma’at and Hebrew Ñeqh or mišpÓ; see above, pp. 5-7), which the sufferings of the innocent have brought into question. God’s government (mišpÓ), a consequence of his sovereignty, was traditionally the theme of the Hymn of Praise in the liturgy of the New Year festival in Israel with its Canaanite prototype reected in the Baal Myth of Ras Shamra. Thus the statement of God’s activity in creation is impregnated with Canaanite mythology, especially in 38.4-11 which refers to God’s triumph over Chaos, represented by the sea (38.8-11). Compare the Ras Shamra text Gordon UT 68, which was a prelude to the establishment of Baal as King and the imposition of his government in nature. The total effect of the divine address, then, is that of the traditional Hymn of Praise. Thus the author of the Book of Job moved easily through the wide range of ‘Hebrew life and literature’.17 Preoccupied with his main moral problem, he was too skilful a teacher and a poet to present a colourless philosophic discussion, but introduced a rich variety of language, gures and literary forms, which enlivened his argument and extended the scope of his message beyond the schools of the sages to the whole of the life of his people.
17. The use and adaptation of those literary forms with their specic signicance in the tradition of Israel is a strong indication that the Book of Job was intended for a Jewish audience and not, as Tur-Sinai suggests (1957: xxvii; 2nd edn 1967: xxxvii), to convince the Gentiles in Mesopotamia. 1
Chapter 6 THE COMPOSITION OF THE BOOK OF JOB
The Narrative Framework Having discussed the possibility of a popular version of the ordeal of an innocent sufferer and his tenacious endurance in faith, which possibly developed from such a text as we have noticed in Mesopotamia, which is actually attested at Ras Shamra in the fourteenth century BCE (see above, p. 18), we have argued for a didactic version in rhythmic narrative prose in Israel in the early monarchy (see above, p. 18). The tradition survives in the Prologue and Epilogue, with the editor’s adaptation to theological conceptions in Judaism in the fth century BCE. This serves the author as a basis for his more mature sapiential work in the intervening Dialogue and its sequel in Job’s apologia pro vita sua (ch. 29), his plaint (ch. 30) and his oath of purgation (ch. 31), the Divine Declaration (38.1–40.14), and Job’s submission (40.3-5; 42.2-6). In the Epilogue it serves also as a counterpoise to the very sharp criticism of the orthodox teaching of the sages of Israel in Proverbs and Wisdom Psalms expressed in the addresses of Job’s friends in the Dialogue, as the nal statement, or addendum, in Ecclesiastes (12.13f.) counterbalances the work of ‘the gentle cynic’. Job’s Curse on the Day of his Birth Before the Dialogue proper (chs. 4–27),1 ch. 3 takes up the suggestion of Job’s wife in the Prologue to ‘curse God and die!’ (2.9). Job does not succumb to this temptation, but in cursing the day of his birth and the futility of a life exposed to unremitting suffering, he seriously questions God’s Order, a recurrent theme of the Dialogue. This chapter then serves as a bridge between the Prologue and the Dialogue. The Dialogue The Dialogue in the MT is limited to chs. 4–27, though we will question what has been generally regarded as a debate in three rounds of addresses and 1. Fohrer (1989: 34) treats this chapter as part of the Dialogue. 1
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responses from each of the four speakers in which Zophar’s expected third address is wanting or wrongly attributed to Job (see below, pp. 59ff.). There is no question about the rst two cycles of the Dialogue, which we may tabulate: First Cycle (chs. 4–14) 4–5 6–7 8 9–10 11 12–13 14
Eliphaz’s remonstrance to Job’s curse (4.2–5.7) and encouragement (5.8-27) Job’s response Bildad’s expostulation (8.2-19) and encouragement (8.20-27) Job’s response Zophar’s expostulation (11.2-12) and encouragement (11.13-20) Job’s response (12.2–13.19) and direct appeal to God (13.20-27) Job’s direct address to God continued, ending the rst cycle of the Dialogue
Second Cycle (chs. 15–21) 15 16–17
18 19 20 21
Eliphaz’s expostulation Job’s response, emphasizing his sufferings in the language and imagery of the Plaint of the Sufferer (16.6-17; 17.1-2, 6-8, 11-16), with a plea for direct confrontation with God (16.18-20), direct appeal to God (17.3.4) and nal statement of his integrity (17.9) Bildad’s expostulation Job’s response Zophar’s expostulation Job’s response
Conclusion of the Dialogue (chs. 22–27) 22
23; 24.1-12
25; 26.5-14
27
Eliphaz’s expostulation and arraignment of Job (22.5-8) in anticipation of Job’s apologia (ch. 29) and oath of purgation (ch. 31), with encouragement to come to terms with God and be restored to favour (22.21-30) Job’s response, amplied by a wisdom poem on the conduct of the wicked (24.13-17), with possible interpolation of a Wisdom poem on their eventual retribution (24.18-25) Hymn of Praise to God transcendent (ch. 25 attributed, perhaps secondarily, to Bildad), secondarily introduced by 26.2-4, secondarily attributed to Job Job’s nal dismissal of his friends’ case, with an oath of purgation (27.2-6) and elaboration of the consequences to him of perjury (27.7ff.)
With this the Dialogue ends 29–31
1
Job’s Oath of Purgation and Prelude Job’s apologia, with its social potential (ch. 29) Job’s Plaint, implying the impairing of that potential (ch. 30) Job’s Oath of Purgation (ch. 31); this is at once a response to Eliphaz’s particular accusations in 22.5-8 and a prelude to the Divine Declaration
58 38.1–39.30; 40.25-30 (EVV 1-6); 40.7-14 40.3-5; 42.1-6 42.7-11
6. The Composition of the Book of Job The Divine Declaration
Job’s Submission Epilogue
Interpolations 24.13-17 24.18-25 25.2-6; 26.5-14 28 32–37 40.15-24 (EVV 41.7-11) 41.4-26 (EVV 41.12-34) 42.12ff.
Wisdom poem on nocturnal criminals Wisdom poem on the eventual retribution of the wicked Hymn of Praise to God Transcendent Sapiential poem on Wisdom Elihu addendum, addressed to the arguments of Job and his friends, culminating in Hymn of Praise to the Divine Creator (36.26–37.12) Poem on Behemoth, the Hippopotamus Poem on Leviathan, the Crocodile, secondarily prefaced by 40.25-30 (EVV 41.1-6) Midrashic Expansion
The Dialogue The Dialogue proper opens with Eliphaz’s response with mild yet rm censure of Job’s impassioned reaction to his suffering. He urges the current doctrine of the sages that suffering implied sin, which he advises Job accept, and by due contrition to return to the divine favour. From this point the Dialogue proceeds with addresses to the same effect by the three friends, with diminution of the element of encouragement which marks the end of the addresses by Eliphaz (5.8-27), Bildad (8.20-22) and Zophar (11.13-20) in the rst cycle of the Dialogue and the intensication of their insistence on the theme of the invariable connection of sin and suffering, which Job refuses to admit in his case, becoming more and more vehement in his protestation throughout the rst cycle of the Dialogue. The intensity of Job’s response to his friends is marked by direct address to God (7.7-21; 10.2-22; 13.20-29), and in the nal colourful soliloquy on the mortality of humanity in ch. 14 (vv. 2-6, 15-17), which ends the rst cycle of the Dialogue. Here also emerges Job’s appeal to God to state the charges against him (10.2) that might explain and justify his afiction, with an urgent appeal for confrontation with God and a fair chance to reply to actual charges (13.20-23). In the second round of the Dialogue (chs. 15–21) the friends intensify their censure of Job for opposing their arguments and the tradition which emphasized the mutual relevance of suffering and sin to his resentment directed to God and his daring demand for a confrontation. Their theme is sustained by what traditional Wisdom taught of the ultimate end of the wicked in striking gures (15.17-35, Eliphaz; 18.5-21, Bildad; 20.5-29, Zophar) with the added 1
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notice that even in the heyday of the wicked, retribution is anticipated by the hazards of their conduct: ‘the wicked are racked by anxiety all their days’ (15.20; 18.11-12). To Eliphaz, Job replies in the style and gure of the Plaint of the Sufferer (16.8-17; 17) and similarly to Bildad (19.11-20), emphasizing the alienation of his friends (16.8–17.5), with particular reference to Eliphaz and his colleagues (16.7; 19.2-6), which leaves him but the prospect of vindication before a divine tribunal (16.18-22; 19.25-27). To Zophar’s declaration on the downfall of the prosperous wicked (ch. 20), and generally to the friends’ arguments in support of the theodicy, Job concludes the second cycle of the Dialogue by elaborating the ourishing of the wicked without retribution, culminating in an honoured burial and incidentally exploding what Bildad has claimed as the universal validity of well-worn proverbs (18.5ff.). We consider it questionable that the author conceived a third cycle of the Dialogue corresponding to the rst two. Volz (1911: 66ff.) long ago expressed this doubt. It is not to be denied that sentiments attributed to Job in the MT are more characteristic of the views already expressed by the friends and this has suggested disruption of the text.2 Buhl considered that chs. 25–28 is a collection of short passages of varying origin adapted to the author’s work secondarily with the intention of depicting Job as eventually conforming to the orthodox view of the theodicy which he has so sharply criticized (Buhl 1925). This view has been revived with modication by Snaith, who proposes that the section consists of distinct fragments not indeed of various origin but possibly written by the author himself, though never quite integrated with the Dialogue.3 Westermann has developed the thesis of Volz. Starting from the assumption that a third round of the Dialogue contains only one speech of Eliphaz’s and none of Bildad and Zophar, closing with Job’s statement in ch. 23, Westermann proposes that chs. 24–27 consist of fragments comprising parts of earlier speeches and later additions which have not been fully integrated into the book (Westermann 1956: 102-104). Thus he would associate 24.1-17, on the instances of oppression unchecked by God, with Job’s earlier statements on this subject, and would associate 24.18-21, on the condign end of the wicked, with one of the friends’ earlier statements. Again 24.5-8, 10-11, describing the wretchedness of the oppressed, and 24.13-17, a series of vignettes classifying malefactors hostile to the light in the tradition of the listing of manifestations of a common principle in sapiential literature (e.g. Prov. 10.15f., 18f., 21-23,
2. Sentiments attributed to Job in the MT more characteristic of the views already expressed by his friends have suggested the disruption of the text (so Tournay 1957; Pfeiffer 1953: 171; inter alios). 3. According to Snaith (1968: 61-63), ‘the most probable solution to the literary problem of cc. 24-26 is that in these chapters we have the further speculations of the author himself concerning the whole problem of God in his heaven and man on the earth, and that either he began to t these ideas into his scheme, but died before he proceeded very far, or found them too difcult, if not impossible, to t into his scheme, and gave up’. 1
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24-28, 29-31), may be excerpts from some sapiential source listed for incorporation into the Book of Job but never quite integrated with it.4 Westermann gets over the difculty of the exceptionally short statement attributed to Bildad in ch. 25 in the form of a Hymn of Praise to the majesty and righteousness of God by assuming that, with 26.5-14 in the same tenor, it belongs to Bildad’s statement in ch. 8, an arrangement which Volz had already proposed (1911: 34). This is feasible insofar as it might explain Job’s riposte to the citation of a Hymn of Praise to God as sustainer of creation in 9.5-10 and the passage on God’s sublime indifference to Job’s outraged innocence in 9.11-24. Westermann further proposes that 26.1-4 and its heading was the introduction to Job’s statement in ch. 9 which lacks the customary sapiential introduction. In ch. 27 he takes vv. 2-6, in which adjuration predominates, as probably the introduction to Job’s oath of purgation in ch. 31, and proposes that 27.8-10, 13-25, which is counter to Job’s declarations hitherto, as the end of Zophar’s statement in ch. 11, while 27.11-12, which is in the characteristic style of the introduction to statements of the disputants, is, Westermann suggests, the introduction to Elihu’s speech in ch. 32 or to the poem on Wisdom in ch. 28. Fohrer also would nd disruption of any dialogue in chs. 24–27 by displacement of text, adjustment and insertion (1989: 34-36), particularly of independent poems from the Wisdom tradition. In what he regards as the third cycle of the Dialogue (chs. 21–27), though incomplete, he admits Job’s statement in ch. 21 and Eliphaz’s statement in ch. 22 as original and in place. From the exceptionally short statement attributed to Job in ch. 23, Fohrer assumes that a longer statement was intended, indicated by the statement in 27.11 ‘I will teach you concerning the power of God’, a promise which is apparently not realized. He suggests that Job’s statement in ch. 23 and perhaps in 27.11 was possibly interrupted by the secondary insertion of Wisdom poems, four in ch. 24 (10.12, 22-23; 5-8; 13-17; and 18ff., with glosses and secondary expansion); a Hymn of Praise to the Creator, attributed in the MT to Bildad, probably secondarily, in ch. 25 and continued in 26.5-14, 26.2-4 and 27.2-6 as Job’s last statement in the Dialogue; and 27.7-10, 13-23 on the end of the wicked as a sapiential poem. While subject-matter in the various parts of chs. 22–27 might with considerable adjustment afford material for the reconstruction of a third cycle of dialogue involving all four disputants according to sentiments already associated with each, form-criticism, we would contend, indicates that this is unlikely. The xed points that must guide us are Eliphaz’s statement in ch. 22, the main point of which is his indictment of Job, alleging his failure to full the responsibilities of his prosperity and high standing. This directly anticipates, and is specically related to, Job’s great oath of purgation (ch. 31), 4. Volz 1911: 45; Fohrer (1989: 367, 370) resolves this chapter into four separate Wisdom poems, of which only the rst, vv. l-4, 10-12, 22-23, on his arrangement, represents Job’s view as in his statements in ch. 23. 1
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preceded by his prosperity and its benets to society (ch. 29), all of which have been lost in his ruin (ch. 30).This passage, taken in conjunction with ch. 29 is tantamount to an indictment of Job’s divine antagonist at law. The next stage is the divine response (38.2–39.30; 40.25-30 (EVV 41.1-6), and Job’s submission (40.4-5; 42.2-6). Between Eliphaz’s indictment (ch. 22) and chs. 29–31 is Job’s insistence on the justice of his case if only he could gain a hearing from God (23; 27.2-6) in the personal tone of dialectic and forensic idiom, which is proper to that context, where Job’s case rapidly approaches its climax in the divine confrontation. The intervening passages (24.1-25; 25.2-6 and 26.5-14) are markedly impersonal and of a different literary form. Chapter 24 as a whole is a sapiential poem, or, according to Fohrer, four sapiential poems on the cruelty of oppressors, and their eventual retribution; 25.2-6 is a Hymn or part of a Hymn of Praise to God transcendent, beyond the questioning of humanity, a mere worm (25.6); it is continued in 26.5-14 in the theme of God’s sovereignty in creation, which the poet describes as ‘but the outskirts of his ways’, of which humans apprehended only ‘a whisper’. 27.7-10, 13-23 is a sapiential poem on the miserable end of the sinner, which, however, we consider that the author adapted as imprecation to Job’s oath in 27.2-6 in his nal dismissal of his friends. And nally, to support the view that between ch. 22 and chs. 29–31 there has been substantial interpolation of secondary matter, is the poem on Wisdom (ch. 28), which is generally taken as independent, and the Elihu addendum (chs. 32–37). Assuming the secondary nature of those poetic passages in the Dialogue, we may ask what prompted their inclusion between 22; 23; 26.1-4; 27.1-6, 11-12. In ch. 24 the detailed list of abuses of power amplify Eliphaz’s allegation of Job’s sins of omission and failure to full his responsibilities. In the same context the passage on nocturnal criminals, surely the citation of a sapiential categorization, may be prompted by Eliphaz’s imputation to Job of the question, ‘What does God know?’ (22.14). The hymnic statement ascribed to Bildad (25.2-6), setting the question of human justication before God in the context of his transcendent might, obviously relates to Job’s persistent assertion of innocence and condence of acquittal if only he had a fair hearing. This is the adaptation to Job’s case of a Hymn of Praise continued in 26.5-14, as is indicated by the assertion of God’s sovereignty ‘on high’ (25.2) and in the underworld (26.5f.), and is an instance of citation in extenso5 which recurs in such passages cited to reinforce dialectic arguments throughout the Dialogue. The ascription of ch. 25 to Bildad in the MT may reect the secondary effort to construct a full-scale third cycle of the Dialogue comparable to the rst two. 26.2-4, which we consider redactionally 5. Tur-Sinai (1957: liiif.) duly notes this citation in extenso, which he explains as intended to certify the citation of a certain sentiment or sentence as coming from an authoritative source and not simply an expression of the author’s personal opinion. 1
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6. The Composition of the Book of Job
ascribed to Job, probably belongs to a tentative third address by Bildad reecting the introduction to Eliphaz’s rst address (4.3ff.). With the admission of a possible third statement of Bildad, though tentative, however, we would not see in 27.7-10, 13-23 a third statement of Zophar, whose sentiments it admittedly expresses though it does seem to be a Wisdom poem, as Fohrer maintains, but, we consider, not independent and incorporated by a redactor endeavouring to construct a third cycle of the Dialogue, where Job wishes upon his antagonists in the Dialogue the fate of the wicked, the theme of the poem quoted. We regard it as belonging to Job’s adjuration in 27.2-6. We propose a form-critical approach to the problem of ch. 27 in favour of the whole in the order of MT as the statement of Job as the heading states. The statement asserting his innocence is in the form of an oath (vv. 2-6); what follows is a Wisdom poem adapted by the author as an imprecation. In his strenuous protestation of his innocence Job includes in his imprecation ‘his enemy’, that is any who is alienated from him on the assumption that the sufferer is guilty and alienated from God, including by implication his friends. In this and what follows we should nd a formal afnity with the curse on those opposed to the sufferer in the Plaint of the Sufferer (e.g. Pss. 35.26; 55.16, 24 [EVV 15, 23]; 58.7-10 [EVV 6-9]; 59.11-14 [EVV 10-13]; 69.23-29 [EVV 22-28]; 139.19-22). In pursuance of the theme of ‘the fate of the wicked’, which he wishes upon his antagonists (27.7-10), the author introduces a sapiential poem on the retribution of the wicked (vv. 13-23). This is introduced by an address to the friends, whom Job undertakes to teach the ‘purpose of the Almighty (vv. 11f.). What follows seems at rst sight nothing new to the friends. But in the mouth of Job, who had dissociated himself from their conclusion from his suffering to his guilt and their elaboration ad nauseam of the fate of the wicked under the divine economy, it was calculated to surprise, and indeed shock, them. We consider it in effect an elaboration of Job’s imprecation not only on his antagonists but on himself if guilty of perjury in his oath in vv. 2-6. With this oath of purgation Job terminates his case with his friends. In thus dismissing them he uses their own theme of the fate of the wicked, ‘which they themselves have seen’ (v. 12a), but in a much less impersonal and even supercial way (‘Why then this empty vapouring?’), holding himself liable to the same fate if he is perjuring himself. Job’s Great Oath of Purgation and Prelude Job’s apologia (ch. 29) is an effective reply to his arraignment by Eliphaz and is complementary to his oath of purgation (ch. 31). The solemn oath with its imprecations is his preparation for his nal confrontation with God for which he has been continuously pressing in the Dialogue. He has been directing his 1
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case progressively from his friends to God and now, having dismissed them in his sworn statement in ch. 27, he makes his nal appeal to the divine tribunal. This demands response from God either in condemnation or acquittal. The prelude, moreover, in the glowing picture of the social benets of the divine favour which Job had enjoyed and shared (ch. 29) and of the great social potential crippled by the suffering he endured (ch. 30) is in itself a case against God who had permitted this situation to develop. On this account the divine response is surely imperative. The Divine Declaration The Divine Declaration, which we take as a unity (38.1-39; 40.25-30 [EVV 41.1-6; 40.2, 6-14]), with displacement of 40.25-30 (EVV 41.1-6) on Leviathan (the crocodile) and Job’s submission in 40.4-5 from before 42.2-6, with the poems on Behemoth, the hippopotamus, (40.15-24, 31-32; 41.1-3) and Leviathan (41.4-26 [EVV 12-34]) as a later addition, has been rejected by some as part of the original Book of Job.6 Sufce it to say that the narrative source of the Book in 42.7 implies a Divine Declaration. In the context of the author’s version this was demanded by Job’s challenge in his oath of purgation and its prelude. On the analogy of the theophany and oracle in the Plaint of the Sufferer, in the form of which Job’s hard case is so often presented, such a Divine Declaration is expected, as also in the Mesopotamian texts on the same subject which we have noticed (see above, p. 9). The answer is not a formal acquittal in the legal tradition, as the source in the epilogue implies, nor formally assurance as in the Plaint of the Sufferer. In the developed work of the author of Job it relates to the Order in nature and society for which Job’s friends have contended against Job’s sharp criticism and indeed parody (ch. 12) with relation to his own case. Thus it takes the form of a magnicent statement of Divine Omnipotence and Wisdom in creation beyond human control or comprehension (ch. 38) and of Divine Providence for the wild creatures apart from human control or convenience (ch. 39). However, this statement in itself, though properly emphasizing that humans are not the measure of the universe so that they may call God’s economy in question, is not so obviously related to the human predicament in the Dialogue, and so called for the challenge to Job to match God in the effective control of the social Order (40.2, 6-14). Thus, in the author’s development of his source, we would admit the Divine Declaration, as we have delimited it, in its universal scope. Less would not have been expected of God in reply to Job’s contention in the Dialogue; nor would we expect less of the poet in such a monumental work. Moreover, while we cannot ignore the rebuke to human presumption to criticize God’s economy despite their limited knowledge and experience, we cannot agree 6. E.g. Studer 1875; Staples 1925: 11f.; Rankin 1936: 93; Irwin 1937: 45ff. 1
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with Cornill’s opinion that the Divine Declaration was savagely ironical.7 The irony, which is not to be mistaken, was more kindly, ‘the expression of a concealed severity and calm superiority’ and ‘the effective and benevolent incisiveness of a higher insight’, according to Ewald (1882: 294). It is at the same time an encouragement to mortals in citing the many instances of God’s daily providence besides the spectacular evidence of his rule and Order expressed in the Hymn of Praise familiar in the history of Israel in the liturgy of the New Year festival (Westermann 1956: 91ff.). The question remains as to the extent of the Divine Declaration, apart from what we consider addenda, the poems on Behemoth (40.15-24, 31-32; 41.1-3) and Leviathan (41.4-26 [EVV 12-34]). The double introduction ‘And Yahweh answered Job out of the whirlwind’ (38.1 and 40.6), in both cases with the challenge ‘Brace yourself like a man and I will question you and you shall declare to me’ (38.3; 40.7), would seem to indicate two declarations8 or perhaps two versions which have been unskilfully fused. The double submission of Job in the MT (40.3-5 and 42.1-6) might indicate the same. The substance of 40.2, 6-14, however, stressing the limitations of Job in the moral Order, which more distinctly connects with the attitude of Job assumed in the Dialogue, might justify a repetition of the formal challenge to Job in 40.7, unless with Fohrer it is taken, like 40.1, after 38.1, as a redactional gloss. The assertion of God’s omnipotence in the moral Order, however, is the natural complement to the declaration of his power and providence in the natural Order, as well as being directly relevant to the debate in the Dialogue. We would therefore retain it as an integral part of a single Divine Declaration,9 whether we regard 40.7 as a fresh challenge to Job, to whose case 40.2, 6-14 is particularly relevant, or Fohrer is right in regarding it as a redactional gloss. Job’s Submission In the interest of a single Divine Declaration we would agree with Fohrer in assuming a single submission of Job, assuming the displacement of 40.4-5 from immediately before 42.2-6. 7. Quoted by Strahan 1914: 14. 8. So Le Fèvre 1949: 1081; Skehan 1964; Gordis 1965: 122f. 9. So Bickell, Budde, Duhm, Steuernagel, Sellin, Lods, Hölscher, Siegfried, Fullerton, Lindblom, Lévêque, Fohrer. Westermann regards the Divine Declaration as substantially one though formally divided. Others propose the omission of 38.1–39.30 (e.g. Kraeling 1938: 144). Eissfeldt (1965: 459) also nds 40.6-14, with Job’s reply in 42.1-6, more closely linked with the main theme of the Dialogue than anything else in the Divine Declaration; cf. K. Fullerton (1924), who rejected 40.3-4, presumably since God’s control of his order in nature in 38.1–40.2, to which Fullerton would conne the Divine Declaration along with 40.3-4, involves also his control of the moral Order. S.R. Driver and G.B. Gray (1921: 160) omit 40.6-14, a modication of Gray’s earlier view that both parts of the Divine Declaration were secondary (G.B. Gray 1913). 1
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Major Addenda The Poem on Wisdom Between the complex chs. 22–27 and Job’s oath of purgation and its prelude in chs. 29–31 stands the Poem on Wisdom (ch. 28). This has formal afnity with the sapiential tradition of instruction by question and answer (e.g. Prov. 23.29; Eccl. 8.1ff.; etc.), the question being a refrain,10 ‘As for Wisdom, whence comes she…?’ The answer is deliberately withheld by statements of inaccessibility by the most strenuous effort of humans and the inestimable value of Wisdom, which emphasizes the nal answer that God alone understands the way to Wisdom, his instrument in creation (cf. Prov. 8.23-31). In the present book it follows ch. 27, which is headed as a statement of Job, and being itself without a heading it has been taken as a continuation of Job’s statement (so Budde). But in the detached academic tradition, as distinct from the dramatic Dialogue with its heavy borrowing from forensic idiom, the Plaint of the Sufferer and the Hymn of Praise, to say nothing of Job’s agonized pleas to God, it is obviously sui generis and is suspect as a secondary insertion. This suspicion is conrmed by the fact that the statement that Wisdom is the property of God alone (and is unattainable to any human) would unduly anticipate the main point of the Divine Declaration.11 As a sober limitation to the condent claim of traditional Wisdom that Wisdom could be acquired according to the repeated exhortations in Proverbs, this passage would be admittedly a tting conclusion to the inadequate efforts of Job’s friends to explain the sufferings of the worthy man by the traditional doctrine of the theodicy, as well as an animadversion on Job’s negative and humanistic arguments. This evidently persuaded Westermann and Tournay that the passage belonged to the original conception of the book of Job (Westermann 1956: 107; Tournay 1957: 31), but in view of the interruptions to the dramatic movement of the work by the incorporation of wisdom poems and hymns of praise between chs. 23 and 29–31 we would regard ch. 28 as also redactional. It may be an insertion by one of the author’s circle, and we are prepared to admit that it was by the author himself, perhaps available to a later redactor.12 However tting the poem may have been as a conclusion to the Dialogue and as a corrective to the assurance of Job’s sapiential friends and of himself, 10. Fohrer suggests that the same question or a variation of it may have introduced the poems; so A. Weiser (1968: 198), J. Lindblom (1945: 79) and C. Kuhl (1953: l. 281) regard the introduction as the fragment displaced to 27.11. 11. M. Jastrow (1920: 136), C.J. Ball (1922: 8), P. Szczygiel (1931: 233), J. Lindblom (1945: 91) and N.H. Tur-Sinai (1957: 395) regard the poem as displaced from after the Divine Declaration, not as a comment on the inadequacy of the wisdom of Job’s friends in the Dialogue, but as a supplement to the Divine Declaration. 12. So Gordis 1965: 102. We hardly agree with Gordis, however, in his assessment of the poem as ‘probably a youthful effort’. 1
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its inclusion in this particular context, where the text has suffered disturbance, may have been through its association with other independent poems assembled for inclusion at some point or other in the Book of Job, and was perhaps specically suggested by the couplet in 27.11: I will teach you concerning the power of God, The purpose of the Almighty I will not hide.
The Elihu Passages Those passages (chs. 32–37), which intervene awkwardly to break the dramatic sequence between Job’s invocation of the immediate activity of God in his great oath of purgation (ch. 31) and the theophany and Divine Declaration (38.1ff.), are certainly an intrusion, and are so treated by practically all modern commentators, though a number have regarded them as integral to the book.13 There are certain very signicant features in the Elihu passages which suggest an origin independent of the rest of the Book of Job. Elihu is not mentioned among Job’s friends in the Prologue, the Epilogue or the Dialogue. Nor does Job reply to him as he does to his three friends, and in the Divine Declaration which immediately ensues at 38.1 it is to Job in his nal appeal in ch. 31 that God replies. The section is disproportionately long, a lecture or learned treatise rather than a round of argument or lively debate as in the statements of Job and his friends in the Dialogue, with their striking gures of speech.14 Elihu is not committed as Job and his friends, but theologically detached. A number of new words appear in Elihu’s statements which occur nowhere else in Job, and Wagner’s statistics show about half as many Aramaisms again than in the rest of Job excluding the Prologue and Epilogue (Wagner 1966: 139-43). It is often objected that the Elihu passages add nothing to the argument. That is true in so far as strict relevance to the main theme of Job is concerned, but Elihu has his insights, notably the disciplinary purpose of suffering, particularly in the case of the worthy man, as a preventative of spiritual pride (33.12-30). Much indeed of this section is a recapitulation of the arguments of Job and his friends, with specic citation of Job’s statements, but new points are made and new emphasis laid. The signicant contribution of the Elihu passages is the emphasis laid on the urgency of God’s grace beyond the anxiety or expectancy of humans (33.14ff.; 35.10) and on the attitude of praise to God for the signal tokens of his providence, which will leave humans no time for recrimination but will help them to adjust themselves to realities. But so far as Elihu’s arguments elicit no response from Job, and since his insistence 13. Cornill 1907: 426ff.; Wildeboer 1905: 380f., 382ff.; so also Van Hoonacker 1903; Pedersen 1926: 531; Humbert 1955; Peters 1928: 23-29; Szczygiel 1931: 23ff.; Dennefeldt 1939; Eerdmans 1939: 16f.; Dubarle 1946: 84ff.; Guillaume 1964b: 27-35. 14. This was already emphasized by E. Renan (1889: 37); cf. S. Mowinckel (1955: 313): ‘He has the whole discussion in his head and takes up particular propositions, partly in verbal citation, partly in contradicting them in the tone of a schoolmaster’. 1
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on God’s providential order in nature beyond the understanding of humanity is simply a statement of God’s own declaration,15 it must be said that, whatever fresh insights the Elihu passages present, they contribute nothing to the dialectic progress of the debate as such, but in the nature of commentary they must be regarded as intrusive. The fact remains, however, that Elihu seems less concerned to help Job to adjust himself to his situation and own his guilt and so nd pardon than with the raison d’être of suffering as an academic. Recognizing this, Rowley argues that since the reason for Job’s suffering is already known as a test of his piety, this concern of Elihu indicates the secondary nature of the passage. The unity of the Elihu passages has been questioned. Thus H.H. Nichols (1910–11) proposed that chs. 32–33, 34 and 35–37 were from different hands, a view which was developed by Jastrow, who distinguished four quite distinct compositions in the Elihu section,16 and W.A. Irwin (1937: 36ff.) who regarded chs. 32–33 as the original ending to the Book of Job according to a hand later than the author of the Dialogue and chs. 34–37 as later comments from sapiential tradition between c. 400 and 100 BCE. More recently Westermann maintained that the Elihu speeches are articially composed from an unnished draft of supplementary arguments to the Dialogue (1956: 109). This view was developed by D.N. Freedman, who concluded that the Elihu passages, already elaborated as several speeches in their present form, were composed by the author of the book of Job with the intention of re-organizing his work, a project which he gave up because it would have disrupted unduly the existing form of the Book. The theme of the conclusion of the Elihu passages, however, expressed in the Hymn of Praise (36.22ff.), was developed in the Divine Declaration, especially in ch. 38. The Elihu passages were then added subsequently in their present place by a later hand (Freedman 1968). But whether the material assembled according to Freedman was the work of the author of the Book rather than an independent supplement is a matter which seems to defy solution. In the view of the detached academic interest which we have noted in contrast to the more intense involvement of the speakers in the Dialogue we consider the latter explanation of the Elihu passages the more likely. It can well be imagined that the Book of Job became a favourite text in sapiential circles, and it is not unlikely that the Elihu section is a crystallization of theses from the Book of Job originally debated piecemeal in such circles, like the theses in Ecclesiastes. If this is so, we may expect considerable disagreement among critics as to the order in which the matter was composed in the Elihu speeches or the order in which it has been transmitted in the MT.
15. Lévêque concludes from Elihu’s verbal citations of Job’s statements that the author of the Elihu section had a written text of the Dialogue before him and that the challenge in interrogatory form on the subject of created nature in 37.15-20 is a conscious imitation of the Divine Declaration, which was included in this written text. 16. Jastrow 1920: 77ff.; so also Buttenwieser and Kraeling. 1
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The Passages on Behemoth and Leviathan Anyone who has experience of speaking or writing for effect knows the importance of making a decisive conclusion. Thus after the passage on the sovereignty of God and the limitations of Job in society, in direct reply to the problem of Job, the reversion to the theme of creatures in nature beyond human control in the long descriptive passages on Behemoth and Leviathan must surely make a rst impression of a later expansion.17 Considering the possible relevance of those passages, Westermann suggests that Behemoth and Leviathan are treated as historical forces hostile to God, as Egypt was depicted as tannîn, the monster of the Nile, possibly envisaged as the crocodile, in Ezek. 29.3.18 However, this is questionable. Leviathan in the eschatological passage in Isa. 27.1 and Rahab in Isa. 51.9, which Westermann cites, are rather the cosmic forces traditionally overcome by God in the establishment of his effective rule, the theme of the liturgy in the New Year festival in Mesopotamia and Canaan, where ltn (Hebrew liwyÓn) is known in the Ras Shamra texts with this signicance. The historication of this theme, as for instance in Ezek. 29.3, is secondary to the cosmic theme and a particularization of it. The description of Behemoth and Leviathan undoubtedly refer respectively to the hippopotamus and the crocodile, but the designation of the latter as ‘Leviathan’ is extraordinary since the Hebrew and Ugaritic traditions describe the monster as ‘serpent’ (naas/bÓn). Hence H.H. Schmidt has contended for mythological overtones in the passage on Leviathan19 which may claim the support of the LXX, which renders Leviathan as ho drak¿n. The same may be said for Behemoth, Egyptian p ’imw, the hippopotamus, which was the symbol of chaos ritually slain by the Pharaoh in the cult of Horus at Edfu.20 Thus the passages on Behemoth and Leviathan have recently been defended as authentic by a number of scholars on the grounds mainly that those two monstrous instances of destructive power beyond human control, with their undertones of the myth of the conict of cosmos and chaos, are a tting climax to the Divine Declaration that even the suffering of the innocent, the helplessness of humanity and the apparent inadequacy of human justice are under the
17. Dhorme, having defended the originality of those passages in his commentary (1928: lxiii-lxxv), rejected them as later accretions in La Bible (1959: cxxxii). Lévêque (1970: 502f.) rejects the passages mainly on stylistic grounds. Hertzberg, Kuhl and Kissane consider them as addenda. Others have regarded them as compositions of the author but inserted later by him (so Larcher 1957: 13) or by a later scribe (so Steuernagel 1953: 382). 18. Westermann (1956: 87) contends that Leviathan has this signicance in Isa. 27.1, like Rahab in Isa. 51.9; cf. Isa. 30.9, where the historical application of the mythological theme is more obvious. 19. Schmidt 1966: 183n. H. Gunkel also (1922: 41-49) regarded the signicance of Behemoth and Leviathan in Job as wholly mythical; so more recently Pope 1965 and Gibson 1985: 251ff. 20. Fohrer 1989: 523, citing T. Säve-Söderbergh 1953: 55f. 1
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divine control,21 or, as J.C.L. Gibson has contended (1985: 254ff.), that those sinister forces beyond human control continue to challenge the Order of God, who alone is able to hold them in control though they demand his constant effort and vigilance. However, if this were so it would surely have been stated more explicitly in those passages. There are signicant stylistic differences between those passages in 40.1524, 31-32; 41.1-3 (EVV 40.15-24; 41.7-11) and 41.4-26 (EVV 12-34) and the Divine Declaration in 38.1–39.30 and 40.25-30 (EVV 41.1-5) which militate against the original association of the two passages. The detailed and lengthy description of Behemoth and Leviathan is certainly far different from the artistic economy with which the works of God in nature are treated in 38.130–39.30; 40.25-30 (EVV 41.1-6), where signicant characteristics are noted selectively in the broadest outline. H. Richter has taken this discrepancy to be the design of the author, who permitted himself this latitude at the end of his account of the works of God (Richter 1950: 253). There are, however, other objections to the authenticity of those passages which are not so readily explained. The passage on Behemoth is not introduced by the interrogative as the rest of the natural phenomena except the passage on the ostrich (39.13-18), and that passage, to be sure, is suspect either as a secondary insertion or a fragment wanting an introduction, and is moreover noted in Origen’s Hexapla as lacking in the original LXX, being supplied from Theodotion’s translation.22 God is moreover referred to in 40.19 in the third person, which suggests a citation from a poem independent of the Divine Declaration, possibly drawn from a sapiential poem classifying and describing natural phenomena including the beasts. Thus we consider the passages on Behemoth and Leviathan, which we have delimited, addenda to the Divine Declaration which ended at 40.14. The passage on ‘Leviathan’ in 40.25-30 (EVV 41.1-6) is introduced and sustained like the rest of the passages on the beasts (except that on the ostrich) by questions, and like them emphasizes either the intractable nature of the beasts and/or the inability of humans to have any advantage from them. This indicates that it belongs to the original Divine Declaration, being displaced after the passage on Behemoth to provide an introduction to the passage on the crocodile (41.4-26 [EVV 12-34]).
21. Lods 1934: 514; Hertzberg 1950: 253; MacKenzie 1959 emphasizes the cosmic signicance of Behemoth and Leviathan as representing the historical forces inimical to the Order of God. 22. Dhorme (1928: 551) explained the omission of the passage in the LXX as owing to the difculty of translation and, we might add, to an imperfect text which was occasioned by difculties of vocabulary, with further complication by efforts to understand it. Lévêque (1970: 503) regards the passage on the ostrich and the horse (vv. 19-25) as original, though he regards the order of the passages as reversed by the redactor in order to associate the two because of the comparison in the passage on the ostrich with the speed of the horse (v. 18). 1
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The descriptive passages on Behemoth and Leviathan, as indicated by the name Behemoth (Egyptian p ’imw, ‘hippopotamus’) and the word-play on timš¿¤ and Egyptian ’ems, and Coptic ’ems (‘crocodile’) indicate the Egyptian provenance of the passage, which may be further indicated by the signicance of the hippopotamus in the myth and ritual of Edfu and by the reference to the crocodile as ‘king’, its signicance in Egyptian hieroglyphics.23 ‘Adjustments’ to the ‘Original Dialogue’ Within the Dialogue proper (chs. 4–27) there is considerable difference of opinion as to how much is original. As in any book of antiquity a number of expressions, glosses, and short commentaries on the text, usually fairly obvious and often quite prosaic in a poetic context, may be noticed, and the Dialogue is really not affected by their admission as secondary. The case is not quite so simple for a number of longer passages, which E. Bruston (1928: 297305) segregated as expressing generalities, thus, he claims, departing from the strict dialectic of the debate and from the particular case of Job. Those include hymns of praise (e.g. 5.9-16 from Eliphaz, 9.5-10 from Job on God in creation to emphasize his aloofness, and 12.13-25 from Job emphasizing rather the destructive aspect of God’s government in nature and in society) and didactic passages (e.g. 5.12-26 from Eliphaz). He segregates also a numerical cluster of statements of preservation in seven emergencies (cf. Prov. 30.15-31), with afnities also with prophetic blessing after pardon (11.13-19 from Zophar on the requital of the pious, 15.20-35 from Eliphaz, 18.5-21 from Bildad on the end of the wicked, a theme which is also found in the Plaint of the Sufferer, and 27.13-23, which is attributed to Job in chs. 24–27 on the same theme). He includes in addenda citation of popular aphorisms, for example 8.11-19 from Bildad and the Plaint of the sufferer in 19.7-20 from Job, which interrupts his complaint against God’s injustice and his friends’ misunderstanding (19.1-6) and his appeal to his friends’ sympathy and his statement that his case shall yet be heard (vv. 21-27). Here, however, the plaint emphasizing God’s hostility (19.8-12) and Job’s isolation in his trouble (vv. 13-20) obviously emphasizes Job’s statement of his case, and is therefore the author’s own citation. Even in the strictly dialectic passages the language and imagery reveal the author as a poet, and, as poet and sage, familiar with the whole range of his people’s literature. In view of his interest in the suffering of the innocent and the problem of the theodicy which it raised it is inconceivable that he should not have been steeped in the Plaint of the Sufferer, which was projected against the background of the Hymn of Praise on the government of God, (e.g. Ps. 89.6-15, 3952 [EVV 5-14, 38-51]). Again it is quite natural that illustrations of God’s order
23. Fohrer 1989: 531, citing Erman 1894: 180. 1
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in the homely aphorisms of didactic literature should have been cited to assure Job that human suffering was not fortuitous nor the effect of the caprice of an arbitrary divine tyrant, leaving humans with no hope or opportunity to prot from their experience. It was natural for Job’s friends to supplement their arguments with such citations, and indeed the book of Job would have been a singularly jéjune production without such passages. Thus reduced it would have an interest for the moral philosopher or theologian, but would have lacked the general appeal and arresting power that is the hallmark of a great piece of literature. Those who would divest the Dialogue in Job of such passages in the interests of strict dialectic ignore the fundamental principle that Lindblom so justly emphasized,24 that argument among Orientals does not depend merely on logic, but on the vehemence, persistence, emphasis and variation of expression with which it is presented, and the more pleasing the rhetorical style, choice of diction and imagery the stronger is the appeal of the argument. The passages on which Bruston animadverted might be ruled out of order in Western debate, but would be expected in the East. Even if they do interrupt the strict dialectic they are never unapt. They are in fact citations, and are noted as such in their dialectic context at 8.8-10; 12.12; 15.18f., which indicate that they are citations by the author of the denitive book and are not secondary. Had they been of the limited proportion of citations familiar in Western debate they would have been generally admitted; but Orientals, though they may cite by limited quotation and even by allusion, is also fond of citing at length as we have personally found frequently in discussion with Arabs, where the relish of a quotation from the Qur’an would often carry them far beyond the bounds of the strictly relevant. Baumgärtel likewise took exception to the Hymn of Praise, the didactic passages on the blessing of the righteous and the end of the wicked noted by Bruston, and other such passages in the Dialogue (Baumgärtel 1933: 159f.). He reduces (pp. 160ff.) the original Dialogue to one round of debate, 4.1–5.7, 27 (Eliphaz); 6.1-30 (Job); 8.1-11, 20-22 (Bildad); 9.1-3, 11-23, 32-35 (Job); 11.1-5, 10-20 (Zophar) and 13.1-9 (Job) with a monologue from Job (16.6-9, 12-17, 18-21; 23.2-7, 10-17; 29). This, Baumgärtel’s ‘original dialogue’, he considered to be developed from an original monologue in the style of the Plaint of the Sufferer like Psalm 73, which may be conjectured in 17.2-20; 21.7-18; 22.12-16; 24.2-4, 9, 12, itself to be developed in a further compilation in three rounds of debate using the ‘original dialogue’ for the rst round and the ‘original monologue’ for the second and third rounds. It was at this point, according to Baumgärtel, that the scope of the work, which, like that of the Plaint of the Sufferer, concerned the sufferer’s relationship to God, developed
24. Lindblom 1945: 40ff. Tur-Sinai (1957: liiif.) admits such citation in extenso, which he explains as intended to certify the citation of a certain sentiment or as coming from an authoritative source and not simply an expression of the author’s personal opinion. 1
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more as a sapiential work on the more general question of the theodicy. He rightly emphasized the predominance of the theme of the end of the wicked, though delayed, in the second round of the debate in the present form of the book. The original work, however, was considerably modied in Baumgärtel’s estimation, especially in his third round of the debate, so that it can no longer be recognized. He regarded this compilation as further modied by the inclusion of chs. 28–31. Over and above, the passages from hymns of praise, plaints and didactic poems, which Baumgärtel would segregate as secondary, have to be accommodated, but at what stage he is uncertain. In his view we must further reckon with displacements, intentional or unintentional, losses of text, amplications, omissions, and nally with revision by a redactor, who brought in insertions for the sake of conformity with the rest of the Dialogue, including the divine names ’l and ’ elôah in parallel with šadday, which we should rather consider only one of the various stylistic features that support a less complicated view where the passages in question are citations made by the author of the denitive Book himself. Baumgärtel distinguished between the statements both of Job and of his friends which were partly addressed to the personal and particular case of Job and partly to the general question of the government of God, the theodicy. The latter, he claims, interrupt the current of thought in the context, being expressed in different literary categories, the Hymn of Praise and didactic poetry or dicta. Such passages fall signicantly at the end of statements of the friends, who have already made their point in the debate on the specic subject of Job’s complaint and, it is claimed, add nothing to the argument. Besides such passages, Baumgärtel under similar considerations segregated as secondary Job’s oath of purgation (ch. 31) excepting vv. 35 and 37, and 27.2-12, where Job protests his innocence (vv. 2-10) and undertakes to instruct his friends about God’s purpose (vv. 11f.), which he regards as part of the Dialogue in the author’s source which he modied in the denitive book. Baumgärtel’s whole argument for the secondary nature of the passages he notices is based on his excessively mechanical application of form criticism and the assumption that the Dialogue was conned to the consideration of the personal problem of Job. However, in a sapiential text, where the universal interest is emphasized by the international character of the disputants and by the generic names of God, it is most unlikely that Job’s case should not be considered in the wider context of the theodicy, the current interpretation of which the Book of Job challenged. The fact that the passages in question fall at the end of the friends’ statements need not mean that they are secondary insertions. This place is not only suitable for the insertion of secondary matter; it is even more so for apt citation as an appeal to higher authority in a literary work which gives evidence at every point that it is more than the report of an actual disputation of a particular case. In reply to the claim of the worthy sufferer that his case was not adequately met by the doctrine of the theodicy 1
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current in Judaism of the author’s time there was no better expression of this doctrine than the Hymn of Praise to the Creator and Sustainer of Order in nature and society and the didactic poem, and no stronger expression of the agony of Job alienated from God than the Plaint of the Sufferer. Such passages round out and clinch the arguments of Job’s friends, as is recognized by Kraeling, Westermann and Fohrer. Kraeling, to be sure, was hesitant about ascribing them to the author of the extant book either as his own work or citations from other sources or as anonymous compositions inserted by a redactor (Kraeling 1938: 29-94), but Westermann and Fohrer have no hesitation in admitting them as citations by the author, and Kuhl aptly cites the analogous citation of the Hymn of Praise in the doxologies in Amos and in Deutero-Isaiah as well as in the First Book of the Maccabees (Kuhl 1953: 287). In the Hymns of Praise in Job’s statements in 9.4-10 and 12.13-25, the regular theme of the Hymn of Praise, the omnipotence and benecence of God as creator and ruler, his majesty and government, is presented in an unusual light by the realism of the sufferer emphasizing rather the terrible and destructive aspects of the rule of God or, as in 9.4-10, his transcendence and aloofness from the predicament of the worthy sufferer. They thus clinch Job’s arguments against his friends by citations similar to their own in form but with quite a different and quite legitimate application in the criticism of orthodox doctrine. We may notice the same relationship to the didactic poem on the end of the wicked which rounds out Zophar’s last statement (20.5-28) in Job’s statement on the prosperity and peaceful end of the wicked in 21.7-26, which is too obviously a parody of the didactic poem to be from any hand but the author of the Book of Job. In view of the later adjustments in the interest of orthodoxy, notably in the Elihu addendum, it is unlikely that a redactor would have elaborated the trenchant parody of 20.5-28 and 21.7-26. Baumgärtel further notes the double nature of most of Job’s statements not only in respect of length but also of character. Besides Job’s long description of his sufferings in the style of the Plaint of the Sufferer, he turns from the address to his friends’ arguments to direct address to God (e.g. 7; 9.25-31; 10.2-27; 13.20-27; 14). Certain of such passages, like the hymns of praise and didactic passages in the statement of the friends, fall at the end of Job’s statements (e.g. 10.2-22; 13.20-27; 14), of which the rst and the last are not strictly related to the thought of what precedes. In 9.25-31, too, the direct address to God contrasts with the reference to God in the third person in 9.124, 32-35. But such passages could be rejected as secondary only on the assumption that the Book of Job was a severely academic work limited to strictly logical dialectic instead of the highly dramatic expression of the existential situation of the worthy sufferer who believes in what tradition has told him of the nature of a just God yet knows that what he suffers cannot be reconciled with traditional doctrine. The personal involvement of the author in this situation forces him to seek an answer in the presence of the living and 1
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beyond all traditional doctrine and the arguments of its representatives, and that nds expression in the direct address to God in the interjections of a soul in anguish. The edifying narrative of Job which Ezekiel (14.14, 20) knew was probably dominated by Job’s expression of faith and the maintenance of his integrity despite the counsels of despair of his associates, but in his delimitation of the Dialogue of the present Book by his drastic surgical operation Baumgärtel is open to Baumgartner’s criticism that his work is vitiated by petitio principis (Baumgartner 1951: 219). The sceptical aspect of the work before us is not the result of a second hand in the denitive Book of Job, as Baumgärtel contends, but characteristic of the author’s own work. Indeed the questioning of the condign signicance of the suffering of the worthy man may well have been expressed in some degree even in the author’s source, as it was expressed in the Mesopotamian texts on the same subject, one of which was known in Syria at Ugarit. Kraeling developed Baumgärtel’s thesis and carried it further. In the immediate source of the present work which he dates c. 800 BCE he assumes a dialogue where Job upheld his faith in divine justice and benecence despite all doubts cast by his friends. The Dialogue, he suggests, was rewritten with perhaps a more determined challenge to God from Job in condence of his innocence. At this point Kraeling regarded the passages of the Plaint of the Sufferer-type which admitted the sin of the sufferer (e.g. 7.1-10, 12-21; 9.2531; 10.1-22; 13.23-27) as accretions made to tone down Job’s challenge, a view which does not admit the possibility, indeed the probability, that the sin mentioned is hypothetical. With Job’s determined attack on the traditional doctrine of God’s order in society in ch. 21, which provokes Eliphaz’s charges in ch. 22, a sceptical note is introduced according to Kraeling (1938: 197) which appears again in ch. 24. Accordingly he took chs. 21–26 as part of a sceptical redaction. There was, however, he suggests, a nal orthodox adjustment, represented by the inclusion of 27.2-12, this having been drawn from a lost dialogue, the statement of the doctrine of retribution in 27.13-23, and the independent poem on wisdom in ch. 28. He suggests that the nal effort to counteract the scepticism which had crept into the Job tradition was the Divine Declaration and Job’s nal submission, and, in view of the nal divine acceptance of Job, chs. 29–31 were introduced, according to Kraeling, possibly from the ‘original dialogue’ as distinct from the ‘earlier dialogue’, that is Baumgärtel’s verdrängte Dialog. The whole was, he maintains, set in the framework of the narrative in chs. 1–20 and 42.10-17 from an earlier version of the Job tradition. We nd no reason to doubt that the cause célèbre of Job was much debated over a considerable period in sapiential circles among the Jews with varying emphasis, but we doubt Kraeling’s conclusion that the book, apart from the major intrusions which we have noted (see above, pp. 52, 66), was not the work of a single author, but ‘the nal harvest of a number of books’ about the 1
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ancient gure of Job (1938: 198). There seems no good reason why the artistic achievement of a great creative poet and thinker should be made to disappear in favour of such a complicated theory of adjustments and readjustments so radical as to present a new and independent work.25
25. Gordis (1965: 110) objects to the view of extensive adjustments in the interests of orthodoxy, stating that an offensive book would simply have been consigned to the geniza. The Book of Job, however, was exceptional insofar as it represented an old traditional work of orthodoxy which had been adapted by the author of the denitive Book in a much more mature critical work. In view of the original tradition which survived as the framework of the late sapiential work and of the divine approval of Job in the Epilogue there was no need to adjust the Dialogue as a corrective to the criticism of orthodoxy. 1
Chapter 7 TEXT AND VERSIONS
The extant authority for the Hebrew text of the OT is admittedly late, not indeed until the Aleppo Codex from the rst half of the tenth century CE. This represents the same textual tradition as the Leningrad Codex from the Ben Asher family of manuscripts, which is dated in 1008 CE. Variants in other manuscripts from the same textual tradition have been noted by Kennicott and de Rossi, but though those are extensive they are of relatively minor signicance, and in the Book of Job, where the MT raises many difculties and doubts, seldom of themselves help to recover the original text. Standardization in the MT was, evidently at least, well on course by the middle of the rst century CE on the evidence of such biblical portions as have survived at Qumran, such as the Book of Isaiah from Cave 1 (1QIsa), which contains variants though minor. Of two fragments of Samuel, however, from Cave 4, one (4QSama) mainly agrees with the MT, while the other (4QSamb) differs from the MT more widely, agreeing with the LXX (Cross 1956), where it varies from MT. Unfortunately too little of Job has survived to serve our purpose. However, the general situation indicates that, while the Masoretic tradition of Job must be respected, we must admit the possibility of variation of greater or less signicance, as indicated in 4QSamb and the fragmentary targum of Job (11QtargJob). In assessing the value of the LXX variants for the appraisal of MT Job we must consider the possibility of an early variant of the Hebrew text, as in 4QSamb. But our judgment must be modied owing to the known tendency of the Greek translators to adjust the text in accordance with Greek literary tradition, pruning long repetitive passages in the interest of logical argument, or adjustments in the interests of theological orthodoxy (e.g. 1.5; 5.18; 7.20; 9.4f.; 10.13; 12.6; 21.22; 22.2, 17; 23.15; 24.12; 27.2; 30.20-23; 31.35-37; 32.2; etc.). Older Greek versions are available, extant in Origen’s Hexapla (c. 240 CE), including the Hebrew text, Greek versions of Aquila, an Anatolian proselyte to Judaism (c. 130 CE), of Symmachus, possibly an Ebionite or Jewish sectary (c. 170 CE) and of Theodotion, a converted Jew (c. 200 CE). The last two, being from Jews, have their own value; that of Aquila, if somewhat inelegant and excessively literal, has by the same token a certain value for the recognition of the text he translated. 1
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The Latin Vulgate produced by Jerome in Bethlehem between 390 and 405 from Hebrew but with reference to the LXX and other Greek versions has signicance as a direct translation from Hebrew and because of Jerome’s local knowledge of the Semitic milieu through long residence in Palestine and his preoccupation with commentaries in the rest of the OT. The Syriac version, or Peshitta, is attested in the Codex Ambrosianus (sixth or seventh century CE). Produced as it was for a public in northern Syria and Mesopotamia of kindred language, thought-forms and ethos to the Jews, it has a signicant value for the assessment of the MT, and, especially in vocabulary, provides a key to the solution of many an outstanding problem in Job. The standard Aramaic version of Job in rabbinic Bibles is comparatively late in the rst half of the rst millennium CE. This, however, is of limited value as a clue to the reliability of the MT. As a development of oral rendering and exposition of Scripture, targums are an indirect rather than a direct witness to the original Hebrew text, and, with a fair amount of paraphrasing, they are generally fuller than the MT. Aiming at edication in their own day, they reect theological developments from the original text, the careful avoidance of anthropomorphism in statements about God and in attitudes and reactions natural to humans which the MT attributes to God, and many expressions of human contention with God, as throughout Job, which even formally imply anything other than God’s absolute transcendence and majesty are avoided, even when that involves considerable variation from the Hebrew Vorlage. Topical interests are also reected, and even in a sapiential work like Job references to the history of Israel are found which were not in the intention of the original. Thus for instance in 4.10, CE
The lion may roar, the roarer cry aloud, But the teeth of the great lions are done away,
the standard Targum equates the lions with Esau and Edom, like the ‘robbers’ in 12.6. In 5.5 ‘His harvest is eaten by the hungry’ is amplied by a specic reference to the Egyptians and Amalekites, a tradition possibly developed from the role of the Amalekites in the introduction to the Gideon cycle (Judg. 6.3f.). In 5.23, But with the waste stones you will make your pact, And the weeds of the eld will be brought into concord with you,1
it relates the stones to the stone tablets of the Law and the weeds, which it renders ‘beasts’, to the Canaanites. In 7.12, Am I Sea or Tannin That you set a guard over me?, 1. Suspecting eh in colon a as a homonym of eh (‘eld’) in colon b, the style of Job, we take it as cognate with Arab. sada(y) (‘forsaken, useless’) and ayyat as ‘weeds’, cognate with Arab. ayyun, which means both cultivated plants and weeds (Driver 1933: 44). See Commentary ad loc. 1
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the symbolic signicance of Sea and Tannin, the powers of Chaos in the classical conict resulting in the demonstration of the effective Kingship of God and the imposition of his government or order (mišpÓ) in its development in the argument of Job, is quite lost in the Targum owing to its preoccupation with the themes of the Pentateuch. Thus the Targum renders: Am I guilty like the Egyptians who for their guilt were bound to be sunk in the Reed Sea, or like Pharaoh who was drowned in the midst thereof for his sins?
Similar references to the episode at the Reed Sea are found in 14.11 and 26.13. Indeed in a quite neutral reference to the sudden end of the wicked (34.20) those are specied as Sodomites and Egyptians. Again the Targum may reect current postexilic tradition, as when the occasion of the heavenly court in the Prologue is specied as ‘the judgment day at the New Year’, reecting the tradition noted in Tosefta Rosh HashShanah that the New Year was the occasion when all were judged and the fate for the year settled. Similarly in Job’s curse on ‘his day’ (3.6b), Let it not be associated2 with the days of the year,
the Targum reads: Let it not be included in the good days of the year!
This evidently reects the observance of memorable days in Jewish history recorded in m. Taanith II.8 as days when mourning was forbidden (Dalman 1927: 1-3). Midrashic accretions to Scripture are also reected. Thus the Shebans in the Prologue (1.15) are specically associated with ‘the Queen of Zemargad’, a tradition possibly developed from the tradition of the Queen of Sheba of Solomon’s time. Job’s wife is actually named in the Targum to 2.9 as Dinah, and in 2.11 the disasters of Job and his family are specied as the blasting of his orchards, his wine turned to blood and his meat to living esh. In 32.2 Elihu is specied as a descendent of Abraham, and on 3.1, The small and the great are there, And the servant is free from his master,
the Targum is quite expansive: Jacob, who was called the Young, and Abraham, who was called the Aged, are there, and Isaac the servant of Yahweh who came out free from the place of sacrice from the grasp of his hand.
And 25.2, Dominion and fear are with him, He makes all well in/from his heights,
2. Reading yad with Sym, V, T, and S for MT yiadd (‘rejoice’). 1
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is amplied by a passage which depicts Michael at God’s right hand and Gabriel on his left. In such passages in the Targum, however, and in the case of the avoidance of anthropomorphisms, it is usually simple to detect the Masoretic text to which the adjustment or amplication is made. There is a reference to a targum of Job before the middle of the rst century CE (b. Shab. 115a).3 The use of an Aramaic targum on Job at this early date is conrmed by the Qumran targum (11QtargJob), which antedates the abandonment of the settlement c. 68 CE, and has been dated by the editors on palaeographic grounds and by comparison of grammatical forms in the Aramaic parts of Daniel as composed in the latter half of the second century (van der Ploeg and van der Woude 1971: 2f.). On this dating 11QtargJob must be as old as, if not older than, the LXX on Job, since the Greek translation of the Law itself was effected c. 250 BCE. This new text is fragmentary though fairly substantial, containing wholly or partly the following sections of Job: 17.14–18.4; 19.11-19; 19.29–20.6; 21.210, 20-27; 22.3-9, 16-22; 24.12-17; 24.24–26.2; 26.10–27.4; 27.11-20; 28.413, 20-28; 29.7-16; 29.24–30.4; 30.13-20; 30.25–31.1; 31.8-16, 26-32; 31.40– 32.3; 32.10-17; 33.6-16, 24-32; 34.6-17, 24-34; 35.6-15; 36.7-16, 23-33; 37.10-19; 38.3-13, 23-34; 39.1-11, 20-29; 40.5-14, 23-31; 41.7-17; 41.25– 42.6; 42.9-11. Fragmentary as it is, giving in the earlier parts only half couplets, but towards the end whole couplets, for instance 33.10-17 and particularly from 37 to 42.11, it is possible to assess the nature and value of the targum and its witness to the MT and to the LXX. By comparison with the ofcial Targum, 11QtargJob is much more of a direct translation, without specic references to the history or traditions of Israel, current custom or Midrashic expansion, though it too has the tendency to avoid anthropomorphism and anthropopathism in statements about God and in demythologizing mythological references. Thus for instance in 38.7, where MT reads, When the morning stars cheered together And all the divine beings shouted acclaim,
11QtargJob renders more soberly, When the morning stars shone all together, And all the angels of God shouted acclaim,
3. This relates that R. Gamaliel, the master of St Paul, who was so ill-pleased with a targum of Job that he ordered a workman who was carrying out some repairs to build it into a wall. This may reect his rejection of the targum as occasionally differing from the Hebrew Vorlage or a prejudice against Job which was not yet admitted to the same status as the Law and the Prophets, particularly in view of Job’s trenchant criticism of current orthodoxy. 1
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to which we may compare the LXX: When the stars were brought into being, And my angels praised me with a loud voice.
In aiming at a direct translation for the most part 11QtargJob represents rather the translation and exegesis which emerges as that of the Jewish community of Alexandria in the LXX. It has in fact peculiar relevance to the debate on the relation of the MT to the LXX and particularly the LXX before Origen’s supplementation from Theodotion.4 The signicance of 11QtargJob for the appraisal of LXX and the relation of both to the MT or to a variant Hebrew Vorlage may be now illustrated in detail at some length, to which the reader is referred in the textual notes to our translation and in our commentary. In MT 17.16, baddê še’ôl tranh ’im-yaa ‘al-‘pr naÓ (read naÓ), the problematic baddê (‘bars’) is called into question by LXX met’ emou and by 11QtargJob h‘my (‘with me’), which respectively understand and express the interrogative particle, which is omitted in MT. G.B. Gray had already conjectured ha‘immî (‘with me?’). LXX and the Qumran targum may have read this in a Vorlage different from MT, which in turn read beyî or bîî, which is used in this form in Phoenician inscriptions meaning ‘with me’ as in Ass. ’ina idi (lit. ‘by my hand’) ‘beside me’, which is cited by Dhorme. This modication of MT baddê may be retained on the principle lectio difcilior potior, especially as it gives the obvious sense of the context which both versions support and is graphically feasible as the original of MT baddê. The interrogative particle ha, included in 11QtargJob, was either omitted by haplography after the nal h of the preceding word or was ’im as evidently read by LXX and taken to mean ‘or’ (eti). In 18.2 MT ‘a-’nh teîmûn qinÑê lemillîn the singular of the verb is read by LXX and the Qumran targum, which is appropriate in view of Bildad’s address to Job in vv. 4ff. We suggest the dittograph of n with corruption to w, the verb being the energic imperfect in scriptio defectiva. The phrase qinÑê lemillîn is suspect. qnÑ would be a hapax legomenon in the OT though it might be a cognate of Ass. qinÑu (‘fetter’) as proposed by Zimmern (so Gesenius– Buhl, Friedrich Delitzsch, Dhorme, Hölscher, Kissane, Stevenson, Weiser, Terrien); cf. Gordis and Pope, who propose, with less probability, Arab. qanaÑa (‘to hunt’), rendering respectively ‘go hunting for words’ and ‘set word-snares’. The construct before the noun with the proposition is indeed attested in the OT before le and be, for example 24.5, mešaharê laÓÓreS and the more frequent y¿šeê b’reÑ (GKC, §130a), but is still suspect. LXX and 4. Theodotion about the end of the second century BCE is thought to have revised one of the current Greek translations, either the immediate predecessor of LXX (so A. Rahlfs) or another (so P. Kahle), such as is exemplied by the Greek fragments of the Prophets and Writings, but not Job, from the Wadi Murabba‘at, which have been dated on palaeographic evidence not later than the middle of the rst century BCE. 1
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11QtargJob agree in rendering ‘stop (speaking)’, mechri ti ou paus (LXX) and twy swp (11QtargJob). Therefore both, and the latter verbally, indicate a reading qÑ in the Vorlage, so understood by Ball and by Fohrer, who, however, retains the construct plural ending. We suggest that qinÑê may be a scribal corruption of qÑ through dittography of n before Ñ in the text represented the linear script of the sixth to the second century BCE.5 And that y of qinÑê is the corruption of an original in the same script, to be read before lmlyn, thus qs ’el-millîn. In MT 18.3, maddûa‘ nešanû kabbehmh niÓmînû be‘ênêkem, LXX omits the verb in colon a and renders niÓmînû or a variant in the Vorlage as ‘we are silent’. In a fragmentary passage 11QtargJob indicates what this variant may have been, reading lm’ (lb) ‘yr’ dmyn (‘Why are we likened to brutes?’). This gives the required three beats in colon b, necessitating the third beat that MT requires in the verb omitted in LXX. dmyn of the Qumran targum indicates that LXX may have read damm¿nû (‘we were silent’) or nedamm¿nû (‘we were put to silence’) in the Vorlage. MT niÓmînû, however, may be a scribal corruption of neÓamm¿nû, the Niphal perfect of Ómam, unattested in the OT, but cognate with Syr. Ómam (‘to be dull, obtuse’), which occurs in this sense in Middle Hebrew. Both versions may have attempted to render the rare verb Ómam by the general sense through the assonance (but not phonetic correspondence) of Óm and dm. The parallelism with nešanû suggests that, failing neÓamm¿nû in the Vorlage, 11QtargJob dmynw is a more likely clue to nimînu (‘we are likened to’) in the Vorlage, which, in fact, was conjectured by Bickell, Beer and G.B. Gray. It is signicant that neither version supports the reading of the verb in MT as Óm (‘unclean’), of which Fohrer takes MT Ómh as a byform. In MT 19.12, yaa y¿’û geûyw wayys¿llû (read weys¿llû) ‘lay darkm wayyaanû (read weyaanû) sî le’oholî (‘his troops come on in mass; they raise their ramp against me; they camp round my tent’), for geûyw LXX reads peiratria (‘raiding parties’) and l1QtargJob tpwhy (‘his robbers’). The context, with reference to a siege-ramp, supports MT geûyw rather than ‘robbers’. LXX peiratrion rendering MT geû in Gen. 49.19 supports MT geûyw. In the MT version of 19.17, rûî zrh le’ištî (‘my breath is repugnant to my wife’), LXX reads ‘I supplicate my wife’ and 11QtargJob ‘I have bowed my spirit before my wife’, both agreeing in general sense. They seem to have read grh in the Vorlage, meaning ‘fear’ with the nuance of ‘reverence’ or at least ‘deference’ (cf. yûrû // kabbeû in Ps. 33.8). ann¿tî lienê biÓnî (‘I am putrid to my own sons’) in the parallel colon, however, supports MT zrh (‘is repugnant’), cognate with Ass. zîru, which Haupt cited as expressing the repugnance of a wife for her husband. The evidence of the two versions is that in the Vorlage grh was a scribal corruption of zrh, though here, given the 5. E.g. the Lachish ostraca (588–586 BCE), Aramaic papyri from Abu Sinjeh in the Wadi Daliyeh (fourth century BCE) (Cross 1969) and Jewish coins from 135 BCE to 44 CE. 1
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early date of the versions and the still earlier date of the Vorlage, we admit graphic difculties.6 In MT 22.17, h’¿merîm l’l sûr mimmennû ûmah-yyip‘al šadday lmô (read lnû) (‘who say to God, “Turn away from us”, and “What can the Almighty do to us?” ’), LXX reads ‘who say, “What will the Lord do to us?”, and “What will the Almighty bring upon us?” ’ and the Qumran targum in a fragmentary text ‘who say [ ] God [ ] to us’. Both versions support lnû in the Vorlage, MT lmô being an obvious scribal corruption of n to m in the Old Hebrew script from the fth to the second century BCE. Both make theological adjustments vis-à-vis MT. In MT 24.24, wehumme¤û ¤akkol (‘and they droop like all’), LXX reads ‘but he withers like the mauve plant (malak) in the heat’; compare 11QtargJob [ ] pepw kybl’. LXX suggests the singular of the verb, which would generally agree with the context. This would indicate wehumma¤ in the Vorlage, suggesting that nal w in MT is a dittograph after k in the linear script of the fth to the fourth century BCE. A plant is surely denoted in colon b, as indicated in LXX. The Qumran targum species kybl, surely the dog-tooth kîlh, identied by I. Löw (1881: 230), of which MT kkl is a corruption of the Vorlage of the Qumran version. MT 25.2 exemplies a case where the Qumran targum conrms the MT, while the LXX seems to suggest a different Vorlage, though the difference is more apparent than real. MT reads hamšl waa ‘immô (‘effective rule7 and terror are in his power [lit. “with him”]’). This is conrmed by 11QtargJob which reads, ‘šlÓn wrbw ‘m ’lh’, provided we understand rbw as cognate with Arab. rba, yrb (cf. Ass. rîbu, ‘to quake’), rendering ‘With God is authority and terror’, which would agree with LXX phobos. But this meaning of rb has yet to be attested in Aramaic, and the probability is, we consider, that rbw means ‘greatness’, complementary to šlÓn. This would be a paraphrase rather than direct translation which generally characterizes 11QtargJob. LXX offers the strange reading, ti gar prooimion phobos par’ autou (‘For what prelude or fear proceed from him?’). Strangely enough, prooimion may support MT hamšl, the innitive absolute Hiphil of mšal (‘to rule’), since it is a synonym of arch (‘beginning’ and ‘rule’), though we suspect that it is a variant or a corruption in the transmission of LXX of paroimion (‘proverb’ or ‘example’), Hebrew mšl. This is not the only case where an apparently widely divergent Greek rendering in LXX really supports the view that the Hebrew Vorlage was MT and not a variant Hebrew text. MT 25.3 reads hayš mispr lieûyw we‘al-mî l¿’-yqûm ‘ôrhû (‘Is there any counting of his troops? And against whom does his light not rise?’), which the LXX renders ‘Has anyone supposed (hupolaboi) that there is escape 6. But cf. the corruption of z to g in Amos 7.1: MT gizzê hammele¤ (‘the king’s mowings’) to ‘King Gog’ in LXX (Hebrew g¿ hammele¤). 7. Literally ‘imposition of rule’. 1
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(parelkusis) from his troops?’ In colon a 11QtargJob reads rÑn for MT mispr. rÑn means ‘trust’ or ‘promise’, hence ‘hope’, Hebrew sbr, of which MT mispr may be a corruption. In colon b ’w ‘l mn l’ tqwm kmntw supports LXX enedra (‘ambush’), indicating ’¿rehû, of which MT ’ôrhû is a corruption, with omission of b after r through haplography in the script attested in Egyptian papyri of the fth to rst century BCE. An emendation of MT 30.17 is suggested by the agreement of the Qumran targum with LXX before corruption of the latter. MT layelh ‘aÑmay niqqar m’ly gives no feasible sense in the context. The Qumran text is fragmentary in the passage, but reads gmry yqdwn (‘My bones are inamed’). LXX reads nukti de mou ta ostea sugkechutai (‘At night my bones are dissolved’). But the verb may be a corruption of sugkekautai, which is preferred by A. Rahlfs, thus establishing agreement with 11QtargJob and indicating the corruption of niqqad to niqqar in MT. This in turn suggests the emendation of MT m’ly (‘from upon me’) to m‘alî (‘than a cauldron’) as suggested by Dahood, assuming ‘alî as a cognate of Arab. ala(y), alayatu(n) (‘cookingpot’); compare ‘lh in this sense noticed by G.R. Driver (1954: 304) in Ezek. 38.18, thus giving the passage the excellent sense ‘at night my bones are hotter than a cauldron’. MT 34.9 reads l¿’ yiskon- (read yisskn) geer bireÑ¿Óô ‘im-’el¿hîm (‘A man has no advantage by his giving satisfaction to God’), for which 11QtargJob offers the reading l’ yšnh gbr my though it is too fragmentary to indicate the Vorlage of yšnh (‘changes’ or ‘attains eminence’) or its restoration or adjustment. But in LXX ouk estin episkop andros the noun episcop (‘oversight’), corroborates the consonants skn of MT; cf. Hebrew s¿¤n (‘steward’, Isa. 22.15). In MT 35.10 ’ayyh ’el¿ah ‘¿y (read ‘¿î) n¿Ón zemirôÓ ballyelh the noun zemirôÓ has caused misapprehension in English translations, the reading ‘songs in the night’ perhaps unduly inuenced by the experience of Paul and Silas at Philippi (Acts 16.25) and the meaning of the root in Amos 5.23; Pss. 81.9; 95.2, and so on, and Arab. zamara (‘to play music, specically on a wind-instrument’). Alternatively the noun is taken as ‘strength’, ‘courage’, cognate of Arabic mira, or, as suggested by D.W. Thomas (1936–37: 478), ‘protection’. The root in Hebrew zmr in such a sense is surely a component of the proper names cited by James Barr (1968: 182), b‘lzmr and zmryhw from the Samaritan ostraca and Zimri. The sense ‘protection’ is understood in LXX, which renders phulakas (‘guards’), evidently misunderstanding the Hebrew feminine plural as signifying the abstract singular, and in 11QtargJob ’lh’ ] lnÑbt’ hlyly’. The context and LXX phulakas indicate that dylq ln l [ the Aramaic nÑbt is cognate with Hebrew neÑÑî in 2 Sam. 8.6, 14; 1 Chron. 18.13 and 2 Chron. 17.2, which denotes watchposts or detachments posted by David in occupied territory and in the homeland for defence, being rendered phroura in LXX. This sense of Hebrew zmr in Exodus 15 was recognized by LXX in the translation of ‘ozzî wezimerÓ yh (read ‘ûzî wezimeraÓî yh) as bothos 1
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kai skepasts (‘a help and protector’), where ‘ûz, as well as its complement zimeraÓî, has an Arabic cognate ‘awau(n) (‘protection’); compare the exclamation na’u billhi (‘May God protect us!’). In MT 37.13 ’im-lešeÓ ’im-le’arÑô (read ’arÑû) ’im-leese (‘Whether for chastisement [lit. “a rod”] or for favour or in token of steadfast grace’), for leseÓ the versions are more specic, the Qumran targum reading lmktš (‘to bruise’, or ‘beat’) and LXX eis paideian (‘for discipline’); compare šeÓ in Prov. 22.14; 29.15. But for MT le’arÑô LXX renders ‘for his land’, which the Qumran targum also evidently understood, in rendering l’r‘’, thus misunderstanding ’arÑû (‘favour’) as a cognate of Arabic rawu(n); compare the Palmyrene deity ’arÑû, Monimus in the Latin translation (cf. Arabic mun‘im, ‘gracious’; see Commentary ad loc). LXX eis eleos is a direct translation of MT leese, but the Qumran targum reads l…srhh (‘for our want’), amplifying by lkpn (‘for famine’). The divergence from MT, however, is readily comprehensible on the assumption of the mistaking of the nal d of ese for r. In MT 39.10, haÓiqšor-rym beÓelem ‘a¿Óô ’im-yeaddr ‘amqîm ’aharey¤, we suspect the meter as too long; the collocation of beÓelem ‘a¿Óô is also suspect, as is ‘a¿Óô if, as LXX assumes, it means ‘ropes’, lacking as it does a preposition and having the singular pronominal sufx with the plural noun. rym, pointed in MT as if rem, is suspect on two counts—the spelling and the repetition of the noun after rem in the preceding verse. The evidence of LXX and 11QtargJob may now be adduced. LXX reads: Will you bind his yoke with thongs? Or will he draw your furrows in the plain?
The Qumran targum reads htqÓr r’m’ btryh wylg(wn) bbq‘ btryk. Both versions omit explicit mention of ‘furrow’ (Óelem) in colon a, where it probably crept into MT as an explanatory gloss on a rare word in the bicolon, which we suspect to be Aram. arÓey¤ (cf. Syr. rat, ‘to split’). The verb weylg(wn) in 11QtargJob, if it means to make a narrow track, the meaning of Aram. lagn’ given by M. Jastrow (1903), may render the verb in colon b yeadd, a rare word, found only here and in Isa. 28.24 and Hos. 10.11, where it is parallel to, and probably a synonym of raš (‘to plough’), possibly with the sense of drawing a straight furrow; compare Arab. adda (‘to be straight’). Still in colon b, MT ’aarey¤, which is not indicated in LXX, is assumed by 11QtargJob to mean ‘after you’, which disagrees with ploughing. We suggest that it is a corruption of arÓeyk (Aram. ‘your furrows’), the object of the verb yeadd. To revert to colon a, with the removal of Óelem as a gloss, the regular three-beat metre would be restored and e then be attached to ‘a¿Ó, which, without a preposition, is a problem. LXX understands this word, without a preposition and signicantly without the pronominal sufx, as ‘thongs’ or ‘ropes’, which may have been suggested by Isa. 5.18. But here the pronominal sufx with the plural is suspect. We suggest therefore that ‘a¿Ó is the verbal noun of ‘h (‘to be thick’), with which the pronominal sufx would be 1
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regular, meaning ‘his thickness’ or ‘his massive bulk’, with specic reference to the ‘bull-neck’ of the animal, the forequarters of the bull including the neck, which is markedly more massive than the hind quarters. This may possibly be suggested by 11QtargJob btwryh, possibly ‘his bull-like strength’. MT rêm is also omitted in LXX, where ‘his yoke’ suggests an original nîr of which rm may be a scribal error of metathesis, with corruption of n to m in the Old Hebrew script. The Vorlage of LXX would then have been haÓiqšor-nîr ba‘a¿Óô (‘Will you bind a yoke on his massive bulk?’). This and other variations in LXX and the Qumran targum in this passage alone indicate that each used a different Hebrew Vorlage with substantial variations from MT. In conclusion we propose an original reading of the couplet: haÓiqšor-nîr ba‘a¿Óô Will you bind a yoke on his massive bulk? ’im-y eaddd b‘meq arÓey¤ Will he plough your furrows straight in the plain? MT 40.26 reads haÓîm ’agmôn be’appô. LXX and 11QtargJob differ from MT ’agmôn in reading respectively krikon (‘a ring’) and zmm (cf. Syr. zmm’
and Arab. zammu[n], ‘bridle’), which would give an excellent sense in the context. MT ’agmôn is not an impossible corruption of zmm or zmôn; compare LXX gô hammele¤ for gizzê hammele¤ in Amos 7.2. So long as the crocodile’s mouth can open, a ring (LXX) or hook (T) is pointless. Hence the snout must rst be bound. It is important to note that the text refers not to the crocodile’s mouth (pîw) but to his snout (’appô). In 41.26 the crocodile is described as mele¤ ‘al-kol-benê-šaÑ (‘king over all the big game’); compare benê-šaÑ in 28.8 (see Commentary ad loc.). LXX and the Qumran targum agree in disagreeing with MT, reading respectively ‘king over all those that are in the water’ (cf. T ‘little shes’) and ‘…over all the reptiles’ (‘al kl rš [Syr. raš’]); compare S šrÑ. While a naturalistic description of the crocodile, the scribal corruption of rš or šrÑ is not graphically feasible. It is less than what MT says, which may reect the allusion to the crocodile as the beast par excellence implied in the crocodile as the hieroglyphic sign for ‘king’, as Fohrer notes (1989: 531) after A. Erman (1894: 180). It would appear that the targums and LXX missed this point in their Vorlage or that their Vorlage differed from MT. 11QtargJob shows an interesting correspondence with LXX, apparently as against MT, in 42.11, where Job’s kinsmen, visiting him after his rehabilitation, present him with a lamb (Aram. ’mr, LXX amn¿n, cf. MT qeîÓh). Since a hundred qeîÓôÓ are given as the price of the ground acquired by Jacob at Shechem (Gen. 33.19), Job 42.11 is probably a case of conscious archaizing. On the basis of LXX, now supported by the Qumran targum, Dhorme (ad loc.) elaborated the view that a qeîÓh was a lamb as a unit of exchange, citing the semantic analogy of Latin pecunia (‘money’) from pecus (‘cattle). 1
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42.6 reads ‘al-kn ’em’as weniamtî ‘al-‘r w’er (‘therefore I despise/reject and repent on dust and ashes’). As indicated by the athna in weniamtî the Masoretes understood this verb to end colon a. In this case colon b must be admitted as decient of a beat. If, pace MT, weniamtî or its original is taken as the rst word in colon b, the verb required before ‘al-‘r we’er, this leaves colon a short of a beat, while according to MT the transitive Qal ’em’as is without an object. It might be assumed that as an object ‘my words’ might be implied when Job rejected his case, but this still does not meet the objection to the short meter if niamtî or its original is taken with colon b, and the same would apply to the reading ’emm’s, which would avoid the difculty of the transitive verb in the Qal without an object. The metrical difculty would be met by assuming the reading himm’s ’emm’s (‘I utterly demean myself’), which would agree with Job’s repentance ‘(sitting) on dust and ashes’. Here we may cite the evidence of LXX and 11QtargJob. LXX reads ephaulisa emauton kai etakn hgmai de eg¿ emauton gn kai spodon (‘I demean myself and am dissolved, I consider myself dust and ashes’); compare 11QtargJob, ‘l kn ’tnsk w’tmh’ w’hw’ l‘pr wqÓm (lit. ‘Therefore I am poured out and reduced [lit. “diluted”8] and I have become dust and ashes’). Here LXX ephaulisa emauton supports the reading ’emm’s, while etakn indicates ’emmas from msas (‘to melt, dissolve’), which was in fact conjectured by Beer, who proposed himms ’emmas, thus restoring the three-beat meter in colon a, omitting weniamtî or its original. The verb msas in the Niphal is indicated in the Qumran targum, which reads colon a ‘l kn ’tnsk w’tmh’ (lit. ‘I am poured out and diluted’). This suggests an original of MT weniamtî as wenimh’tî, cognate of Aram. meh or an Aramaism in Job. The sense of this verb in 11QtargJob and LXX etakn would support Beer’s conjecture. But LXX ephaulisa emauton supports MT ’em’as read ’emm’s. Our conclusion in colon a is that in view of the familiar word-play so dear to the author of Job, the original of this colon was ‘al-kn ’emm’s we’emmas (‘Therefore I demean myself and yield’, lit. ‘melt, lose coherence’, hence ‘yield’ in the physical sense). Both versions supply the verb required in colon b, LXX ‘I considered myself’ and the Qumran targum ‘I have become’, both of which we nd in the context quite colourless. The original may have been nihm’Óî (corrupted to niamtî in MT), which the Qumran targum read and included in colon a. We suggest an original text: MT
‘al-kn ’emm’s we’emmas wenimh’Óî ‘al-‘r we’er Wherefore I demean myself and yield, and am reduced to dust and ashes.
Possibly the targumist took ’emm’s and ’emmas as alternative readings and omitted ’emm’s and included wenimhe’tî of his Vorlage in colon a supplying 8. See Dalman 1938: 226a. 1
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the verb ’hw’ in colon b (metri causa), while LXX took ’emmas and nimh’Óî as alternatives and omitted the latter, supplying the missing beat in colon b with kai hgmai. Finally in the Epilogue 11QtargJob makes a valuable contribution to the problem of the composition and transmission of the Book of Job, in ending at 42.11 of MT. Here there is no question of a fragmentary text since the targum ends here in the middle of column 38 of the scroll and nothing further is written in this line or in the space left in the column. The rather naive reference to Job’s material restitution, which has always offended spiritual sensibilities, may, of course have been omitted for theological reasons. But it probably indicates that the Book of Job as the targumist knew it in the late second century BCE ended at 42.11, the rest being a later midrashic expansion, like ‘the Syriac book’ to which LXX refers (ed. Swete, 42.17 b-e), indicating a certain uidity of the Job tradition at this point. The necessity for the LXX version of the Hebrew Scripture and the translation of Ben Sira’s work into Greek indicates that since c. 250 BCE and probably earlier the Jews in Egypt were more familiar with Greek than with Hebrew, and particularly with the less familiar words in a poetic work like Job, such as the many homonyms which characterize the book. Indeed, even among Hebrew speakers in Palestine it is not to be expected that all nuances of the living language of c. 450 BCE, when we should date the Book of Job, should have been familiar even three centuries later any more than most average English speakers should know what the Authorized Version meant by ‘earing’ (‘ploughing’) in Exod. 34.21. But, produced in Palestine, where Hebrew and Aramaic were living languages, the Qumran targumist was on more familiar ground and is noticeably more faithful to the Hebrew Vorlage. In Job, which so fully exploits the resources of Hebrew language and current Aramaic, students of the book, from the starting point of the more familiar content of Hebrew language, soon nd it necessary to have recourse to the versions where an unfamiliar word occurs or where the sense seems to break down. If directly or indirectly they do not solve the problem they may have recourse to Comparative Semitic Philology, using the increasing resources of cognate Semitic languages, Akkadian, Amorite from Mari, Assyrian, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic and Ethiopic with South Arabian dialects from the latter half of the rst millennium BCE. This may at once solve the problem, giving the obvious sense in the context and agreeing with other passages in the OT. This is particularly the case where, as often in Job, apparently the same word is used in a couplet in parallelism, a solecism which the poet would surely never have committed even occasionally. Failing such help, we may have recourse to emendation, and here again the ingenuity of the scholar must be subject to control. A version, even where it does not give direct help, may yet give a clue to the original which it has misunderstood, and here the deciency of one version may, and indeed must, be checked against another, as we have noticed in our citation of LXX and 1
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11QtargJob. Subject to such controls, conjectural emendation must be graphically feasible, its characters relating to those of the dubious text, for scribal corruption did occur. The corruption may be a wrong arrangement of consonants as in 42.6, where on the clue of 11QtargJob which reads w’tmh’ we may suspect such a corruption with the further corruption of h to , MT weniamtî being suggested to the scribe by ’emm’s in colon a. The emendation to wenimh’Óî suggested by the Qumran targum and read in colon b, together with LXX and 11QtargJob supports Beer’s conjecture ’emmas for MT ’em’as in colon a, where, reading MT weniamtî in colon b, he supplied the metric deciency in colon a by proposing himms ’emmas. This conjecture, however, must be modied by the support for MT ’em’as, read ’emm’s (‘I demean myself’) in LXX. Finally, in support of the reading ‘al-kn ’emm’s we’emmas wenimh’Óî ‘al-‘pr we’er, appeal to the general style of the poetic author of Job in his fondness for word-play exemplied in the collocation of ’emm’s and ’emmas (lit. ‘demean myself and am dissolved’, sc. ‘lose coherence’). The sense of the second member of such a pair is amplied in the next verb wenimh’Óî (lit. ‘and I am diluted’, sc. ‘reduced’) in a convention well known in Arabic poetry and rhetoric as tawriya, cited by Guillaume (1963) in the case of homonyms, to which ’emm’s and ’emmas, though not homonyms, vocally approximate. Beer’s conjecture is thus controlled by metrical considerations, but modied by the support of LXX, for MT ’emm’s in the consonantal text, and with due recognition of the poetic style of Job, MT weniamtî read by the Masoretes in colon a and conjectured to belong to colon b is a corruption of wenimh’tî, suggested by 11QtargJob, and supported by the meaning of the sense of ’emmas in colon a on the analogy of tawriya in Arabic poetry. In considering the graphic feasibility of an emendation we must reckon with the origin and transmission of a text. If the denitive Book of Job was composed c. 450 BCE with later addenda until c. 400 BCE it is reasonable to suppose that it was written in the Old Hebrew script attested in the Lachish Ostraca (588–586 BCE) and in Aramaic Papyri from the Wadi Daliyeh (fourth century BCE). At Qumran from the last quarter of the second century BCE, this script was replaced by one not far removed from that familiar in our printed Bibles. But the older Hebrew script is still attested at Qumran in certain fragments from Caves 1 and 4 and was used in Jewish coinage from 135 BCE to 44 CE and in coins from the revolt of Bar Coseba (132–135 CE). Thus it might be supposed that if the Book of Job was composed and transmitted in Palestine, it may have had currency in the Old Hebrew script, while, if it was composed and transmitted in Egypt, we must reckon with the development of this script as attested in the development of that script as attested in Egyptian papyri from the fth century BCE. On the other hand, the direct ancestor of the developed Hebrew alphabet, which betrays its origin among the exiles in Mesopotamia by the term ‘the Assyrian script’, known also as ‘the square 1
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script’, generally adapted at Qumran, was evidently brought to Palestine by Jews returning from Exile from the middle of the sixth century BCE. Developed by Jewish intelligentsia in Mesopotamia keenly concerned to conserve their scriptural heritage, this may well have set the pattern in the west for scriptural manuscripts, including the Book of Job. Be that as it may, we shall nd obvious cases where the recovery of the original text is graphically explicable on the assumption of scribal corruption in the Old Hebrew script, while other cases indicate the square script as attested in its development in the bulk of the Qumran manuscripts or later, while that of the Egyptian papyri is not out of the reckoning. Some emendations of the consonantal text by the application of epigraphy or calligraphy will be relatively simple and obvious, but in the case of others which are more complex we must apply the checks we have mentioned, always mindful that once corruption has occurred, especially in a difcult text—and those are any which bafed the versions in Job—corruption may proliferate. A notable example of this we would nd in the description of the splendid burial of the prosperous wicked in 21.33: mÓeqû-lô rieê naal (‘Sweet to him are the clods of the wadi’), which we nd quite unHebraic and not apt in the context. We have suggested the emendation miÓq¿nn be‘û welîl (‘Having provided for his elegy to the accompaniment of ute and pipe’). We nd it signicant in the context that in the elaborate funeral this essential element is the sole omission. Here we may note the correspondence of most of the consonants to MT. Others in the emendation, such as n for w and m for n are simple scribal errors in the Old Hebrew script, and w for y in ‘û welîl in the square script; equally simple is dittography as in miÓq¿nn. This leaves ‘ in ‘û as the outstanding difculty, for which there is no obvious graphic relation to the MT at any stage of the script, and this we explain as a case of proliferating corruption of an already corrupted text. Here the most helpful 11QtargJob is unfortunately fragmentary. We must notice the contribution of comparative philology to the assessment of the MT, with special reference to conjectural emendation. This resort, once so freely exercised, seemed to nd a fruitful eld in Job with its outstanding abundance of hapax legomena and words formally known in Hebrew but in their familiar sense incongruous with the context. This applies particularly to the apparent repetition of a word in corresponding position in parallel cola. In the frequency of such cases in Job we may be sure that this was no literary lapse, but was a deliberate stylistic convention, which Guillaume did well to note as a feature of Arabic poetry and rhetoric. That such word-play was known in Israel is evidenced by Samson’s riddle (Judg. 14.14), Out of the eater came forth meat, Out of the strong came forth sweet,
with its answer, 1
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What is sweeter than honey (’ary)?9 What is stronger than a lion (’arî)?,
and Judg. 15.16, With the jawbone of an ass (amôr), heap upon heap (am¿rÓyim)…
The formally identical words in parallelism in Job prove to be such homonyms, formally identical yet quite different in meaning, like the English ‘sole’, meaning part of a foot, a sh, and ‘only’. In Hebrew the unfamiliar member of such a pair is to be recognized from a cognate either in Aramaic, Syriac, Northern Arabic, or Ethiopic or one of the Southern Arabian dialects which would indicate the obvious sense in the context, which must of course be the nal criterion. The recognition of this stylistic feature in Job and the application of comparative Semitic philology has severely limited the exercise of conjectural emendation of the MT. The order of the MT has often been called in question by practically every serious commentator on Job, and usually a displacement of text is taken to have occurred, as for instance in a tricolon where a colon is out of accord, or seems to be, with its context and where it gives more sense in another position. Such an exercise can be quite subjective if we may judge by the difference of opinion as to where the assumed ‘errant block’ originally belonged. Such a question may often be objectively settled by the appreciation of the style of the poet, who, like the poets in the Ras Shamra myths and legends, used the tricolon occasionally to punctuate their text which was usually in bicola. Thus in Job we nd that the tricolon frequently marks the end of a theme, as we nd regularly once we have resolved the various chapters into strophes, either thematically or on form-critical grounds, as Fohrer has so admirably done. Thus, while an odd colon in a prevailing arrangement of bicola may suggest to the critic a rearrangement of the text of the MT exercised, one would hope, in accord with the sense of the context and with the minimum of subjective judgment, this tendency is modied if not minimized by the real signicance of the odd tricolon among the predominant bicola. In cases where displacement of text is assumed it must be admitted that this is proposed ad sensum, but a signicant criterion is also the style of the author. For instance in 20.10 between the statement of the evanescence of the wicked and his prosperity in vv. 9 and 11 the MT reads, bnyw yeraÑÑû allîm weyyw tšnh ’ônô His sons crush the poor but his hands will give back his wealth,
while in the statement of the prosperous wicked to enjoy his prots in 20.19 MT reads: kî-riÑss ‘za dallîm bayiÓ gzal wel¿’ yienhû. 9. Cognate of Arab ’aryu(n). 1
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For the unintelligible ‘za we propose ‘¿zm (‘by force’). The fondness of the poet for word-play suggests the emendation of yeraÑÑû in v. 10, yireÑû (‘they will make restitutions’), a parallel to yyw tšnh, with further word-play between bnhû (MT yienhû). This suggests that vv. 19 and 10 belong together in that order: 19. kî-riÑÑs ‘¿zm dallîm bayiÓ gzal l¿’ bnhû 10. bnyw yireÑû dallîm weydyw tšbnh ’ônô Since he has crushed the poor by force, plundered a house which he had not built, His sons will have to make restitution to the poor, and his own hands give back his wealth.
The word-play between bnyw and bnhu indicates the chiastic arrangement of the two bicola, which we would place after v. 18. With the multiple aid of all such disciplines, the study of versions, epigraphy and calligraphy, comparative philology, prosody and the appreciation of the stylistic idiom of the author, we may and must make our approach to the assessment of the MT or to the recovery of the original after scribal corruption in transmission. At certain disputed points the MT will be supported against proposed conjectural emendation; at others a more meaningful original will be recovered. In all cases both support and emendation of the MT must be under strict and indeed multiple control.
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Chapter 8 THE LANGUAGE OF THE BOOK OF JOB
The Book of Job, a masterpiece in Hebrew literature, exhibits a wide range of language, with an extraordinary number of rare words and hapax legomena. These have always been a problem to commentators, together with passages either obscure in themselves or through scribal corruption, which have occasioned copious emendation often more ingenious than controlled. Such passages are sometimes reconstructed from Hebrew diction, phraseology or sentiment familiar elsewhere in the OT preferably in similar contexts; more often they proceed from the assumption of a hitherto unknown or doubtful Hebrew word as cognate with one in one of the kindred Semitic languages or even as not a Hebrew word at all but an import—an ‘Aramaism’ for instance, or an ‘Arabism’. Some of such suggestions, like conjectural emendation, have reected the interest and expertise more or less in those languages rather than deep appreciation of Hebrew language and literature. All such attempts to arrive at the form and meaning of the original must employ all available checks. The proposed reconstruction must be assessed with relation to its immediate context and other parts of the work studied and other parts of the OT reected or consciously cited or alluded to, as particularly in Job, where the writer makes such ample use of known literary forms with their conventional diction, imagery and association of thought (see above, pp. 39-55). The ancient versions, the LXX, S, V, T and now the earliest known version, the Aramaic targum from Qumran, 11QtargJob, may supply a measure of the desired control. When in addition the effort is made to solve an outstanding problem or to elucidate a text in the OT by the citation of cognate Semitic languages, words cited from such sources must be cited wherever possible with due regard to their native context. Here we are fortunate to possess such a volume of material from Akkadian texts of various character from southern Mesopotamia, early in the second millennium BCE, from Mari just before the middle of that millennium in an Amorite dialect, Assyrian texts contemporary with the history of Israel, Canaanite citations and glosses in the Amarna Tablets from Syria and Palestine from the fourteenth century BCE, and administrative texts and poetic myths and legends from Ras Shamra with vocabulary, grammar, gures and forms of prosody so close to Hebrew (particularly Hebrew poetry) that a 1
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Hebrew prophet could speak of his language as ‘the language of Canaan’ (Isa. 19.18). Contemporary with the appearance of the Book of Job, Aramaic, the lingua franca of Persian administration in western Asia and Egypt is well attested in documents both administrative and domestic, from Elephantine and in letters found in the Wadi Daliyeh and dated in the fourth century BCE (Cross 1969). From the Christian era there is a great volume of Syriac in the targum to the OT and the direct translation of the Testament, and original works such as patristic literature, mediaeval history and a work on agriculture (Geoponicum). Any commentary on Job teems with citation of Arabic, either conjectures as to the meaning of hapax legomena or rare or doubtful words unattested in what is known of Hebrew or its obvious cognates. Many of these will be supported by citation of cognates in one or more of the kindred Semitic languages just mentioned, though regrettably this has not always been done. Despite occasional over-emphasis and exclusive application of Arabic it does occupy a very signicant place in a philological approach to the linguistic problems of Job. The Arabic element in Job was rst suggested by the mediaeval Jewish commentator ibn Ezra, who suggested that the linguistic peculiarities of the Book of Job, which had long been the despair of Jewish rabbis, arose from its character as a translation. This was taken up and argued by D.S. Margoliouth and F.H. Foster, who argued for an Arabic original (Margoliouth 1924; Foster 1932–33: 21-45). However we may evaluate Arabic in the study of Job, this explanation is most unlikely. R. Gordis (1965: 210), rightly in our opinion, argues that there is nothing known in Arab culture in the pre-Christian era which could have given birth to such a work as Job or which could have evoked such emulation in an advanced Hebrew society as to demand translation. ‘Arabisms’ in Job were more recently claimed by the late A. Guillaume1 in explanation of the many cases where apparently identical words are used in parallelism. With this great wealth of vocabulary it is rightly argued that it is inconceivable that the poet should have lapsed to this extent in the short compass of a couplet. In qualication it must be noticed that occasionally identical words in parallelism do occur in Ugaritic poetry in the cuneiform texts where there is no question of textual corruption. In such cases the word is repeated for the sake of emphasis. In Job, however, this is relatively rare. In such cases Guillaume recognized that the words were not synonyms but homonyms. He took the rst as Hebrew and the second as Arabic with a different meaning. This is a conscious word-play exemplied outside Job in Ps. 137.5f.: ’im-’ešk¤ yerûšlyim tiška yemînî
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, Let my right hand wither away.2
1. Guillaume 1954: 1-12; 1963; 1965: I, 3-35; II, 5-35; III, 1-10; IV, 1-18. 2. The verb š¤a in this sense, in our opinion, has an Ugaritic cognate, for example, in Gordon UT 67 I.4, 30f., tÓk ttrp šmm (‘the heavens will dry up, yea languish’); so also Driver 1956a; Gibson, ad loc. (‘burnt up’); cf. Pope 1966: 240. 1
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This literary convention is used much more frequently in Arabic poetry and rhetoric, and is found in Job more often than in any other book in the OT. From this fact Guillaume goes on to argue that the writer and his circle were bilingual and indeed that the book was produced in the Hejaz (see above, p. 4). Though the clue to one or other of the homonyms—usually the second—is frequently found in Arabic, this does not mean that the word is an Arabism, as Guillaume concluded; it may have an Aramaic cognate as well as, or even rather than, an Arabic one or a cognate in Ugaritic, which Guillaume persistently ignored. In this case the word in question is probably genuinely Hebrew, an element in fact of seaÓ kena‘an (Isa. 19.18). We are even less convinced by Guillaume’s conclusion that his ‘Arabisms’ indicate the provenance of the Book of Job from the Hejaz. The weakness of Guillaume’s thesis of extensive Arabic inuence in Job is that his alleged ‘Arabisms’ are cited from Classical Arabic at least a millennium after the composition of Job, and there is nothing contemporary except possibly short inscriptions, little more in fact than mere grafti of uncertain and probably much later date.3 That, of course, does not exclude Arabic as the medium of communication in daily life and in oral tradition. In fact the full owering of Arabic poetry with its elaborate structure and polished, precise diction in the pre-literary period just before Islam in the seventh century CE implies a long period of currency of Arabic in the peninsula, while in the south the language is attested in its local expression in numerous inscriptions in the ruinelds of the south Arabian kingdoms from the tenth century BCE.4 When all this is said, however, of all the resources of comparative Semitic philology, the signicance of Arabic must be admitted. North or Hejazi Arabic, attested in sophisticated poetry before the seventh century CE, is used in all its fullness and uency in the Qur’an and in traditions of early Islam and subsequently in jurisprudence, history and science to modern times, with current books, periodicals and newspapers. There are of course specic developments in the meaning of words to say nothing of coinage, which, however, in the immense resources of the language, are relatively rare and readily detected. In invoking Arabic in explication of passages in the OT, however, due regard must be paid to the use of Arabic words and roots in their living context, as in the profuse citations in the lexica of Lane–Poole (1863–93) and Freytag (1830–37) and authoritative works of native Arab 3. Van den Branden 1956. On the basis of his understanding of the development of the Old Arabian script F.V. Winnett proposed to date such inscriptions from Teima and its vicinity not later than the sixth century BCE. This date is supported by no local evidence from northern Arabia, but a closely related script from southern Iraq in an archaeological context dated to the eighth or seventh century was found; see Driver, 1944b: 124; Albright 1965. Relatively to this, Winnett dates his inscriptions in the ‘Taymanite script’; see Winnett and Reed 1970: 99-103. 4. On the application of Southern Arabic and Ethiopic in Semitic Philology, see Ullendorff 1956 and Beeston 1962. 1
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lexicographers.5 There is furthermore the opportunity to hear and communicate in spoken Arabic in a living Semitic milieu, particularly, from the point of view of the Hebraist, in the local dialects of Palestine and Syria. Here we may pay tribute to Gustaf Dalman, our teacher in the University of Greifswald, in his monumental Arbeit und Sitte in Palastina (1928–39), where he cites verbal communications to him in the practical situations of peasants and humble folk, with profuse citation of relevant passages in the OT, Targum, Talmud and Midrash which makes this work an invaluable supplement to his Aramäischneuhebräisches Handwörterbuch zu Targum, Talmud und Midrasch (1938). Thus the many words in Job where the familiar sense of Hebrew is not applicable may reasonably be invested with meaning on the assumption of an Arabic cognate, always, however, subject to congruity with the context. This has informed an impressive series of studies by G.R. Driver from 1922 to 1955,6 which are reected in NEB, and by I. Eitan (1924), J. Reider7 and D.W. Thomas.8 In many, if not indeed most cases, however, Arabic does not offer the only cognate with a Hebrew word. Cognates in other Semitic languages suggest themselves, which may indeed conrm the evidence of Arabic adduced, but may occasionally modify it. We nd that this applies particularly to the work of Guillaume. Notwithstanding his many brilliant insights, he declared, in defence of the MT in Job against what he alleged to be ‘deliberate falsication of the evidence in an appalling degree’ that he would be determined to read it as an Arabic work (Guillaume 1963: 108). In discussing the Aramaic element in Job we would dismiss Tur-Sinai’s thesis of an Aramaic original and Hebrew translation (Tur-Sinai 1957). This is surely exploded by the uent application of literary forms with relation to their Sitz im Leben, and the characteristic language, imagery and themes of Hebrew literature. Moreover the ample evidence we shall cite of the elements of Ugaritic, a dialect of ‘the tongue of Canaan’ with which the prophet classied Hebrew (Isa. 19.18), surely militates against the thesis of an Aramaic original and a subsequent Hebrew translation. Such an original would never have exhibited such features, nor would the alleged Hebrew translation in the fth century BCE. In this respect the Book of Job is a natural development of biblical, particularly the Wisdom, tradition and idiom and in the language and literary tradition of ancient Canaan to which Hebrew poets were heirs. Moreover in Mesopotamia, where Tur-Sinai has suggested that the book was produced in Aramaic (at a period of activity in assembling and editing the considerable literary deposit of Hebrew from before the Exile and when and 5. Ibn Manur, Lisnu’l-’arab, 1232–1311; al-Frzbd, al-Qmsu ’l-MuÓ, 1326– 1414; MurÓad ’z-Zabd, Tju ’l-‘ars, 1732–91. 6. Driver’s work is cited throughout the Commentary; cf. also his ‘Hebrew Poetic Diction’ (1956b). 7. J. Reider, articles in HUCA from 1925 to 1953; VT 4 (1954); JJS 3 (1956). 8. D.W. Thomas 1938: 374, 402 and articles in ZAW, ETL, JTS, VT and VTSup. from 1934 to 1944. 1
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where the massive prophetic work of Ezekiel was produced) it seems odd that a work which so fully develops the sapiential tradition of the Hebrew sages should appear in Aramaic. Given the currency of Aramaic as the administrative lingua franca of Palestine and the western provinces of the Persian Empire when the Book of Job was produced and the extent to which it had penetrated popular Hebrew, Aramaic elements in vocabulary and grammar are but to be expected in Palestine and in Egypt, as is indicated by the records of the Jewish or perhaps North Israelite community of Elephantine (Cowley 1923) and elsewhere in Egypt on the evidence of epigraphic matter (Gibson 1975: 113-47). N.H. Snaith has supplemented the deciencies of Guillaume’s work in citing the same list of ‘Aramaisms’ from Driver–Gray and Kautzsch9 and in giving a more just notice of their use in Aramaic and Syriac, in Akkadian and often in Ugaritic (Snaith 1968: 104-12). Here we may note that many an Akkadian root has a direct descendant in Aramaic and Syriac. The case for an assumed Aramaism in Job being a genuine Hebrew word, the rarity of which in Hebrew literature is simply accidental, is much stronger when a Ugaritic cognate is validly adduced. Thus Snaith rightly adduces evidence of Ugaritic cognates to Kautzsch’s ‘Aramaisms’. Thus, for instance, m¤a¤ (‘to be low, humiliated’, Job 24.24), which has Aramaic and Arabic cognates and is attested in a Hebrew context in Eccl. 10.18 and probably earlier in Ps. 102.43, occurs in Ugarit in the physical sense ‘to collapse’ (Gordon UT V.68.2, 17). ‘Óaq (‘to be advanced in years’, lit. ‘to pass on’, Job 21.7) occurs in Ugaritic (Gordon UT 49 II.5, 26; 125.16, 19; 126 VI.1, 13) in the physical sense ‘to pass on’; compare Job 9.5; 14.18; 18.4, where the verb is possibly Hebrew rather than Aramaic. qibbl (‘to receive’, Job 2.10) is regular in Aramaic but exceptional in Hebrew, occurring only in late Hebrew works, for example, Esther (4.4; 9.27), Chronicles (1 Chron. 12.19; 21.12; 2 Chron. 29.16, 22), Ezra (8.31) and Ben Sira (12.5). Here despite its incidence in Ugaritic in the fourteenth century BCE we are entitled to accept it in Job as an Aramaism. Despite the afnities with Hebrew we must remember that Ugaritic was a northern Canaanite dialect,10 so that a word like qibbl in this sense evidently 9. Kautzsch 1902: 101; Gray and Driver 1921: xlvi-xlvii. For Guillaume it is sufcient that a word has a possible Arabic cognate to rule out the possibility of Aramaism. N.H. Snaith (1968) also follows this line, though adducing certain instances where the assumed Aramaisms have Ugaritic cognates. It is signicant that Pope, whose Ugaritic equipment is much superior to Snaith’s, while no more convinced than the writer by Tur-Sinai’s main thesis, treats his demonstration of the Aramaic element in Job with much more respect than Snaith (Pope 1965: livf.). 10. This was emphasized by J. Cantineau (1932; 1940: 59-61), J. Aistleitner (1937: 38f.), J. Friedrich (1933: 27; 1951), and A. Goetze (1936: 142), who regard Ugaritic as a new language hitherto unattested which lay between Biblical Hebrew and Akkadian, characterized by H. Bauer as ‘Saphonisches’ (1935), by Goetze as ‘Amorite’ and by Aistleitner as ‘altmesopotamisches Westsemitisch’, which recognized the Amorite, or North-West Semitic features characteristic of the dialect of Mari in the early second 1
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survived in Aramaic in the region, but not in Classical Hebrew before the fth century BCE. In Job 22.28 Snaith rightly claims that the verb gzar in the basic sense ‘to cut’ is attested in Ugaritic as well as Arabic, from which the sense it has in Job and Est. 2.1, ‘to decree’, is derived. The word has this sense in the Mishnah, Talmud and modern Hebrew, but here it is probably inuenced by the usage in those late Hebrew passages. The fact remains that it is in Aramaic that it has the regular sense ‘to decree’, and its incidence in the late Hebrew passages surely indicates Aramaism. The same may be said for emh (‘beware!’), which should probably be read in Job 36.18 for MT mh. It is true that this has cognates in Arabic ama(y) (‘to protect’) and Ugaritic myt in the phrase gr myt (‘an alien in sanctuary’, Gordon UT 2.27f.); compare Akkadian ¨amatu (‘sanctuary, protection’). This is obviously the root of Hebrew ômh (‘wall’) so that it is only a matter of chance that the verb is unattested in Hebrew except possibly in Job 36.18. Here again the exceptional incidence in the late Hebrew work and the relative frequency of amh and am’ in Aramaic must indicate Aramaism in the passage. In a case like ma‘alîm ‘Ñh (‘obscuring [God’s] purpose’, Job 42.3) the rst radical consonant of the verb may suggest the Aramaic variation of Hebrew Ñ. Here, however, Ugaritic lm (‘darkness’, UT Krt 10; 125, 50) may indicate a Classical Hebrew root ‘lam (‘to be dark’), which Dahood would recognize in Eccl. 3.11 (Dahood 1952: 38). The verb ‘lam, however, is well attested in preexilic Hebrew works in the sense of ‘to hide’, which is not unconnected with the sense ‘to be dark’ or Ugaritic lm, which is the sense of the verb in Job 42.3 and possibly in Eccl. 3.11. Since we are unable to attest the root in the sense ‘to be dark’ in Aramaic or Syriac, the passages in Job 42.3 and Eccl. 3.11 may indicate Aramaic inuence on the pronunciation of Hebrew rather than an Aramaic root. In his study ‘Hebrew Poetic Diction’, G.R. Driver cautions us against concluding from Aramaic roots in a Hebrew work which are known only through Aramaic sources that that of itself is evidence for the late date of the work. Contending that Aramaic is by far the largest single extraneous element in the Hebrew language (Driver 1953a), he has noted strong Aramaic inuence in the Elohistic narrative source of the Pentateuch and Hosea in northern Israel, with which we may compare Aramaic forms which characterize certain narratives of Elisha in Kings, for example 2 Kgs 4.1-7, 8-37; 5.8-23; 6.24; 7.20, also from northern Israel (Burney 1903: 420ff., 440ff.). Gordis repeats this caution (1965: 162), classifying Aramaic elements in the OT in four categories. He admits rst an Aramaic element, which is reasonable in view of the provenance of the patriarchs from northern Mesopotamia.
millennium BCE and the Canaanite glosses in the Amarna Tablets. Greater emphasis was placed on the Canaanite element by J.A. Montgomery and Z.S. Harris (1935: 10ff.), R. de Langhe (1938), C.H.W. Brekelmans (1962: 6ff.) and particularly C.H. Gordon (1965: 147f.) and M. Dahood (1952; 1962; 1963c; 1964b; besides current articles in Biblica and CBQ). 1
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Secondly he reckons with borrowing from Aramaic in the pre-exilic period, especially from Syria during the days of the kingdom of Damascus, with which Israel had relations friendly and more often unfriendly until the eighth century BCE. In the Northern Kingdom with its interest in the northern part of Transjordan, a border land itself, it is natural to expect afnity of language with Aramaic which was spoken just over the border, just as in the English marches of Northumberland and Cumberland we nd closer afnity in vocabulary and pronunciation with the dialect of the Scottish borders than the English of Oxford or London. Thirdly, in and after the exile, when communities of Jews were isolated in Aramaean communities in Mesopotamia and particularly when Aramaic became the ofcial administrative language in the western provinces of the Persian Empire from the middle of the sixth century BCE, Hebrew was particularly exposed to Aramaic inuence. This is the period in which, on grounds other than language, the Book of Job is usually dated. Finally the current Aramaic is attested increasingly in the targums, Mishnah and the Talmud in the early Christian era. The same case is developed at greater length and depth by Max Wagner in his important monograph,11 where he examines possible Aramaisms in vocabulary, roots and forms, meanings and phonetic variations in the various books in the OT. He reaches the conclusion that Aramaic contributed at all times to the vocabulary and grammatical forms in Hebrew either by the inuence of Old Aramaic in local dialects in Palestine or, in the case of late books like Job, through the currency of Aramaic from the sixth century BCE to the Masoretic standardization of the text of the OT, which in fact it may to a great extent have determined.12 In Wagner’s tabulated summary of his survey and conclusions on vocabulary (Wagner 1966: 139-43) we nd that though there are Aramaisms of one or other of those classes in every book of the OT (except possibly Nahum) they are particularly frequent in exilic or postexilic books, especially Esther,13 Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, the Hebrew section of Daniel and, to a lesser extent than those, Job, especially in the Elihu section.14 From the considerable evidence of Aramaisms of various categories in the earlier books of the OT we should not be prepared to take automatically all Aramaic words and forms as reecting the Aramaic of the exilic or postexilic period. Nevertheless their 11. Wagner 1966. Wagner cordially endorses Driver’s views of the inuence of Aramaic on Hebrew throughout the OT, which had already been expressed by D. Winton Thomas in Record and Revelation (1938: 386-91). Wagner species more particularly what constitutes an Aramaism. 12. So Meyer 1957: 139ff.; 1958: 45ff.; Baumgartner 1959: 209. 13. Wagner includes Persian loanwords through Aramaic. 14. Wagner gives the percentage of Aramaisms in the whole vocabulary of Job excluding the Prologue and Epilogue and the Elihu sections as 1.6%, of the Elihu sections as 2%, of Song of Songs as 2.2%, of Ecclesiastes as 3.1%, of Daniel 1.75%, and of Esther as 5.3% (excluding Persian loanwords through Aramaic 4%). 1
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exceptional frequency in Job in contrast to pre-exilic works and in comparison to postexilic books makes it probable that they do reect the currency of Aramaic at that time, when Wagner demonstrates that even on the most generous estimate of Aramaisms in the earlier sources, this element increased six-fold (1966: 149f.). Granted that the number of Aramaisms Wagner nds in Job may require to be reduced in the light of Ugaritic elements with afnity with the Canaanite rather than the Aramaic substratum of Hebrew, there is still a comparatively substantial element of Aramaism in Job, though, in comparison with the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes and Esther, not enough to suggest that the book was a translation of an Aramaic original. In conclusion, we may note that that nota accusativa ’et, which is regular in Classical Hebrew, is limited to the prose narrative in the Prologue and Epilogue and certain introductions to the various addresses in the Dialogue, but occurs only thrice in the Dialogue where the MT is questioned in the versions (5.17; 14.3 and 26.4). Elsewhere in the poetic Dialogue, where the nota accusativa is used sparingly, it is always the Aramaic le. We would note also the Aramaic masculine plural termination -în which appears invariably in millîn (‘words’). This noun, incidentally, though occurring in earlier Hebrew works (2 Sam. 23.2), Prov. 23.9 (monarchic) and in the undateable Ps. 139.3, 4, is found in the late postexilic Ps. 19.5 and recurs over 30 times throughout Job from 4.2 to 38.2. The survival of Aramaic elements in Classical Hebrew is understandable in view of the Mesopotamian antecedents of the ’arammî ’¿, the ‘forwandered Aramaean’, and later contacts between northern Israel and northern Transjordan with the Aramaean populations of Syria and the borderlands. What then of the Canaanite substratum of Hebrew evidenced by Ugaritic? In the Late Bronze Age when Egypt claimed suzerainty over Palestine and southern Syria (Canaan) we are familiar with citations and glosses in the Amarna Tablets which have afnity with Hebrew and more particularly with Ugaritic. The repeated deportations of the populations of Palestine and southern Syria to which Egyptian records of that time refer, must have resulted in a large Canaanite population in Egypt, particularly in the north, which was a ready material for exploitation in forced labour, of which the Exodus tradition has preserved vivid reminiscence (Exod. 1.9-14). There is no reason to believe that the ‘mixed multitude’ that traditionally Moses led out of Egypt (Exod. 12.38) was limited to the family of Jacob, the Aramaean forbears of Israel. The majority of those who survived detention in Egypt were probably those deported to Egypt and their descendants. Nor do we nd it likely that Palestine was occupied in the Early Iron Age by a conquering minority of Aramaean stock. We have no doubt that Moses or some such gure with a natural gift of leadership and spiritual charisma was able to weld a ‘mixed multitude’ into a religious community which penetrated into Palestine. In an analysis of the names, local settlement and characteristics of the conventional ‘tribes’ of Israel in Palestine and Transjordan we have contended for the accretion from the nucleus of such a sacral community to a larger sacral confederacy through 1
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attraction of ‘second-class citizens’ disaffected under the petty kings and oligarchies of the small city-states of the land (J. Gray 1988: 439-55) in agreement with the thesis of G. Mendenhall (1962). This symbiosis was put on a rm political basis by David with the emergence of the historic Israel. The linguistic result was the Hebrew of the early narrative sources of the Pentateuch and certain of the Psalms and subsequent literature in ‘the language of Canaan’. We are now prepared to assess the language of the Book of Job on the evidence of the fullest extant representative of Canaanitish, Ugaritic, bearing always in mind that it represents the most northerly of the Canaanite dialects, with afnity with Akkadian and Aramaic dialects in northern Syria and Mesopotamia,15 though the afnity of Ugaritic with other Canaanite dialects in the southern Syria and Palestine including their development in Hebrew was stronger. The Ras Shamra texts, particularly the poetic myths and legends, attest many words which not only formally suggest a cognate with Hebrew, but, being in parallelism with others often in the same combination as in Hebrew,16 give indication of a more precise nuance in the latter than is often the case with cognates cited from other Semitic languages. This in itself is very impressive evidence of the value of Ugaritic for understanding Hebrew texts and in the solution of many problems that abound in such a book as Job. But it is when we study the grammar of the Ras Shamra texts that its pre-eminence for the appreciation of the language of such a book, whether in support or emendation of the MT, is really manifest. To begin with the verb, we encounter here the optative perfect, for example in UT 76 II.20: ¨wt ’a¨t (‘May you live’, sc. ourish, ‘O sister’). This is found also in Arabic, but on the strength of its incidence in Ugaritic, taken with the mass of evidence that may be cited for the afnity of Hebrew and Ugaritic, its closest neighbour, we may condently see Canaanite inuence rather than Arabic in Job’s exclamation on the fateful night of his parents’ marriage (3.3): h¿rh ger (‘May a man-child be conceived!’). The imperfect is used in graphic narrative, though this may express rapid succession of actions in the past like the Akkadian preterite. Like Hebrew and Arabic the jussive and imperfect indicative has often an energic ending, which we must be prepared to nd more often in Hebrew than has been recognized. Thus in Bildad’s second address he opens with the statement: ‘a-’nh Óeîmenn qÑ ’elmillîn17 (‘How long until you put an end to speaking?’, 18.2). Here the recognition of the energic imperfect suggests the emendation of the verb in MT, where the plural is contrary to Bildad’s address to Job. The nal n of the restoration of the text has been corrupted to w in the Old Hebrew script. 15. See above p. 77. 16. Gevirtz 1963; Craigie 1971; 1977; 1979a; 1979b. Watson 1988. 17. MT emended after LXX and 11QtargJob. See above p. 92. 1
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The imperfect is also used in Ugaritic to express purpose after the imperative in anacoleuthon, for example in Gordon Krt 37: rd lmlk ’amlk ldrktk ’aÓbnn Come down from the kingship that I may be king, From your administration that I may occupy the throne.
Compare Job 34.28: le®bî’ ‘lyw Ña‘aqaÓ-dl weÑa‘aqaÓ ‘aniyyîm yišm‘ To bring before him the cry of the poor, That he may hear the cry of the distressed.
This Ugaritic text also illustrates ‘the energic imperfect’ and the root drk expressing ‘rule’ or ordered government; compare Arabic darkatu(n) with the same sense, which we shall have occasion to note in Job as distinct from the usual sense of dere¤ (‘way’) in passages expressing the ordered government of the divine king. The verb in Ugaritic is often introduced by a proclitic l with asseverative force, for example in Gordon UT 51 V.65-66: rbt ’il lkmt šbt dqnk ltÑrk Thou art aged, O El, thou art indeed wise, Surely the grey hairs of your beard instruct thee.
In this passage, almost pure Hebrew, we may note rb in the sense not of ‘great’, as usually in Hebrew, but, as the parallel indicates, ‘aged’, as in Job 32.9: l¿’-rabbîm yekmû ûzeqnîm yînû mišpÓ It is not (just) the aged who are wise, And the old who are discriminate in judgment.
However, it is the asseverative sense of the proclitic l in the Ugaritic text that is really signicant. This we nd to have been repeatedly misunderstood by Hebrew scribes who pointed it in many a passage as the negative l¿’ possibly because it was pronounced lo in Ugaritic, as Gordon suggested. In the MT the effect was to give such passages the diametric opposite of the sense the context demands. One out of many such instances, perhaps the most striking, is in Job’s apologia pro vita sua in 29.24: ’eaq ’alhem le (MT l¿’) ya’ amînû we’ru (MT we’ôr) pnay loyalîqû (MT l¿’ yappîlûn) 1
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If I smiled to them then indeed they gained condence, And if my face shone they fairly beamed.
Confronted by the difculty of the negative l¿’ in the MT Mowinckel and Fohrer cut the Gordian knot by omitting it as a scribal error, while G.R. Driver understood it as interrogative for the more normal hal¿’, the rhetorical question as a strong asseverative. But other instances of MT l¿’ which give the converse of the sense of the context do not support this explanation, for example Job’s objection to his inquisitor in 14.16: kî-‘atth Ñe’ay tispôr letišmôr ‘al-aÓÓ’ Óî (reading le for MT l¿’) But as it is thou dost keep account of my steps, And dost surely mark my transgression.
Here incidentally the parallel Ñe’day indicates that aÓÓ’Óî is, as Eitan proposed (1924: 38-42), probably cognate of Arabic ¨aÓwatu(n) (‘a step’), which the Masoretes pointed as the more familiar Hebrew haÓÓ’aÓ. By happy coincidence we may recognize both senses of the noun by the English translation ‘transgression’. Another usage to emerge in Ugaritic is the signicance of ’al introducing the imperfect. It is already familiar in Hebrew as the negative particle introducing the jussive and occasionally has this force in Ugaritic. In Ugaritic, however, it may also introduce the imperfect indicative, for example in Gordon UT 51.VIII.1: ’idk ’al ttn phm ‘m r Then indeed did they direct themselves to the mountain.
The Masoretes evidently recognized this usage in Ps. 121.3: ’al-yittn lammôÓ ralek ’al-ynûm š¿merek He will not suffer your foot to stumble, Your keeper will not sleep.
This solves an outstanding difculty in Job 13.20, where the sufferer makes his request: ’a¤-šettayim ’al-ta‘a ‘immî Grant me but two requests.
The Ras Shamra texts familiarize us with the conjunction or proclitic k introducing the verb in the nal position in a sentence, which is thus emphasized, for example in Gordon UT Aqhat V.15: gm l’intÓh kyÑh Aloud he cries to his wife. 1
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This is also found in Hebrew though possibly not recognized by the Masoretes or even earlier scribes, for example in the refrain in Ps. 118.10-12: bešm yhwh kî ’amîlm in the name of Yahweh I will drive them away.
It may even introduce and so emphasize a nal sentence, for example in Deut. 32.9: kî leq yhwh ‘ammô ya‘aq¿ eel naalÓô Yahweh’s portion was his people, Jacob the lot which he inherited.
Another phenomenon with the verb in Ugaritic is the nal enclitic m, for example apparently with the participle or innitive absolute in Gordon UT V.10: my b’ilm ydy mrÑ gršm zbln Who among the gods will drive out the sickness, Expelling the disease?.
In such cases m may have an adverbial sense. A nal m with a verb has caused commentators on the OT some perplexity, which might, of course, be resolved by assuming scribal corruption of a nal n or, in the case of the masculine plural, w to m in the Old Hebrew script. Now emendation is obviated in the light of Ugaritic usage, for example in Job 12.27: yemašešû-¿še¤ (MT we) l¿’-’ôr (MT wayyaÓ‘m) kaššikkôr.
Here in colon b the LXX read the Niphal wayyitt‘û, assuming the same subject as for the verb in colon a, and it must be admitted that the nal m in the MT wayyaÓ‘m must have been taken as w in the Vorlage of the LXX. But the Masoretes must have found nal m in the text they transmitted, which was probably in scriptio defectiva. They then took the nal m as the pronominal sufx, pointing accordingly, so changing the subject, converting the Niphal of the verb into the Hiphil. Final m appears also in Ugaritic as a substitute for a preposition, for example in Gordon UT Krt 265-66: Ónh kspm ’atn wÓlÓ ¨rÑm Two (thirds) of her I will give in silver, Yea, a third in gold.
Or nal m may be used as a supplement to the preposition, for example km (‘as’), bm (‘in, with, at, on, from’), lm (‘to, for, from’), which evidently 1
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survived in Hebrew kemô, bemô, lemô. Final m attached to a noun, as in gm (‘aloud’, lit. ‘with a voice’), or to a verb, either participle or innitive absolute as in gršm (‘driving away’), may have an adverbial sense. This usage has survived in Hebrew in the adverbs innm (‘in vain’), piÓ’¿m (‘suddenly’), ’omnm (‘truly’), rêqm (‘empty-handed’) and yômm (‘by day’) (de Langhe 1946). Certain prepositions in Ugaritic have meanings beyond the usual sense of their Hebrew equivalents. Thus b, as well as meaning ‘at, by, with, in, on’ as in Hebrew, may mean ‘from’, for example Gordon UT 1 Aqht. 75, 113: bph rgm lyÑ’a bšpth hwt Word passed from her lips, Declaration from her lips.
Incidentally, this attests a word hwh (Akkadian awatu) which must be recognized in Job 6.30: ’im-ikkî l¿’-yîn hawwôt (‘Can my palate not discriminate words?’). The sense of ‘from’ is illustrated in Job 12.10: ’ašer beyô neeš kol-y werûa kol-bear-’îs.
Here ‘îs in the sense of ‘man’, assumed in the pointing of the MT, is unapt. The chiastic parallelism demands something corresponding to beyô. So MT ’îs is probably a corruption in the square script attested at Qumran of an original ’ûš (‘gift’), cognate with Arabic ’awu(n) and Ugaritic ’ušn and the verbal element in the theophoric name Jehoash. This being so beyô means not ‘in his hand’ but ‘from his hand’. The passage incidentally illustrates another distinctive feature of Ugaritic poetry which survived in Hebrew, the pronominal sufx doing double duty in a couplet. The passage in Job may then be rendered: From whose hand are all who live, And whose gift is all esh?
Another case of be meaning ‘from’ as well as le with this sense is Job 20.20b-21a: beomeô (MT baamûô) l¿’ yemmlÓ ’ên-rî le’o¤elô No one escapes from his greed, There is no survivor from what he devours.
We nd another case of be meaning ‘from’ in Job 19.19: ta‘aûnî kol-me Óê sôî wezeh-’hatî nehpe¤û-î All the men of my society have shown their abhorrence of me, And those I moved have turned from me. 1
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This passage illustrates another correspondence with Ugaritic, zeh corresponding to Ugaritic d, which is the regular relative pronoun in Aramaic. This may be a feature of Ugaritic as a northern Canaanite dialect with afnities with the Semitic dialects of northern Syria and Mesopotamia, which emerge to our notice as Aramaic. That the sense of le (‘from’) was once more familiar in Hebrew is indicated by the compound preposition mille and lemin. In the OT the preposition ‘al means normally ‘against’, like ‘im, or ‘upon’, but is found where the meaning ‘to’ is expected, for example in Job 31.5: ’im-hla¤tî ‘im-šw’ wattaaš ‘al-mirmh raglî If I have gone to evil, And my foot has hastened to treachery.
Compare Gordon UT 127.39: ‘l ’abh y‘rb To his father he enters.
It is signicant, however, that this is not a regular usage in Ugaritic, but is used exceptionally in this passage in the Krt Legend of being admitted to the presence of a dignitary, here the king, who would of course be seated while the one who entered stood ‘above’ him. Despite the evidence of ‘al in this sense from Ugarit, its recurrence in Aramaic passages in Dan. 2.24; 4.31, 33, 6.7, 18; Ezra 4.12, 23 and so on indicates that in such a passage in Job as the one we have cited this may be an Aramaism. The preposition ‘m as well as meaning ‘to’ as in Aramaic and Syriac but not in Hebrew, and ‘with’, which is regular in Hebrew, evidently was at one time patient of the meaning ‘from’, to judge from the compound preposition in Hebrew m‘im. We are not able to attest this meaning in Ugaritic, but the compound preposition may indicate this sense of ‘im in a southern Canaanite dialect from which Hebrew developed. However this may be, this seems to be the sense of ‘im in Job 27.13 in the MT: zeh leq (-’m) rš‘ ‘im-’l wenaalaÓ ‘rîÑîm miššadday yiqqû This is the portion of the wicked man from God, And the lot of the violent which he will receive from the Almighty.
Here the parallel with ‘arîÑîm may indicate the plural reš‘îm in colon a, and the collocation of ‘ and m might suggest the more familiar preposition m‘im, with haplography of m. Impressive as we nd these correspondences between Ugaritic and Hebrew poetry in vocabulary and grammar, the instances we have cited are a mere fraction of what must be cited in any commentary on Job, as the publications of the late M. Dahood, including one specially on Job, have shown, even if 1
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one must occasionally qualify his conclusions.18 In the passages we have cited, beyond the features we have especially mentioned, the close correspondence with Hebrew, especially Hebrew poetry, will have been noticed, indicating a correspondence far exceeding that of any other cognate language, which is mainly conned to vocabulary. The correspondence of Hebrew with Ugaritic extends much further, to style in the parallelism of members symmetric, antithetic, cumulative and chiastic and to the plethora of imagery common to both and the wealth of mythology in Israelite literature which is invested with a new meaning in the new medium, the signicance of which is to be fully understood in the light of its Sitz im Leben in Ugarit. However we may appreciate the Canaanite substratum of Hebrew and the extent to which the author of Job drew upon the poetic tradition of Canaan, we must recognize that Hebrew language was no arrested development. Thought and expression in Israel developed and matured with political development and contact with the outside world, Egypt in the time of Solomon and the Aramaeans of Syria. With those widening horizons in Solomon’s reign, and under his patronage, professional administrators and their instructors came into contact with the sapiential works and traditions of Egypt and probably Mesopotamia and found their own expression of Wisdom so stimulated. New expressions were occasioned by the spiritual development promoted by the liturgy of the Temple and evidenced by the Psalms and by the great prophets. The Book of Job is poetry of the highest quality, which drew generously upon the resources of Canaanite poetry and used a wealth of language often beyond the scope of current Hebrew, at least so far as it is attested, the meaning of which we may gather from cognates in kindred Semitic languages, subject always to the test of congruency with the context and the parallelism of members in Job. However, the more we know of Hebrew literature the more we are impressed with the uency of the author of Job in Hebrew language as it had developed through the history of Israel, his natural application of its idiom, thought and literary forms. With consummate ease and mastery he adapted the literary forms and their associated themes and expressions. This he does sometimes in support of the orthodox theology of Job’s friends in the Hymn of Praise and the proverbial wisdom they cite and represent or in the declarations on the fate of the wicked from Wisdom psalms. He may on the other hand adapt this material in his criticism of current orthodoxy. He even daringly parodies Psalm 8 (at 7.17-18), while the thought, vocabulary and imagery of the Plaint of the Sufferer in the Psalms echo throughout the book, with verbal and thematic echoes of Jer. 20.14-18 and Lam. 3.8-9 in 3.3-10 and 19.5-8 respectively. Job’s apologia pro vita sua in ch. 29 reects the Israelite ideal of social responsibility expressed in the psalms and prophets, while his 18. Cf. the just yet critical appraisal of Dahood’s use of Ugaritic material in his AB commentary on Psalms by P.C. Craigie in the latter’s excellent commentary on Psalms 1– 50 (1983). 1
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Oath of Purgation reects such a declaration of integrity as is expressed in Psalm 15, a liturgy of access to worship in the Temple, and more particularly in substance, the social demands of the Decalogue, and in form, the Twelve Adjurations in Deut. 27.10-26. From such correspondences then we have little doubt that in language, thought and form, the Book of Job is in the mainstream of traditional Hebrew which had developed until the fth century BCE, with other linguistic elements, like Aramaic, strictly secondary.
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Chapter 9 THE ARGUMENT
In the Prologue the author’s adaptation of his source poses the problem of the reaction of a person to what Hebrew thought ascribes to a benecent and just God in the vicissitudes of life. The tradition of Israel in cult, prophecy and Wisdom encouraged humans to expect that in conformity to the revealed nature and will of God they might expect material expression of his favour as they might expect deance of the divine will for society to result in condign punishment. This expression of divine justice, or theodicy, is notably inculcated in the Book of Proverbs with its many graphic illustrations of the principle in salutary admonition to prospective leaders of society. As a result, the overall impression is that of a utilitarian morality, which must lead one to question the motivation of the approved conduct of ‘a man perfect and upright, fearing God and shunning evil’ (1.8). This is done by the agency of the Ón in the Prologue, and the stage is set to assess God’s faith in humanity as the apex of his creation, his ‘servant’, one devoted to and governed by the divine will and the recipient of his favour, by the acid test of faith in adversity. From this trial the sufferer emerges with faith unimpaired in what the author has retained of his source in Job’s classical response (1.21): Naked I came out of my mother’s womb And naked shall I go away again whither I shall go; Yahweh gave and Yahweh has taken, Blessed be the name of Yahweh.
In this declaration God’s faith in humanity is gloriously justied in his fortitude in adversity, which the Wisdom tradition of Israel inculcated, and which is one of the cardinal elements in the Arab ideal of manhood (mur’atu[n]). With the dialogue and its prelude in Job’s curse on the day of his birth the author’s proper contribution begins. Despite the sturdy faith of the sufferer in Job’s declaration in 1.21 and 2.10 the reader may well be disturbed by the suffering of the exemplary Job by the permissive will of God, which, to be sure, seriously modies the teaching of the sages in Proverbs. This is shared by the author in his controversial adaptation of his source, reected in Job’s curse on the day of his birth (ch. 3). Though in the Prologue he has rmly rejected his wife’s advice to ‘curse God and die’ (2.9), Job, though not cursing his creator, curses his creation in his curse of the day he was born (3.3ff.). The 1
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very purpose of life is questioned in the light of his unmitigated suffering (3.20, 23): Why is life given to one in trouble… To a man whose way is hidden And about whom God has set obstructions?
We have little doubt that this is more than a general academic question, but regard it as reecting the personal agony of the author in contrast to the dismissal of life and its experiences and aims as ‘vanity’ by ‘the gentle cynic’. This intimate personal involvement characterizes Job’s arguments in response to his friends throughout the Dialogue with progressive intensity, where the arguments of traditional Wisdom on the mutual relationship of God and humanity are subjected to the author’s keen and controversial criticism. In the opening of the Dialogue Job’s impassioned personal reaction in questioning the meaning of the life of a person like himself tormented by unrelieved suffering is rebuked by Eliphaz (4.3-6; 5.2) as the betrayal of the unimpassioned reaction of a human to the vicissitudes of life commended by Hebrew Wisdom: Your words would raise the fallen, You would strengthen bowing knees; But now when it reaches you, you cannot bear it, And when it comes to you, you are non-plussed… For resentment kills the fool, And passion is the death of the simpleton.
Signicantly, in his questioning of the meaning of life in face of his suffering (ch. 3), Job has not introduced the subject of his innocence. One’s sufferings are indeed related to the will of God, who circumscribes one’s freedom (3.23), though the controversial note has been sounded by Job’s wife: Are you still unshaken in your integrity? Curse God and die!
In Job’s curse on the day he was born, with his harrowing plaint of his sufferings, there is no question of their relation to his conduct. This is introduced by Eliphaz, insisting on the doctrine of the theodicy represented in traditional Hebrew theology, as in the Deuteronomistic history, prophecy and proverbs. This is the reply of Wisdom to Job’s bleak pessimism in ch. 3. The kindliest and most mature of Job’s three friends and probably the one who shares his spiritual problem, Elihu, edges the argument ad hominem. He advances from his rebuke of Job’s impassioned expostulation in ch. 3 to God’s animadversion on his failure as a sage and pious man to appreciate God’s Order in his upholding of the innocent and the discomture of the wicked (4.7f.): What man if innocent ever perished, Or where were the righteous cut off? 1
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9. The Argument For as far as I have seen, those who plough in mischief And sow trouble reap it.
Implying rather than explicitly asserting the culpability of the sufferer, Eliphaz proceeds to argue a maiore ad minus that as the celestials are imperfect with relation to God, a mortal is even more morally defective (4.1719): Is a man just vis-à-vis God? Is a man pious vis-à-vis his maker? If he does not commit himself wholly to his servants, And charges even his angels with error, Much more those that inhabit houses of clay, Whose foundations are in the dust.
Eliphaz uses the same argument with more pointed allegation of the culpability of the sufferer in 15.14-16, and, with probably more than a mere hint at Job’s culpability, he states (5.6f.): Mischief does not grow out of the soil, Nor trouble spring from the earth. Trouble is innate in a man As soaring ight in Reshef’s brood.1
The sufferer is more overtly indicted by Zophar in the rst cycle or the Dialogue (11.6), and from this point, provoked by Job’s pointed criticisms of the friends’ arguments for the theodicy as applied to his particular case, their indictment intensies until Eliphaz’s specic charges in 22.4-11, which, however, we prefer to regard as in the design of the author to introduce specic charges to answer in anticipation of Job’s apologia (ch. 29) and oath of purgation (ch. 31). Meanwhile Eliphaz commends Job to God’s mercy in anticipation of relief from his suffering enhanced by material favour (5.8, 17-26), and this is, signicantly, at this stage of the Dialogue the approach of Bildad (8.5-7) and even the acrimonious Zophar (11.13-19), in whose statement, in anticipation of the indictment pressed against Job, the relationship between sin and suffering is more directly implied (11.4-6). However, while the plea to God which Eliphaz recommends might be understood as one for relief from unmerited suffering, the drift of the friends’ argument indicates rather that it is the plea of the penitent sinner and not the man of whom God approved without qualication in the Prologue. Apart from the arguments of the friends for the suffering of humans in the divine economy as retributive, which they support by all too familiar experience (5.3-7, 13-16; 8.8-22; 15.20-35; 20.5-29) and by graphic aphorism (18.5-21), Eliphaz proposes the explanation of suffering as discipline which betokens the favour or God, not, however, without the implication that such 1. Vultures. See Commentary ad loc. 1
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chastisement is for some degree of sin. This view is propounded in the Elihu addendum, which suggests that such discipline as well as being therapeutic to a sinner may also be preventative (33.14-30). In reply to Eliphaz’s mild rebuke to his impassioned outburst on the curse of the day of his birth Job’s despair is not assuaged by Eliphaz’s generalities regarding the limitations of humans and their natural propensity to trouble (active or passive). He is not encouraged by Eliphaz’s observations of the effective justice of God in the retribution of the wicked and his blessing on the righteous and the repentant sinner. Indeed, Eliphaz’s recommendation of an appeal for God’s mercy (5.8), coupled with his declaration that trouble is innate in humans, surely implies the belief in a necessary connection between sin and suffering, which dominates the argument of Job’s friends throughout the Dialogue. Many obvious instances of such a connection may be adduced, though the realist may cite all too obvious modications in the case of blatant materialists (21.7-15). Granted, however, the general experience that sin in more and less degree results physically, mentally and spiritually in suffering, we may not infer that in every case suffering is the consequence of sin. This logical fallacy impairs the argument of Job’s friends from rst to last in the Dialogue. Nor indeed can Job, despite his clear conscience, divest himself of the fallacy, imputing his suffering to God’s allegation of sin. The logical fallacy is nally exposed in the divine rebuke that Job convicts the Almighty while exculpating himself (40.8). Firm in the conviction that his suffering was unmerited at the hand of God (7.12-21) the sufferer breaks out in apostrophe to God (7.12): Am I Sea or Tannin That you set a watch over me?
Alluding to the traditional theme of God’s effective conict with the forces of chaos, Job animadverts on the Order established by God in creation culminating in the creation of humanity in the image of God, capable of response to him according to the revelation of the divine nature and will expressed in society governed by his Order. The sufferer thus rejects Eliphaz’s citation of the Divine Order in nature and society (5.5-16) in his encouragement to convince Job that humans are not the victims of blind chance of an arbitrary divine power but, under the divine economy, may look for relief and favour beyond their present suffering, just as sinners may expect retribution (5.11-27). The signicance of this expression of faith may be grasped by the recognition of its place in the faith of Israel in Hymns of Praise to God as King in the great autumn festival (e.g. Pss. 29; 65; 93; 97; etc.), as the ground of assurance in the Plaint of the Sufferer both communal (e.g. Pss. 44; 74) and individual (e.g. Pss. 22.4, 29 [EVV 3, 28]; 102.13, 16 [EVV 12, 15]; 103.20ff. [EVV 19ff.]), and in its application in the prophets in hope (Nah. 1.3-5; Hab. 1
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3.8-15; and particularly Deutero-Isaiah, 51.9 and 40.12-14, the latter of which enumerates the cosmic exploits of the Divine Creator in a series of questions reecting the sapiential tradition, as in the Divine Declaration on the same theme in Job 38.1-39; 40.25-30 [EVV 41.1-6]). So in the recurrence of the theme in the statements of Job’s friends and its corollary in the assertion of God’s Order in society (e.g. 8; 15.20ff.; 18.5ff.) we have matter which might lift the sufferer beyond his nihilistic despair, his obsession with his unmerited suffering and his doubt of the interest and of the justice of God. Or again the application of the theme in prophecies of doom (e.g. Jer. 10.12-16; Isa. 26.22; 27.1) is made by Job’s friends in their reply to his intensied challenge to the traditional doctrine they represent. But this the author counters in Job’s parody of Ps. 8.4f. in Job 7.17 and his sarcastic criticism (12.10-23), with emphasis on the destructive activity of God in his otherwise ordered creation in nature and society (9.4-24), with particular reference to the case of the worthy sufferer (9.11ff.), whom God condemns to torture without a fair hearing (9.14-20, 3235). So in his response to the encouragement or censure of his friends the sufferer either relapses into the nihilistic prospect of ch. 3, recurring in 7.1-10, 14-21; 10.18-22; 14; 17.11-16, or aspires, too often in vain, to a hearing in confrontation with God, when he may state his case, condent in his innocence, thus challenging the justice of the Almighty, the traditional belief which, however, he cannot quite renounce despite all apparent evidence to the contrary which his sufferings suggest (13.14-22; 16.18-21). In such a confrontation Job might expect God to state his grounds of complaint which occasion Job’s suffering (10.22; 13.23f.): I will say to you, ‘Do not condemn me, Inform me of your case against me… Then call, and I will answer, Or let me make a statement, and you answer.
Besides natural disasters cited by Job (10.5-7; 12.14-22), which impair God’s Order that Job’s friends allege, the sufferings of the worthy man, such as disease and at the hands of oppressors or traducers, recur in Job’s lamentations (7.5-10; 16.8-16; 19.15-20) in the language and imagery familiar in the Plaint of the Sufferer in the Psalms. There, however, in the context of the cult they are incidental to the rehabilitation of the sufferer in God’s Order either in anticipation or in thanksgiving. The author of the book of Job, true to sapiential tradition, faces life’s problems independently of the cult, and the sufferings of the worthy man are presented in all their stark simplicity, indeed in the context of a Job’s apologia pro vita sua (chs. 29–30) the disruption of God’s Order without qualication is clearly implied in the fatal impairing of the social potential of the worthy and willing man. In this context then ch. 29 is not a plaint in anticipation of deliverance nor a statement of sufferings from which deliverance is already experienced, but is the statement of a plaintiff with a just cause which he sustains by an oath of purgation (ch. 31). 1
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As humanists, Job’s sage friends support the doctrine of the theodicy, reechoing the summary dismissal of the wicked who seem to disrupt God’s Order in Proverbs. Thus they allege that the wicked may ourish but, like the grass in Ps. 37.2-10, this will be but for a time, when their end will be complete (Job 5.3; 8.11-19; 15.20-35; 18.5-21; 20.5-29). In Job’s statements there is no such prospect. It is true that, apart from obvious retribution, the physical effects of over-indulgence and the anxiety of the violent malefactor in his constant apprehension of retaliation (18.11ff.) may be cited in support of the arguments of Job’s friends. However, the miscreant too often dees justice until his death, going down to an honoured burial (21.31-34). In his reply to the condent assertion of the certain end of the wicked in the aphorisms cited by Bildad, the author seriously questions their universal validity (21.17f.). Nor, in his explosion of the current doctrine of the theodicy, does the author admit that the sin of the wicked who die with impunity may be entailed with condign retribution on his descendants (e.g. Exod. 21.5), a communal ethic already modied in Israel by the time of the book of Job (Deut. 24.6; Ezek. 19.18; Job 21.19). Thus the realist rejects the arguments of his orthodox friends and invites, indeed compels, serious consideration of life’s experiences. The author of the Book of Job puts the problem of suffering beyond the scope of theory and objective discussion in relating his unmitigated sufferings to God (3; 6.4-9; 9.11-24; 19.6-12; 21), his problem being more acute in that his sufferings are out of all proportion to his exemplary life noticed in the Prologue. Thus the poet heightens the drama of his work, but such passages, and particularly Job’s apostrophes to the Almighty (7.12-21; 9.25-31; 10; 14.16f.), which come as interjections in the debate, surely reect the personal agony of the author, which prompted his great work. This personal agony is intensied in Job’s appeals to God for a hearing where he may sustain his case of a life corresponding to what was recognized in his society as the declared nature and will of God (13.14-17; 16.19-22; 17.3), which prompts the condent, though to be sure only momentary, hope of ultimate vindication (19.25-27): But I myself am sure, the one who will vindicate me is vital, And one who is nal authority will prove himself effective on this earth, And though my skin is stripped from my esh, Even after that I shall come face to face with God, Whom I myself shall see, Whom I shall see with my own eyes, himself and no stranger.
Here the author ventures into a realm peculiarly personal and beyond the scope of traditional Wisdom and current theology. Job’s objections to his friends’ defence of the current conception of the theodicy in its strictly mechanical application on which they insist and his claimant appeals to defend himself before the divine tribunal elicit their response that God is transcendent, beyond the conception and aspiration of mortals and even the celestials (4.17-21; 11.8-10; 15.7f., 15f.; 22.12). The 1
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transcendence of God is the ultimate solution of the problem of Job, as is indicated in the Divine Declaration (38.1–39.30; 40.25-30 [EVV 41.1-6]), which Job nally accepts (40.4-5; 42.2-6). But he does so in the light of its full implications, which are not revealed until the theophany and Divine Declaration. However, in response to his friends’ appeal to the transcendence of God, Job, far from being silenced, considers the transcendence of God an obstacle to his faith in a God who would, according to his essential character that is just and merciful, treat him according to his own norm of justice as the servant of God, as his blameless conduct deserved, or bring to his notice the case which he apparently had against the sufferer, and admit him to a fair hearing. Yet Job’s reaction to his friends’ assertion of the transcendence of God as their ultimate argument is an oscillation between hope and despair. Thus to the prospect of God standing surety for him in the encounter which he so ardently desires (17.3) or to his appeal to God backed by celestial support (16.19f.) and his sanguine hope of vindication by the living God (19.25-27) we may counterpoise his statement that even if a petitioner’s case could be presented no one could win it nor indeed would God consent to answer ‘one question in a thousand’ (9.2f.), nor could a sufferer in such a case expect either response to his just case or mercy (9.15). The alternation of sapiential dialectic and impassioned plaint of suffering by the will of God and particularly direct appeal to him emphasizes the theme of the book as the conict between theological formulation and existential experience, between theology and religion. Thus it culminates in the nearest approach to the confrontation with God which Job has wished, his direct appeal to God in his oath of purgation (ch. 31) prefaced by his apologia pro vita sua (ch. 29) and his plaint (ch. 30), which in such a context is tantamount to a charge against God for permitting the impairment of the social potential indicated in ch. 29, and God’s response in the Divine Declaration. Here the author leaves the controversial eld of the Dialogue for the nal solution of his problem, signicantly between Job himself and God, whom he has been apostrophizing throughout the debate with his friends in the Dialogue. In the theophany in thunder, where the poet uses the imagery of the revelation of the sovereignty of God in the Enthronement Psalms (Pss. 29; 46; cf. Amos 1.2; Joel 3.16), and in the Divine Declaration Job nally ‘sees’ God. That is to say he is brought to an overwhelming sense of the presence and power of God, tremendous beyond the full comprehension and scope of human competence, yet of compelling attraction and compelling response as in the call of Isaiah (Isa. 6.5, 9): Woe is me! For I am lost… For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts… And I answered, ‘Here am I; send me’.
The Divine Declaration is not the answer Job would expect. It is in fact a rebuke, and as such it is a reply to Job’s allegation of divine injustice in his 1
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suffering, which, through the logical fallacy we nave noticed, he regarded as the consequence of sin imputed to him by God. To the logical fallacy God’s condemnation of Job’s ‘words without knowledge’ (38.2b) might specically refer. The gist of the divine reply, however, exposes the inadequacy of the mechanical application of the humanly formulated doctrine of the theodicy with relation to the eternal counsel, or purpose (‘Ñh) of God (38.2a). The latter theme is elaborated in an impressive series of ironical questions which pose the limitations of humans in contrast to the manifold evidences of the power and wisdom of the creator, all of which attest His positive purpose. These ironical questions culminate in the passage 40.7-14, which asserts God’s Order in society and exposes, or at least implies, human limitations to make that order effective, even though he might acknowledge it. The rebuke, however, is tempered by the emphasis on the Providence of God as evidenced by the regulation of nature to the benet of humans (38.3137) even apart from human advantage, with rain upon the uninhabited desert (38.26f.) and his provision for the beasts of the wild (38; 39; 40.25-30 [EVV 41.16]) with their characteristics beyond humans’ control for their convenience. Humanity, we are thereby reminded, is not the measure of God’s universe, and if humans are chastened by being reminded of this, a wider prospect is thereby opened which enables them to emancipate themselves from the limitations of a deterministic theodicy as formulated by current doctrine and to renew their faith in the Divine Creator and his inexhaustible providence. The fact that Job has the grace to acknowledge this justies God’s faith in them, which is explicitly expressed in the Epilogue, which is accepted and adapted by the author as more than the happy ending of a popular story. However, apart from the wider prospect of the divine purpose disclosed to the perplexed sufferer to lift him from his self-pity and rebuke his selfrighteousness, raising him into a realm where he may expect ever fresh disclosure of the divine power and grace, the mere fact of God’s self-manifestation to Job is the effective answer to his real problem. It is this that dispels for him ‘the dark night of the soul’. His suffering does not betoken the alienation of the sufferer from God as though he were, as the friends alleged, a sinner. The traditional theology, the systematization of thought about God on the basis of humans’ limited experience and understanding is not commensurate with religion, the encounter with and response to the living God. Having ‘seen God’ (42.5a), possibly with the nuance of the courtly idiom in ancient Israel, having been admitted to the presence of God, Job is relieved of his burden and freed from his ordeal. With a new assurance to face life and its problems, he regains his composure. It is only in the personal encounter, granted at length to Job, that his problem may be solved and he and all humans may be adjusted to bear his suffering, like the sufferer in Psalm 73, who agonized over the same problem and found peace of mind in communion with God (Ps. 73.26): My heart and my esh may fail, But God is my portion for ever. 1
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Here, the sage author of the Book of Job may full the ideal of Wisdom in maintaining patience in afiction but, like those rallied by the great prophet of the restoration from the exile, he is prepared to wait upon the Lord that he might renew his strength (Isa. 40.31).
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Part II COMMENTARY
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Job 1 and 2 THE PROLOGUE
As an introduction to the Dialogue (4-27), Job’s curse on the day of his birth (3), his oath of purgation and its prelude (29–31), the Theophany and Divine Declaration (38.2–40.2, 6-14) and Job’s response (40.3-5; 42.2-6), the author of the Book of Job reworks his source in the popular Hebrew form recast in a patriarchal setting, but showing evidence of elaboration, probably by the author of the book as late as the end of the sixth century BCE. See further, General Introduction, pp. 56-75. The narrative prologue to a sapiential work recalls the Protest of the Eloquent Peasant on social injustice (ANET, 407-10), the Aramaic Proverbs of Ahiqar (ANET, 427-30) and the Book of Tobit. The literary form of the Prologue is the oral saga or folk legend, with quick succession of dramatic events, dramatic direct speech, verbal repetition, round numbers, seven, three, ve and their multiples, and the remarkable survival of one man only in all the disasters. This indicates the author’s familiarity with the Job tradition in popular oral form on the subject of a man’s faith in God’s just and benecent providence in face of all appearances to the contrary. The narrative is reminiscent of the narratives of the Hebrew patriarchs in the earliest sources of the Pentateuch, but the cadence is more regular and is often almost as regular as poetry. The assonances, word-plays, rare vocabulary and forms are more characteristic of poetry than of prose. The Prologue falls into two parts: 1. Job’s prosperity (1.1-5), his faith impugned (6-12), the test of adversity (13-19), Job’s declaration of steadfast faith (20-22). 2. Further impugning of Job’s faith (2.1-6), the intensication of the test of his faith (7-8), Job’s faith despite counsels of despair (9-10), the visit of his friends (11-13). The scenes in the heavenly court (1.6-12; 2.1-6), which are each followed by tests of Job’s faith (1.13-19; 2.7-8), are particularly signicant as emphasizing that, however critical the sage intends to be in the Dialogue, he is a constructive writer who is prepared to consider human contingencies sub specie aeternitatis, which is the view eventually expressed in the Divine Declaration in the Dialogue (38.2–40.2, 7-14). As Fohrer (1963b: 69) rightly stresses, the Prologue emphasizes not the question of the theodicy, but that of human reaction to the vicissitudes of life, where the attitude of traditional wisdom is going to be critically examined in the Dialogue. 1
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Chapter 1 1. 2. 3.
4. 5.
6.
8.
9. 10.
11.
12.
13.
15.
16.
1
There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. And that man was perfect and upright, fearing1 God and shunning evil. And seven sons and three daughters were born to him, and his property was seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, and ve hundred yoke of oxen, ve hundred she-asses and a great many servants; and that man was greater than all the peoples of the East. His sons used to go and hold a feast in one another’s houses day about, and they would send and invite their three2 sisters to eat and drink with them. And when the feast-days were over, Job would send and have them puried. He would get busy in the morning and offer up sacrices for each of them, for Job said: Perhaps my sons have sinned And cursed3 God in their mind. So did Job on all the occasions. Now one day the celestials came and presented themselves before Yahweh and among them came also the Ón. 7. And Yahweh said to the Ón, ‘Where are you coming from?’ And the Ón answered Yahweh and said: ‘From going to and fro in the earth And walking about in it.’ Then Yahweh said to the Ón: ‘Have you considered4 my servant Job, How there is none like him in the earth, A man perfect and upright, Fearing God and shunning evil?’ And the Ón answered Yahweh and said: ‘Is it for nothing that Job fears God? Have you not yourself set a hedge5 completely About him and his house And about all that he has? His undertakings6 you have blessed, And his cattle have passed all bounds in the land. But stretch forth your hand And touch whatever he has, And he will assuredly curse7 you to your face.’ Then Yahweh said to the Ón: ‘Lo, all he has is in your power; Only on himself do not put forth your hand.’ And the Ón went out from the presence of Yahweh. And one day his sons and daughters were eating and drinking8 in their eldest brother’s house, 14. when a messenger came to Job and said: ‘The cattle were ploughing And the she-asses were grazing beside them,9 When the Sabaeans made a raid and took them, And smote the lads with the edge of the sword, And I alone escaped to tell you.’ While he was yet speaking another came and said: ‘Lightning fell from the sky And blasted the sheep and the lads10 and consumed them, And I alone escaped to tell you.’
The Book of Job 17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
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While he was yet speaking another came and said: ‘The Chaldaeans laid an ambush in three bands, And broke out against the camels and took them; The lads they smote with the edge of the sword, And I alone escaped to tell you.’ While11 he was yet speaking another came and said: ‘Your sons and daughters were eating and drinking12 In the house of their eldest brother, When, lo, a great wind Came from across the desert And struck13 the four corners of the house And it fell on the young people and they were killed, And I alone escaped to tell you.’ Then Job rose up and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and did obeisance, 21. and said: ‘Naked I came out14 of my mother’s womb And naked shall I go away again whither I shall go. Yahweh gave; Yahweh has taken; Blessed be the name of Yahweh.’ In all this Job did not sin, nor did he ascribe lack of moral discrimination15 to God.
Textual Notes to Chapter 1 1.
2. 3. 4.
5.
6. 7. 8.
9. 10.
11. 12. 1
Reading yer’ for MT wîr as in v. 8 with T and two Heb. MSS, omitting w as a dittograph before y in the rst stage of the Hebrew square script as in the Qumran texts. Reading šlôš for MT šel¿šeÓ as in v. 2, according to the regular grammar of Classical Hebrew and with 1 Heb. MS. MT ûra¤û (lit. ‘and blessed’), a regular euphemism of the orthodox scribes, to whom ‘curse God’ was intolerable. Lit. ‘applied your heart (sc. mind) to’. For MT ‘al we may read ’el with many Heb. MSS as in 2.3, a common scribal confusion characteristic of the time when Aramaic was displacing Hebrew as the spoken dialect in the last pre-Christian centuries. MT a¤t is perhaps a scribal error from akkoÓ from s¤a¤ (‘to screen’), but MT may denote a verb û¤ meaning ‘to set a thorn hedge or barrier’. See Commentary ad loc. Reading ma‘aê with LXX, S and T for the singular ma‘a’h. Lit. ‘bless’, a scribal euphemism; cf. n. 3. Omitting yayin with S and one Heb. MS as a dittograph of y and m in the preceding word š¿Óîm in the Hebrew script; cf. 1.4, where eating and drinking is mentioned without yayin (‘wine’). Reading the pronominal sufx -hen for MT -hem with ve Heb. MSS in agreement with the feminine participles. A possible reading is ûr¿‘îm (‘and [on] the shepherds’), so LXX and S, but we retain MT, which agrees with the reading in v. 17 in a similar context, where there is no question of a variant in the versions. For MT ‘a read ‘ô as in vv. 16 and 17, with many Heb. MSS. Omitting MT yayin with LXX, S and two Heb. MSS; cf. n. 8.
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13. Reading wattigga‘ for MT wayyigga‘ in agreement with the subject rûa, which is generally feminine. Alternatively, Tur-Sinai suggests that wayyigg‘aû ’arba‘ pinnôÓ habbayiÓ should be read, ‘and the four corners of the house were overthrown’; cf. Arab. ja‘aba (‘to throw down’). 14. Reading yÑ’Óî for MT yÑÓî. 15. For MT tilh, LXX reads ‘folly’, which probably reects a reading nelh, a word which means lack of discrimination between right and wrong, the subject of the Dialogue in Job being just this in God’s moral Order according to the orthodox faith. See further note on v. 22.
Commentary to Chapter 1 1. The opening of Job, ’îš hyh (‘there was a man’), recalls the opening of the narrative prologue in the Mesopotamian wisdom text commonly known as ‘the Sumerian Job’ (van Dijk 1953: 29ff.; Kramer 1955). See above, pp. 1-15. On ‘the land of Uz’ in the N. Hejaz see above, pp. 35-36. Various proposals have been made to explain the name Job (’iyyô) in agreement with the subject of the book, for example, the man with whom God was at enmity or ‘the enemy’ (’¿y) of God, or ‘the man who eventually returned’ (cf. Arab. ’ba) to God. The name, however, is not ad hoc, as such views suggest, but is widely attested in the Near East in the second millennium, for instance, in the Egyptian Execration texts from Luxor in the nineteenth century (’ybm), the Brooklyn Papyri from Egypt in the eighteenth century (hybi’ilu), the Mari texts from the eighteenth or seventeenth centuries (Ha-a-ia-a-ba-m), the Alalakh tablets from the fteenth to the fourteenth centuries (Ayabi), administrative texts from the palace of Ras Shamra from the fourteenth century (Hy’abu), the Amarna Tablets in the fourteenth century (Aya-ab). The signicance of the name is probably ‘Where is (God) the Father?’ This, to be sure, would agree with the theme of the book, recalling the gibe of the Bedouin to the disconsolate Doughty, ‘Where is thy God?’ More relevant to the Book of Job is the taunt of the ungodly to the sufferer in Ps. 42.2, 11 (EVV 3, 10). tm weyšr and yer’ ’el¿hîm (‘perfect and upright’ and ‘fearing God’) is characteristic phraseology of wisdom literature; see above, pp. 21-31. 2. Seven sons is the conventional number of saga. Thus in the royal legend of Krt in the Ras Shamra texts it is promised to the king: ’aÓt tq ykrt The wife thou takest, O Krt, ’aÓt tq bbtk The wife thou takest into thy house, lmt tš‘rb zrk The damsel thou bringest into thy court, tld šb’ bnm lk Will bear thee seven sons, wÓmn tÓtmn lk Yea eight times will she bear to thee,
Cf. the psalm in 1 Sam. 2.5 (‘The barren woman has borne seven sons’) and Ruth 4.15. In the Semitic community, however, daughters were economically 1
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and morally a liability, hence in the ideal family they were relatively fewer than the sons; here they are three, to make up the round number of ten children. In his family and property Job is richly blessed, the due reward for his conduct according to the retributory view of morality, which is to come under such severe criticism in the Dialogue. 3. miqneh is ambiguous, meaning both property in general and cattle in particular, in which a man’s wealth was reckoned in the patriarchal age and society in which the narrative framework of the source of the Book of Job was cast. Note again the round numbers 10,000 (7000 and 3000) and 1000 (2 × 500). Job is depicted as a paramount sheikh. The association of camels and ploughing oxen suggests a semi-nomad milieu such as S. Palestine between Gaza and Beersheba, where the semi-nomadic Isaac is said to have sown and reaped (Gen. 26.12). The collective singular ‘auddh is, like miqneh, ambiguous, meaning either servants or slaves. Never at any time had the Israelites any inhibitions against slavery, whether the slaves were acquired as prisoners of war (Deut. 21.11-14; cf. Num. 31.26-47) or aliens bought from slave-dealers (Exod. 12.44; Lev. 22.11; 25.44-45; Eccl. 2.7) or taken in mortgage for debt (Exod. 21.7ff.; Num. 5.1-5), the only case in which an Israelite could hold a fellow-Israelite as a slave, it being necessary to release him in the seventh year if the slave wished to go free (Exod. 21.2-11; Deut. 15.13-14; Jer. 34.14). Slave-trading by Israelites, however, was condemned as the enterprise of foreign Phoenicians (Amos 1.9; Ezek. 27.13), Edomites (Amos 1.6, 9) and of the Greeks (Joel 4.6 [EVV 3.3]). The slave had a certain personal status in Israel, being protected in the Book of the Covenant against personal injury by the master (Exod. 21.20, 26-27) and being admitted to the Passover meal if circumcised (Exod. 12.43) The category of Job’s ‘auddh is not specied, but in the context of the account of his wealth they were probably slaves. The wealth of Isaac as a semi-nomad sheikh in the Negeb is similarly described, with slaves mentioned after cattle, in Gen. 26.14 (J). This enumeration is to be noted also in administrative tablets from the palace of Ras Shamra (ThureauDangin 1937: 246ff.). ‘The people of the East’ (benê-qeem), is vague here as in Gen. 29.1, where it refers to Aramaeans of N. Mesopotamia, Judg. 3.33; 7.12; 1 Kgs 5.10 (EVV 4.30); Isa. 11.14; Jer. 49.28; Ezek. 25.4, 10. Job’s wisdom is associated with that of the ‘people of the East’ whose wisdom was proverbial (1 Kgs 5. 10 [EVV 4.30]), namely the Edomites (Obad. v. 8). 4. In wehle¤û, waw consecutive with the perfect denotes habitual action. mišteh, lit. ‘a drinking feast’, though indicating conviviality, need not exclude a cultic occasion; cf. Amos 2.8. ’îš yômô, lit. ‘each (on) his day’, might denote an auspicious day, possibly his birthday, but probably means ‘in his turn’. In hiqqîû yemê ham-mišteh, in v. 5, it has been feasibly contended that a feast of several days was denoted, possibly on an annual occasion like the seven days 1
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of the New Year Feast of Tabernacles (Deut. 16.13-15). The sheikh among the Arabs has always kept open house, establishing his good name by generosity (Arab. karmu [n]), one of the cardinal Arab virtues. Each one of Job’s sons must have a like opportunity. The presence of the daughters is exceptional and indicates the status of Job’s family and the consciousness of a higher ethical standard in the Jewish community. Convention demanded that Job could not compromise his dignity by being entertained in his sons’ houses. In šel¿šeÓ ’ay¿Óêhem the feminine numeral with the feminine plural noun is exceptional, being instanced only in Gen. 7.13, 1 Sam. 10.3 and Ezek. 7.2—so exceptionally, that is, as to be questionable. Here, however, šel¿šeÓ may be the abstract noun ‘trio’. 5. On hiqqîû yemê ham-mišteh see on v. 4. The verb nqa, ‘to come full circuit’ (of time), is found only here in the Hiphil, and in Isa. 29.1 in the Qal; cf. nqpt in the Ras Shamra texts, for example Gordon UT 52.66-67: šb‘ šnt tmt Ómnt nqpt ‘d
Seven whole years, An eighth circuit besides.
Cf. Gordon, UT 75, 45-46. As in Arab tribal society the father so long as he lived was head of the household, so Job assumed responsibility for the conduct of his sons though they were sufciently adult to have houses of their own. Thus he had his sons ‘sanctied’ (wayeqaddešm), that is, puried from whatever was incompatible with the sacral society, which every community in antiquity was. This he effected here and in 42.8 by offering up whole burnt offerings as the patriarchs had done, an ofce which during the history of Israel was increasingly restricted to Levites and later priests of the house of Aaron. Again the lavish sacrice of a whole beast for each of the family (mispar kullm) is a feature of saga. mispar in this phrase is used adverbially, like the verbal accusative in Arabic. wehiškîm babb¿qer is generally rendered ‘he would rise early in the morning’; Pope aptly renders ‘he bestirred himself in the morning’, observing that when ‘morning’ is explicitly mentioned the verb denotes urgency as here, or, as Jer. 7.13; 25; 11.7; 25.4; 26.5; 32.33; 35.14, 15; 44.4 and Zeph. 3.7 indicate, persistency. The Hiphil indicates a denominative verb from šekem (‘shoulder’) and is a survival, like many expressions in Classical Hebrew, from the nomad past, when the rst task in the morning was the striking of camp and the loading of baggage on the shoulders of beasts of burden. It thus comes to denote the bestirring of oneself to any enterprise. Óe’û may denote unwitting offence, either moral or ritual, as well as conscious sin. lt has been suggested that for MT bilem (‘in their heart’) we should read beÓû lelm, ‘in the exuberance of their heart’ (Joüon 1937: 322), but in this letter-complex the omission of such a distinctive letter as Ó either in the Old Hebrew or the square script is unlikely. The meaning here is 1
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that though convention might forbid articulate deance of God, ‘cursing him’ or ‘making light of him’, for which MT gives the euphemism ‘blessed’, the mood (‘heart’) of the revellers might have implied such an insult or blasphemy. 6. wayehî hayyôm followed by waw consecutive and the imperfect of the verb is the regular expression for ‘there came a day’ (cf. v. 13; 2.1; 1 Sam. 1.4; 14.1; 2 Kgs 4.8, 11, 18; etc.), the denite article signifying in anticipation the particular day when the event happened, that is to say ‘a certain day’ (GKC, §126s) species the day as the New Year day, the second day, when the heavenly court is held (2.1), being specied as the Day of Atonement, ten days later then the New Year day according to P. The New Year was associated with judgment in the postexilic tradition reected in T, but this was not fortuitous. In ancient Canaan, as indicated in the Baal myth from Ras Shamra, the New Year festival in late autumn was the great crisis of the peasant’s year when the kingship of Baal and his establishment of Order in nature was celebrated. This occasion was celebrated also in Israel as an agricultural festival, but owing to the precaution in the days of the settlement to have such festivals celebrated at the central sanctuary of the sacral confederacy, where the tribes expressed their solidarity by the sacramental experience of the Exodus and the Covenant, the kingship of Baal in nature was supplanted by the kingship of Yahweh in nature, in history and in the social order expressed by the religious and social demands of the Covenant. Throughout the monarchy this was the theme of the New Year festival and the source of the postexilic conception of that as the occasion of the great judgment. It was possibly the recurrent questioning of God’s moral Order (mišpÓ) throughout the Dialogue in the Book of Job that led the Targumists to consider this as the occasion of the heavenly assize. benê h’el¿hîm, lit. ‘the sons of God’, denotes divine beings, ‘sons’ signifying those who belonged to a certain category, or circle, like ‘the sons of the prophets’, or members of prophetic guilds. It originally, as in the Ras Shamra texts, denoted members of the divine family, and appears in this sense in the earliest passages in the OT, signifying the gods of other peoples over whom Yahweh was supreme in Israel, as, for example, in Deut. 32.8: When the most High assigned the peoples their portion, When he separated the sons of men, Fixing the boundaries of the peoples, According to the number of the gods (benê ’l, so LXX for MT benê yir’l).
The same situation, implying the worship of Yahweh alone in Israel, but admitting the existence of other gods in other communities, is implied in Exod. 15.11, which was incorporated into J in the early monarchy: Who is like you among the gods, O Yahweh? Who is like you, lordly in holiness? 1
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Cf. Pss. 29.1; 89.7 (benê ’lîm). The present passage reects more closely the settlement of decisive affairs in the government of the world in a heavenly court, or assembly (pr bn’il, Gordon UT 51.III.14; cf. pu¨ur ilani, known in the Babylonian Creation Myth, Enuma Elish, and mp¨rt bn’il in ritual texts from Ras Shamra, Gordon UT 2.17, 34; 107.3, and an inscription from Byblos, and ‘dt ’ilm in Gordon UT 128.II.7, 11). This conception was adopted in Israel with the theme and imagery of the liturgy of the New Year festival of Canaan, celebrating the kingship and government (mišpÓ) of God, and this is a feature of the Enthronement Psalms. The conception, however, was so adapted in Israel that the heavenly court served as a foil to the sole efcacy of Yahweh; cf. Pss. 96.4-5; 97.7, and particularly Ps. 82.1-5. Later ‘the sons of God’ were identied with supernatural forces disposed by God, like ‘the host of heaven’ (1 Kgs 22.19) and later the stars, which were beyond the control of humans, of which there is a reminiscence in Job 38.7 (H.W. Robinson 1943; Cross 1953; Meyer 1961). Eventually when Israel emerged from monolatry to monotheism the gods associated with Yahweh were conceived of as angelic forces subservient to him, executors of his will, like the Ón in Job, or witnesses of the divine decree, or as intercessors for humans before God; cf. 33.23-24. The conception of angelic assessors and executives of God in Judaism became rmly established after the Jews’ contact with Persian Zoroastrianism in the late sixth century BCE, though the beginning of this conception may be seen in the vision of the heavenly court in the episode of Micaiah ben Imlah before Ahab at the gate of Samaria (1 Kgs 22.19-23) from a prophetic source which may be dated to the eighth century BCE. In a juncture which concerns the moral government of God as in the Book of Job, the scene in the divine assembly retains something of its old signicance in Canaan and in the liturgy of the New Year festival in Israel. hiÓyaÑÑ here denotes taking an acknowledged place; cf. Ps. 82.1, also depicting the heavenly court, ’el¿hîm niÑÑ ba‘aaÓ-’l, ‘God takes his place in the divine assembly’ (actually Yahweh takes his place among the other gods in the Assembly of El, the senior god of the Canaanite pantheon, with whom Yahweh God of Israel was eventually assimilated as the universal Most High God). The verb is used in the sense of executives reporting personally to God for his orders in Zech. 6.5. On haÓn, God’s ‘public prosecutor’, as in Zech. 3.1, and not yet as in 1 Chron. 21.1 the personal arch-enemy of God and humanity, and the relevance of this passage for the date of Job see above, pp. 32-38. For the development of the conception of Satan in late Judaism see Bousset and Gressmann (1926). 7. In the reply of the Ón to God’s question, From going about (miššûÓ) in the earth And walking up and down in it,
there is what at rst sight seems to be a word-play between Ón and šûÓ, which describes the activity of God’s agents in terms of the intelligence 1
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service of the Persian Empire, ‘the Eyes of Yahweh’, in Zech. 4.10. Ón, however, as the nal n indicates, is more naturally connected with the verbal root Óan, ‘to oppose’ (Pss. 38.2; 71.13; 109.20), than with šûÓ, and indeed the Ón in Job exceeds his commission as a mere intelligence agent and is rather the Adversary. The verb šûÓ is used of going to and fro, as of the people gathering manna in Num. 11.8, of the ofcers in David’s census of Israel in 2 Sam. 24.2, of the people wandering about seeking water in a drought in Amos 8.12 (in Polel) and of the eyes of the Lord which range all the earth in Zech. 4.10. The complementary verb hiÓhall¤ in the sense of patrolling, or going about inspecting, recalls the patrols of Zech. 1.10-11; 6.5-7. The description in 1 Pet. 5.8 of Satan ‘going about like a roaring lion’ is reminiscent of the passage in Job. 8. ‘Have you considered?’ (haamt libbe¤) means ‘Have you set your heart to?’, that is, applied your mind to, the heart being to the Hebrews the seat not of affection but of cognition. On the reading ’el for MT ‘al (‘upon’), see textual note. Job is designated as the servant (‘ee) of God. The word is ambiguous, denoting servant, slave and worshipper. Certain persons are singled out as God’s ‘servants’ par excellence, for example, kings in ancient Canaan, as, for instance, Krt in the Ras Shamra texts and David in Israel, or prophets, as Moses and others in Israel, and the community which will effect the divine purpose in atonement in Isa. 52.13–53.12. The term expresses the dependence of the servant on the master and the identity of their interests. Job is again described as tm weyšr yer’ ’el¿hîm wesr mr‘; cf. v. 1. His innocence is thus emphasized and singled out as the subject of testing. 9. The question is raised of the disinterested nature of Job’s reverence of God (‘Is it for nothing MT [innm] that Job, fears God?). innm is composed of n (‘free grace’) with the adverbial ending in -m, which is found in Akkadian and Ugaritic as reinforcing, or as a substitute for, the preposition (de Langhe 1946); cf. ’omnm, yômm, piÓ’¿m, rêqm. 10. The personal pronoun ’att is included for emphasis; Job was the special object of divine favour. a¤t as it is pointed in MT is from û¤, used in Hos. 2.8 (EVV 6) of putting a barrier of thorns in the way of a straying beast. Here it denotes doing the same to protect property, that is, crops or grain on the threshing-oor, against beasts. See further, textual note ad loc. missî, generally in Hebrew meaning ‘around’, here probably, like Akk. ana si¨irti, adduced by Dhorme, ‘completely’. praÑ means not only ‘abounded’ but rather ‘has broken all bounds’; cf. Jacob’s ocks (Gen. 30.30). 11. The conditional sentence with the ellipse of the oath in the apodosis and with the negative after the conditional particle in the protasis is the common Hebrew idiom for the strong asseverative. 1
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14. The use of the denite article in hammal’¤, now introduced for the rst time, indicates the focus of the narrator’s attention; cf. happlîÓ (lit. ‘the survivor’) in Gen. 14.13; see GKC, §126q, r. bqr is collective singular and masculine, which makes the feminine plural participle ¿rešôÓ strange. A. Guillaume emphasizes ploughing with cows and uses this as an argument for the provenance of the Book of Job from the Hejaz, citing Doughty’s mention of ploughing with ‘kine’ there. We think this an extremely tenuous argument. Doughty’s ‘kine’ is as general as Hebrew bqr, with no implication of sex. The feminine plural ending of ¿rešôÓ is probably a scribal inadvertency through the inuence of the following two words. She-asses were more numerous than males and more docile and valuable for breeding, where grazing had to be husbanded for the more productive females with the minimum of males for stud. The asses were at hand by the ploughing oxen, being used to ride to the elds and to carry the implements and also to facilitate watching against the sudden razzia. 15. The Sabaeans (še’) are to be distinguished from the Shebans of the S. Arabian mercantile kingdom, which ourished from the tenth century to the fth century BCE (W.F. Albright 1956: 6-10; Van Beek 1956: 6-9). The Sabaeans are a N. Arabian people who have possibly left their name in the Wadi ’shaba NE of Medinah. wattipp¿l suggests the Hebrew verb nal (‘to fall’) and is taken as ‘fell upon’. There is only one clear instance in the OT of nal with the preposition be in this sense, namely Josh. 11.7, and the verb in Job may well have the meaning of ‘plunder’; cf. Arab. nafala (‘to assign booty’), cited in BDB. This may be conveyed by the translation ‘made a raid’. The survival of a single individual in a general disaster is part of the stuff of the popular folk-tale; cf. the survival of the Hebrews’ cattle in two of the plagues of Egypt (Exod. 9.6, 25-26) in the popular elaboration of cult-legend. 16. The popular saga passes on swiftly from one incident to another, and dramatic effect is heightened by the arrival of one messenger of disaster before the other has done speaking. This suits the purpose of the sapiential author admirably as it allows him to come to his proper subject without delay and to emphasize the cumulative suffering of the innocent man. ’š ’el¿hîm, lit. ‘re of God’, is lightning; cf. ’š yhwh in the ordeal between Elijah and the devotees of Baal on Carmel (1 Kgs 18.38; cf. Num. 11.1) and ’š ’elôhîm in 2 Kgs 1.12. ’¤al, lit. ‘ate’ and so ‘consumed’, is regularly used with ’š; cf. 15.34; 20.26, 22.30; etc., and in the Ras Shamra texts, for instance, Gordon UT 75.I.10, kbd k’iš t’ikln, ‘The liver like re they consumed’. 17. kadîm, read kaldîm in Aq., Sym. and V, is the Hebrew term for the Chaldaean, Aramaic, dynasty of Babylon founded by Nabopolassar. The Kaldu were Aramaean tribesmen NW of the Persian Gulf, who menaced S. Mesopotamia like the Arabs in the early seventh century CE, and like them, 1
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nally, overran it. kadîm probably visualizes the Babylonians rather that the tribal Kaldu. This may reect a late recension of the narrative source, with a reminiscence of Chaldaean, Aramaean, Moabite and Ammonite raiding parties against Judah in the last days of the monarchy (2 Kgs 24.2). The situation might well have encouraged raids by predatory tribes like the ‘Sabaeans’ from the N. Hejaz. Alternatively the association of the kadîm with the N. Arabian ‘Sabeans’ might refer to Nabona’id’s occupation of the oases of the Hejaz, which must have made heavy demands on his commissariat. Jewish settlement in the region, well attested in the time of Muhammad, was not unlikely after the disasters under Jehoiakim, Jehoiachim and Zedekiah, and consequent deportations of leading citizens. See further General Introduction, p. 4. mû, lit. ‘they put’, denotes an ambush as in 1 Sam. 15.2, where the verb is transitive. In this case MT šel¿šh r’šîm (‘three hands’, lit. ‘three heads’) is an adverbial accusative and not the direct object of mû. This sense of m is supported by the verb pšaÓ which is used of deploying from an ambush in Judg. 9.33f.; 20.37; 1 Sam. 23.27; 30.14. The verb is probably cognate with Arab. baaÓa (‘to open out, extend’), which is also the meaning of Aram. and Syr. pešaÓ. 19. m‘er hammibr may simply mean ‘from the direction of the desert’; cf. rûa hammibr (Jer. 13.24). A whirlwind is probably visualized associated with dust devils, which thus might convey the impression of ‘striking the four corners of the house’ simultaneously. 20. m‘îl, as the derivation from ‘lh indicates, means the great robe, Arab. ‘abayya, which is worn over the tunic, being distinctive of the dignity or wealth of those who had not to strip for work; cf. 1 Sam. 18.4; 24.5, 12; Ezek. 26.16. The rending of the mantle may be a modication of the laceration of the skin as a mourning rite, known in Canaan in the fourteenth century BCE; cf. the mourning of El in the Baal myth of Ras Shamra (Gordon UT 67.VI.11-22): ’apnk lÓpn ’il dp’id yrd lks’i yÓb lhdm wlhdm yÓb l’arÑ yÑq ‘mr ’un lr’iš ‘pr plÓt lqdqdh lps yks m’izrtm r b’abn ydy psltm by‘r yhdy lm wdqn yÓlÓ qn zr‘h yrÓ kgn ’aplb k‘mq yÓlÓ bmt
Then the kindly One, El the Merciful, Came down from the throne, he leapt to the footstool, And from the footstool he sat on the ground. He let down his turban in grief from his head; On his head was the dust in which he wallowed; He tore asunder the knot of his girdle; He scraped his skin with a stone; With a chipped int for a razor; He shaved his side-whiskers and beard; The humeral joint of his arm he scored; He scored his chest like a garden, As a valley-bottom his back he lacerated.
The shaving (gzaz) of the head is already known as a rite of mourning (Jer. 2.29; Amos 9.10; Mic. 1.16; etc.). It is one of the rites of separation whereby a 1
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person suspends his normal behaviour and appearance in the interim period necessary to the readjustment of the community or family, when it is more than normally exposed to supernatural inuences with evil potential. For the shaving of the head as a rite of separation, cf. the treatment of a captive woman before remarriage (Deut. 21.11-12). Such rites were eventually forbidden in Israel because of their association with the superstitions of Canaan (cf. Deut. 14.1; Lev. 19.27-28), but survivals persisted. In wayyištû the explanation of the form as the Hithpael of the verb š(w) has been questioned since Albright’s recognition of the reexive of the causative Shaphel in Ugaritic corresponding to the Xth form of the Arabic verb itaqÓala. This is formally possible, but must be doubtful so long as the assumed root w(w) is not attested in the simpler forms in Ugaritic, Hebrew or Arabic, whereas š(w) is attested (Isa. 51.23). The meaning, however, is not doubted, ‘to prostrate oneself’, lit. to touch the ground with one’s forehead, the gesture of total submission to humans or God. 21. Job’s submission to the will of God, expressed in obeisance, is declared in his citation of a proverb: Naked I came out of my mother’s womb, And naked I shall go away again whither I shall go.
This and the following couplet, Yahweh gave; Yahweh has taken; Blessed be the name of Yahweh,
are the classical expression of the truth that mortals hold life and all that it can give on a terminable lease from God. Occasionally the Hebrew thought scientically of birth, occasionally poetically of the origin of humanity (’m) from the dust of the earth (’amh) or of being fashioned in the hidden depths of the earth (Ps. 139.15). The two conceptions are combined in Ps. 139.13, 15, and so too possibly in Job 1.21 (so Tur-Sinai), where šmh cannot refer literally to the womb, where a human does not return. It has been thought that the reference is to a return to ‘mother earth’ (so Mowinckel, Larcher [JB]; cf. Ben Sira 40.1), or that here is a reminiscence of burial in a crouched position like the embryo in the womb, which may once have reected the conception of the earth as the mother of humans (so Ricciotti 1955). Buttenwieser and Hölscher see an echo of the Egyptian euphemism for death, ‘those who are yonder’. šamh may be used here with a demonstrative sense independent of ‘my mother’s womb’, as in Eccl. 5.14: Even as he has come forth from his mother’s womb Naked shall he depart as he came.
šmh may then be admittedly vague, indicating the ultimate uncertainty of the ancients as to the end of life (so Horst, Fohrer). The verb šû does not 1
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necessarily mean that šmh is identical with the place of origin. It may rather denote here the going back not to but from a certain estate, ‘to go away again’. In v. 21b the use of the divine name Yahweh as distinct from El, Eloah, Shaddai (‘the Almighty’) and Elohim in the poetic Dialogue is characteristic of the Prologue and Epilogue. It has been noticed as characteristic of the prose as distinct from the poetic portions of the book. The latter distinction does not apply here, where Job’s declaration is in poetry, but in the general context of the Prologue it is admissible, in any case probably reproducing a well-known formula from a fast-liturgy, the context of the Plaint of the Sufferer. The phraseology is re-echoed among the Arabs, where A. Musil cites the acknowledgment of the next of kin among the Bedouin of the Hejaz, ‘the Lord gave him; the Lord has taken him’ (1927: 427). The last phrase too recalls the Arabic ’al-amdu ’lillhi (‘Praise be to Allah!’), which is added to the report of ill as well as good, in which case ‘ala(y) kulli li (‘in any condition’) will be added. 22. Ó’ signies ‘missed the mark’, hence ‘sinned, offended’, wittingly or unwittingly. tilh suggests tl (‘insipid’), hence our translation ‘lack of moral discrimination’. It has been suggested that the word is cognate with Arab. tafala (‘to spit’) (Tur-Sinai, Pope), giving a meaning ‘reprehensible’. But in view of the obvious meaning of tl in 6.6 we prefer the meaning derivative from ‘insipid’. On the LXX variant nelh, see textual note ad loc. The moral sense of tilh is attested in Jer. 23.13 of the prophets of Samaria who prophesied by Baal and misled people, and possibly in Ps. 109.4. Chapter 2 1.
3.
4.
1
Then one day the celestials came and presented themselves before Yahweh and among them came also the Ón to present himself before Yahweh.1 2. And Yahweh said to the Ón, ‘Where do you come from?’, and the Ón answered Yahweh and said: ‘From going to and fro in the earth And from walking about in it.’ Yahweh said to the Ón: ‘Have you considered my servant Job, How there is none like him in the earth, A man perfect and upright, Fearing God and shunning evil, And holding fast to his integrity, Though you have moved me against him to hurt him without cause?’ And the Ón answered Yahweh and said: ‘Skin for skin; All that a man2 has Will he give for his life.
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132 5.
6.
7.
9.
10.
11.
12.
But stretch out your hand And touch his bone and his esh, And he will assuredly curse you3 to4 your face.’ And Yahweh said to the Ón: ‘Here he is, in your power, Only spare his life.’ Then the Ón went out from Yahweh’s presence and struck Job with a bad pox from the sole of his foot to his head; 8. and he took a potsherd to scrape himself, and sat in the ashes.5 And his wife said to him: ‘Do you still hold to your integrity? Curse God and die!’ But Job said to her: ‘You speak like one6 of the obtuse women. Are7 we to accept good from God And not accept ill?’ In all this Job did not sin with his lips. Now Job’s three friends heard of all the calamity which had befallen him and they came from their several places, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Na’amathite. They arranged to meet together and go and condole with him and console him. And they lifted up their eyes from the distance but did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept, and each tore his robe and they sprinkled dust on their heads (casting it up).8 13. And they sat with him (on the ground)9 for seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his grief was very great.
Textual Notes to Chapter 2 1.
2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
8. 9.
1
MT lehiÓyaÑÑ
‘al-yhwh (‘to present himself before God’) is omitted in the original version of LXX, being included in Origen’s recension from the versions of Theod. and Aq. It is thought that it should be omitted here as a scribal inadvertency since it is not included in 1.6. But since the šÓn was reporting back to Yahweh after his rst trial of Job it may be retained. Reading le’îš for MT l’îš with LXX, S and T. A scribal euphemism as in 1.5; see textual note ad loc. Reading with certain Heb. MSS ‘al for MT ’el, as in 1.11. LXX has a long addition here. See Commentary ad loc. Reading min after ’aaÓ with two Heb. MSS, S and T. As the text is set out in BH3, gam is taken with what precedes, in which case it demands ’att (‘you’) after it, the pronoun being omitted by haplography before the following ’eÓ. It was taken by the ancient versions with what follows in MT (so Dhorme; G.B. Gray). Ball proposed to read the interrogative particle ’im for gam, introducing the rhetorical question, which LXX indicates, reading the sequel as a conditional sentence. MT haššmyemh should probably be omitted with LXX; see Commentary ad loc. MT l’reÑ should probably be omitted with LXX and two Heb. MSS. Strictly, if the friends sat with Job they would sit on the refuse heap.
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Commentary on Chapter 2 3. The verb bla‘ is most familiar in the OT meaning ‘to swallow up’, and may mean total annihilation. But Job is not totally annihilated, so we take the verb as a cognate of Arab. balaa (‘to reach’) in the same hostile sense as na‘ (lit. ‘to touch’) in v. 5. Arab. balaa means also ‘to hurt’ or ‘attack’. This meaning would be more apt than ‘to swallow’ at 8.18; 10.8; 2 Sam. 20.19; Ps. 52.6, ‘harmful words/false tongue’. 4. The Ón possibly cites a proverb in reply. ‘ôr be‘a-‘ôr has been the subject of much speculation and debate. It is generally regarded as the citation of a proverb reecting the practice of barter (so Calmet, Duhm), where ‘skin’ is used as our ‘head of cattle’, the point being equivalence in moral dealing. In support of this interpretation Hölscher cites the Arab proverb r’ bir’; cf. bîta kîma bîti in an Ugaritic deed of exchange (RS 16.283) published by J. Nougayrol (1955: RS 16.383) and cited by Horst. The difculty in this interpretation is that the preposition would not normally be be‘a but taaÓ, which means ‘in place of’. be‘a means usually ‘about’ or ‘for the sake of’. Following the rst sense of be‘a, the phrase is translated ‘one skin is over another’, or, as we might say ‘under the skin there is still the quick’ (so Schultens, Budde, Merx, Jastrow, Lindblom). Pope’s objection that as yet Job’s skin has not yet been touched ignores the gurative sense of ‘skin’. TurSinai takes ‘skin’ as denoting the various layers protecting the heart, the seat of life, hence Pope translates ‘skin after skin’. Following the second sense of be‘a, T and Rashi understood the phrase to mean that one will risk and suffer injury to one part of the body to protect a more vital part, or to acquiesce in the loss of property and children to ‘save one’s own skin’ (St Thomas Aquinas). The phrase is not to be considered apart from the following: ‘All that a man has will he give for (be‘a) his life’. Dhorme suggests that ‘ôr be‘ad-‘ôr is a gure drawn not from commerce but from law, reecting the principle ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, etc.’ (Exod. 21.24ff.), where, incidentally the preposition is not be‘a, but taa. The sense according to Dhorme would be that as in retaliation a skin wound only is allowed for a skin wound, what Job has so far suffered cannot be expected to provoke violent reaction, but if his life, or at least the full capacity to enjoy it, were threatened Job’s faith would be really tried. In view of the meaning of be‘a, ‘for the sake of’, in k¿l ’ašer l’îš yittn be‘a našô this is a feasible interpretation. Alternatively we might propose the emendation ‘ô be‘ô ‘ôrô of which the assumption that MT is a corruption is graphically feasible, and even more so if w of MT we¤¿l is attached to the preceding ‘ôr resulting in the reading ‘ô be‘ô ‘ôrô k¿l ’ašer l’îš yittn be‘a našô His skin is still about him; All that a man has will he give for the sake of his life. 1
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This is admittedly a conjecture, with no support in the ancient versions, but it has the merit of congruity with the sequel and it gives an extra beat, which the meter, such as it is in the passage, demands. Nevertheless we prefer Dhorme’s interpretation. neeš should be noted here. The word does not mean ‘soul’ as distinct from body as in the Greek or Christian conception of life, but the life-breath or life itself. It may also denote the full capacity to enjoy life, English ‘vitality’, the impairment of which is denoted in certain passages of the OT as ‘death’ (mweÓ) which is considered as invading life to various degrees in human suffering. 7. Various suggestions have been made, generally with a certain amount of medical support, to diagnose more particularly Job’s skin disease (see bibliography in Rowley 1958: 169-70), but the evidence in Job is insufcient. Since the case is hypothetical, to serve as an introduction to the moral problem of the book, we refrain from more precise speculation as to whether the disease be visualized as black, or tubercular, leprosy or elephantiasis, eurythema, chronic eczema, or, as Terrien suggests (1963: 59) pamphigus foliaceus. The only clue is that Job erupted in boils. šeîn, from a root attested in Akkadian, Ugaritic, Aramaic and Arabic meaning ‘to be hot, or inamed’, is rendered in S as ‘ulcers’, which, so far as may be specied, suggests ‘the Nile rash’ as Job’s disease; cf. ‘the Egyptian boil’ as one of the plagues threatened in Deut. 28.27, and as one of the plagues of Egypt in Exod. 9.8ff. qoq¿, lit. ‘skull’, is usually poetic for ‘head’ in Hebrew, as, for example, in Deut. 28.35; 2 Sam. 14.25, but regularly means ‘head’ in Ugaritic texts. Job’s potsherd (ere) may have been not to relieve his itch, but rather to scrape off running matter, as the verb hiÓgr suggests (so LXX).This verb is a hapax legomenon, and is cognate with the Arabic verb jarada which is used of scraping hair off a hide or peeling the bark off a tree. In h’er the refuse of baking ovens, cooking hearths and broken pots and generally the village midden (Arab. mazbala) is visualized, as particularly in LXX, which translates kopria. This steadily mounting heap of refuse in Arab villages is periodically burnt, and the mound outside the settlement is often a place where the natives take the evening air. It was a natural place of isolation outside the settlement for such as Job (cf. the lepers in 2 Kgs 7.3), but it did not absolutely deny him the company of such as his three friends. 9. Christian dogmatics has made capital out of the role of Job’s wife, whom St Augustine calls ‘the Devil’s Abettor’ (Diaboli adjutrix); cf. Calvin, ‘the instrument of Satan’ (organum Satanae). St Thomas Aquinas after Chrysostom and St Augustine regards woman as the natural intermediary between a man and the tempter as Eve was the intermediary between the man and the serpent. The Rabbis note the parallel between Eve and Job’s wife, but remark that Job unlike Adam resisted the temptress. 1
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‘Curse (MT ‘bless’) God and die’ may mean either ‘Curse God, since in any case you are going to die’ or ‘since God has deprived you of blessing and made your life void as a dead man, accept the fact of alienation from him and make it nal’. This touches the central problem of the book. Did suffering mean alienation from God? Or was it to be borne in hope and faith that expected response in suffering, where God was ready to help the sufferer in his own time and manner? The role of the wife, abetted by Job’s friends, as 42.7 may imply, to undermine the faith of Job in God’s benecence was probably part of the immediate source of the present Book of Job. LXX has a considerable expansion here in the style of midrash (Swete, 2.9, 9a-d): After the lapse of a long time (his wife said to him), ‘How long will you hold out saying, “See, I will wait a little longer, looking for the hope of my salvation?” See, your memory is already wiped out from the earth, sons and daughters, the pains and labours of my womb, for whom I laboriously strove for nothing. You yourself sit in wormy decay, the whole night in the open, while I roam as a drudge from place to place and from house to house, waiting for the sun to go down, that I may rest from my labours and pains which grip me. But say some word against the Lord and die.’ But he looked on her and said to her…
This is part of the very substantial elaboration of the Job legend, which emphasizes the patience of the sufferer, ignoring his embarrassing questioning of the faith of orthodox wisdom in the Dialogue as distinct from the Prologue and Epilogue of the Book of Job. 10. nl, a synonym of kesîl (‘fool’) in Prov. 17.21, means generally ‘churlish’ and contrasts with ‘wise’ and ‘prudent’. It signies one whose conduct is governed by regard for reason or popular repute. In Isa. 32.5ff., it is contrasted with šôa‘, ‘noble’, a gentleman who behaves as such, to whom the community looks to uphold its fair ethic, like the good man of birth on whom the community depends on Job 29. The nl is animated by none of the ner susceptibilities, which attest the spirit of God in a person. He is the moral ‘deadwood’ of society, as the possible connection with nelh (‘a dead body’) may indicate. The aspect of nl as ‘godless’ is emphasized by W.W.M. Roth (1960). The Piel of qal in the sense ‘receive’ is attested in Ugaritic and in the OT only once before the Exile, in Prov. 19.20. The regularity of the verb in Aramaic and Syriac and its recurrence in Ezra, Chronicles, and Esther suggests that there as in the present passage it may be a Hebrew usage which fell into desuetude but revived under the inuence of Aramaic in the postexilic period. ra‘ in this context means ‘ill’ or ‘calamity’ without the moral implication of ‘evil’. In ‘from God’ note the Hebrew emphasis on primary causes. In an original, pre-Israelite source God may have been represented by the guardian spirit of the individual, whose alienation is betokened by the afictions of the 1
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sufferer in the Mesopotamian plaint ludlul bl nmeqi I.43-46, designated either as the sufferer’s god or his ‘good daemon’ (šdu dimqi) or his ‘protecting genius’ (lamassu). 11. Here Job’s three interlocutors in the Dialogue are introduced. It is thought by Alt (1937; so too Fohrer 1989: 104) that they are secondary, being introduced by the author of the Book in its present form in place of Job’s own community (cf. 42.11), who like his wife sought to assail his orthodox faith. habb’h, but for the Masoretic punctuation, which indicates the perfect after the denite article with the force of the relative pronoun, might be a participle, which, however, does not alter our translation. Eliphaz is given as the son of Esau (Gen. 36.4) and father of Teman (Gen. 36.11), hence an Edomite; cf. Teman as a place-name in Edom in Amos 1.12; Ezek. 25.13 (Edom from Teman to Dedan); Obad. 8f. and particularly Jer. 49.7 in his oracle on Edom, ‘Is wisdom no longer to be found in Teman?’ Bildad is unknown elsewhere in the OT, but Shuah is given as the son of Abraham by Qeturah (Gen. 25.2), who with her other sons was sent to the East. Fohrer after Albright suggests a connection of ‘Shuhite’ with šûu by the mid-Euphrates. Zophar is not mentioned elsewhere in the OT, but his designation as ‘the Naamathite’ may refer to Jebel Na‘ameh east of Tebuk in the N. Hejaz. All are chosen by the Israelite redactor of the source as representative of the reputedly wise ‘people of the East’, and particularly, in the case of Eliphaz, with Edom. wayyiww‘aû denotes both agreement and meeting by appointment. ‘To condole with him’ (lnû-lô) means lit. ‘to shake the head’, or ‘rock the body to and fro for him’. 12. In MT ‘and they sprinkled dust on their heads (to the sky)’, LXX omits ‘to the sky’. Dhorme posits a conation of two variants, ‘they sprinkled dust on their heads’, a mourning rite (cf. 1 Sam. 4.12; Ezek. 27.30; Lam. 2.10), and the mourning rite mentioned in the citation from the Baal myth from Ras Shamra (see note on 1.20), ‘and they threw dust up into the sky so that it fell on their heads’, or as intervening between them and God to indicate alienation in suffering. The letter would recall the gesture of the Jews at the martyrdom of Stephen (Acts 22.23), where, however, it is rather designed to register horror at what was regarded as blasphemy and so to rid the subjects from the attention of God. On this assumption Buttenwieser (1922: 43) takes it to refer to the friends’ condemnation of Job, arguing from his suffering to his sin. This strangely ignores the statement in 2.11 that the friends come to condole and console (lenaamô). Tur-Sinai suggests that haššmyemh is a corruption of the innitive absolute of the Hiphil, a verbal noun used adverbially, hašmm (‘dumbfounded’), which was inadvertently omitted from the following verse (cf. Ezek. 3.15; Ezra 3.3-4), and added in the margin, then displaced and repointed. The verb zraq is that used of the rite whereby Moses cast up ashes to induce the plague of boils in Egypt (Exod. 9.8f.). 1
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12. The gesture of the friends, sitting silently with Job in his ritual isolation, whether or not ‘on the ground’ is read with MT or omitted with LXX and two Heb. MSS, is a striking token of their sympathy. They too for the conventional mourning period of ‘seven days and seven nights’ (cf. Gen. 50.10; 1 Sam. 31.13) were prepared to consider themselves under the cloud of the divine displeasure through their association with the sufferer and so alienated from the community and its association with God. Their tactful silence is designed not to provoke a hasty retort on the subject of the divine economy. Job himself, quite unprovoked, rst broke silence in his curse of his existence, to which his wife had rst provoked him (2.9). This (3.1) is the culmination of the Prologue as well as the immediate introduction to the Dialogue.
1
Job 3 JOB’S EXPOSTULATION
Job’s curse on his existence, to which the whole of the chapter is devoted, while not directly the curse of God which his wife had urged on him (2.9), comes very near to it, in the implicit animadversion on the Giver of life. Signicantly, Job does not yet question the justice of God in the suffering of the innocent in his personal case. His concern is a general problem of the meaningfulness of a life lived in unrelieved suffering, as of course exemplied in his own. In any case his impassioned outburst, contravening the sapiential ideal of calm resignation, serves to introduce Eliphaz’s mild rebuke (4.3-6) and the subsequent censure of all the friends. It further sets Job’s problem beyond academic discussion into the domain of existential experience, which characterizes Job’s subsequent declarations as distinct from those of the friends in the Dialogue and his ultimate appeal directly to God. The chapter is divided into three strophes, vv. 3-10, 11-19, 20-26. After the statement in v. 1 that Job cursed the day he was born, which is the culmination of the Prologue as adapted by the author of the Book, the rst strophe (vv. 310) expresses the despair of the sufferer in the literary form of a curse. This leads in the second strophe (vv. 11-19) to the question of the meaning of his life when he is in such hard case, and in the third strophe (vv. 20-26) to the question of the meaning of human life in general, in which suffering is such a common lot. Thus while vv. 11-19 express the subject’s sufferings within the common convention of the literary prototype of the Plaint of the Sufferer, vv. 20-26 open up the philosophic question of the meaning of life itself, where experience often affords so little support to faith in Providence. In the last section the apparent shift from the general case in vv. 20-23 to the particular in the rst person in vv. 24-26 may be explained by assuming that vv. 24-26 is a citation from the Plaint of the Sufferer. The curse on a particular day including the day on which the sufferer was born is familiar in Arab society (Dhorme), and, as applied by the sufferer himself has its counterpart in Jer. 20.14-18, which recalls the language and thought of much of Job 3.3-10, particularly in the wish that he might have been still-born and the reference to the announcement of his birth. The curse is more elaborate in Job with notable wealth of mythological imagery. 1
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The arrangement of MT may be questioned. In vv. 4, 5 and 6 it is important to realize that the arrangement is not in bicola but tricola, the threefold curse perhaps reecting a convention of incantations. We should thus defend MT against the view that the passage is interpolated by later insertions, for example, v. 4a and v. 6a according to Bickell, Beer, Stevenson and Hölscher, but admit that v. 6 was possibly followed by the tricolon in v. 9 (so Dhorme, Pope). Verse 16, which interrupts the thought of vv. 15-17, may be displaced from after v. 11 (so Dhorme), in which case MT l¿’ would require to be emended to lû (‘would that’). 1.
2. 3. 4.
5.
6.
9.
7. 8. 10. 11. 16. 12. 13. 14.
15. 17. 18. 1
After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day he was born. Then Job spoke up1 and said: ‘Perish the day on which I was born And the night on which one declared, “Let a man-child be conceived.” That day—let it be darkness; Let God from above not care for it, Nor let light shine on it. Let darkness and utter gloom claim it as its own.2 Let cloud settle upon, May eclipse surprise it. That night—let darkness seize it, Let it not be associated with3 the days of the year, Nor be entered into the number of the months. May the stars of its twilight be darkened, Let it wait for light which shall never be, And let it not be seen4 by the eyes of the dawn. 5 That night—let it be barren, Let no joyful shout come therein. Let those curse it who curse day (light), Who are skilled to rouse Leviathan, Because I did not close up the doors of the womb that bore me And hide trouble from my eyes. Why did I not die at birth, Emerge from the womb—to expire? 6Would that7 I were as a still-born child, Like babes that never saw the light!6 Why did the knees receive me? And what was the signicance of breasts to suck? For now I should have been lying down quiet, I should have slept and had rest, Just as kings and counsellors of the earth, Who built themselves palaces, Or as princes who had gold, Who lled their houses with silver. There the wicked cease from troubling And the weary are at rest; Prisoners are at ease together, Hearing no taskmaster’s voice.
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19.
Small and great are the same there, And slave is free from master.
20.
Why is light given8 to one in trouble, Life to those whose life is bitter, Who long in vain for death, And seek for it as9 for hidden treasure, Who rejoice to reach the burial-heap,10 Are happy to have found a grave? (Why is light given) to a man whose way is diverted, And about whom God has set obstructions? For instead of my food comes my sighing; My groans are poured out as water. For what I feared has come to me, And what I dreaded comes upon me. I have no rest nor quiet, Nor repose, but disturbance has come upon me.’
21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.
Textual Notes to Chapter 3 LXX and V omit MT wayya‘an through a misunderstanding of the verb, which they take in the sense common in Classical Hebrew ‘and he answered’. Job, of course, does not answer, but speaks for the rst time. Actually the verb is common in the myths and legends of Ras Shamra, where there is no question of ‘answering’, and where it means ‘spoke up’. 2. We take g’al to signify guratively the claim exercised by darkness for its kindred manifestations over against the kindred manifestations of light. The verb g‘al means ‘to stain’, which is spelt as g’al in Zeph. 3.1; Lam. 4.14; Isa. 59.3; 63.3; Mal. l.7; Ezra 2.62 = Neh. 7.64; Dan. 1.8. The dates of those passages from the late seventh century to the second century BCE indicates that this meaning is possible in Job without emending to g‘al. See further Commentary ad loc. 3. For MT yiadd, from (‘to rejoice’) read the jussive Qal ya, from ya (‘to be united’), with Sym., V, T and S. 4. Reading the Niphal yr’eh for MT yir’eh. 5. Omitting MT hinnh metri causa with LXX, S, V and one Hebrew MS. 6. The couplet breaks the sense of vv. 15-17, and obviously goes with v. 11, either as part of the original text or a marginal gloss expanding v. 11, which would more easily account for its transposition to after v. 15 in MT. ’ô, which is superuous to the meter, was probably added after the transposition. 7. Reading the optative particle lû for MT l¿’. 8. Reading the passive yuttan with LXX, S, T and V for MT active yittn. 9. Reading kemaÓmônîm (‘as hidden treasure’) for MT mimmaÓmônîm, which would mean ‘more than for hidden treasure’. This is possible, but the simile is more natural. We assume a scribal error of m for k in the Old Hebraic script. 10. gîl may originally have been written in scriptio defectiva, which would be intentionally ambiguous, gîl (‘joy’) or gal (‘burial heap’).
1.
1
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Commentary on Chapter 3 1. It has been suggested that ‘his day’ (yômô) is not the day he was born but ‘his fate’ (so Tur-Sinai), but in view of the immediate reference to ‘the day of my birth’, etc., and of Jeremiah’s similar curse on the day of his birth (Jer. 20.14-18), ‘his day’ probably refers to the day of Job’s birth as indicated by the immediate sequel. 3. In yôm ’iwwle bô the omission of the denite article before yôm and of the relative particle ’ašer before the relative clause are features of poetry. Dhorme notes the imperfect as ‘a veritable Aorist’. This may be equated with the Akkadian preterite, which had the same signicance as the Greek Aorist. The so-called narrative imperfect in the Ras Shamra myths and legends has the same signicance. MT hallayelh ’mar h¿rh ger has been questioned on the grounds that the indenite subject of ’mar, unlike the announcer of the birth, could not tell the sex of the child conceived, and so it is proposed either to emend h¿rh to harh, the Aramaic interjection, ‘Behold!’ (so Beer, Budde, Stevenson, after LXX) or to take hallayelh (masc. as in v. 6) as the subject of ’mar (so Horst, Fohrer, Pope). MT, however, might feasibly be defended on three counts. If the subject of ’mar is indenite the reference might be to an anniversary celebration of the conception of a man (so Hölscher), or if the reference is to the actual night of conception the perfect might be optative as often in Ugaritic and regularly in Arab., ‘the night on which one said, “Let a man-child be conceived” ’, referring to the consummation of the Oriental wedding with its embarrassingly public celebration. Alternatively the subject of the verb might be God, who could determine both conception and sex. Our preference is for the optative sense of the Pual h¿rh. The preposition with the resumptive pronominal sufx in the relative clause is probably omitted metri causa, being in any case understood after the preposition and pronominal sufx in v. 3a. 4. In ’al-yirešhû the verb has the same meaning ‘to care for’ as in Deut. 11.12, where it is used of the land of Canaan as the special object of God’s attention, and in Isa. 62.12, where it is used of Jerusalem in antithesis to the neglected (‘azûh) city. nehrh, ‘light’, a hapax legomenon in the OT, from the verbal root nhar, ‘to shine’ (Isa. 60.5; Ps. 34.6), is more common in Aramaic; cf. nehôr’ (Dan. 2.22). Here it may have the meaning ‘daylight’; cf. Arab. nahru(n). 5. In yi’luhû Aq., T, Dhorme, Stevenson and Tur-Sinai read yi’alûhû, ‘may the darkness stain it’, a sense which g’al also has in Zeph. 3.1; Lam. 4.14; Isa. 59.3; 63.3; Mal. 1.7; Ezra 2.62 = Neh. 7.64; Dan. 1.8. Theod. renders anchisteusato (‘performed the kinsman’s part’) and Sym antepoisato (‘ransomed’), hence ‘claim as its own’ (so Hölscher, Horst, Fohrer, Pope). S and 1
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the Arab. versions render ‘obfuscate’ or ‘cover up’, which, with the meaning ‘protect’, is the primary sense claimed for g’al (‘to play the kinsman’s part’) by A.R. Johnson, ‘The Primary Meaning of ga’al’, VTS 3 (1953), pp. 67-77. While this meaning claimed by Johnson would suit Job 3.5 and the phrase g¿’l haddm, he suggests no etymology, and the question is still open as to whether the verb is primarily denominative, signifying ‘to discharge a kinsman’s duties’, which was primarily rehabilitation to an acknowledged status or afnity within a given group—which would be intelligible at Job 3.5—or a pure verb such as Johnson assumes, of which ‘to play the kinsman’s part’ is secondary. We favour the former alternative, taking g’al on the evidence of the OT to mean not simply protection from something that menaces the subject, but rehabilitation to a status one has actually lost; cf. Snaith (1963), who maintains that the primary meaning of the verb denotes restoration to proper ownership, to which we should add afnity. We understand ÑalmweÓ as a compound noun, mweÓ having a superlative signicance. ‘annh is a hapax legomenon in the OT, being the particular noun (nomen unitatis) from the more common generic ‘nn. The verb š¤an, used of the cloud, recalls the cloud which signied the abiding Divine Presence (še¤înh) over the Tabernacle in the Exodus tradition (Exod. 40.35; Num. 9.17). yeba‘aÓuhû is generally taken to mean ‘terrify’. It may rather be cognate of Arab. baata (‘to come suddenly upon, surprise’), a more apt description of a solar eclipse, the rst of which to be scientically predicted was that on 28 May 585 BCE by Thales of Miletus. For this sense of b‘aÓ, cf. 18.11; 33.7. For MT kimerîrê yôm we should probably read kamrîrê yôm (‘blackness of day’) (Dhorme); cf. Stevenson, who proposed to read kamrîrîm, omitting yôm as a dittograph. The plural of kamrîr has cognates with the same sense in Akk. and Syr. Dhorme suggested the obscurity of the sirocco, but the Akk. cognate kamru (‘to cover’) suggests rather the eclipse, which is supported by the verb yeba‘atû (‘to come suddenly upon, surprise’). 6. yad (‘let it be associated with’) is obviously demanded by the context instead of MT yiadd (‘rejoice’). 9. neše is the twilight both of dawn (Ps. 119.147) and evening (Job 7.4; 24.15; etc.). kô¤eê (‘stars’) in the context may be dual rather than plural, the Venus star in its twin role of morning and evening star, šr (‘dawn’) and šlm (‘completion’, sc. of day) in Canaanite mythology (Gordon UT 52). Here and at 41.10 ‘a‘appê šaar (‘the eyes of dawn’) is intelligible as a reection of Canaanite mythology in Hebrew poetry. The dual ‘a‘appê means ‘eyes’ rather than ‘eyelids’ of NEB, as is indicated by ‘p‘p in parallel with ‘q (‘eye ball’) in the Ugaritic text (Gordon UT Krt 148, 295). NEB renders the phrase at 41.18 ‘the shimmer of dawn’, connecting ‘a‘appê with a verb cognate with Syr. ‘a’ (‘to shine’). 1
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7. For galmû, meaning here and at 15.34 ‘barren’, Dhorme cites Isa. 49.21, where galmûh is parallel to šekûlh (‘with no children’); cf. galmûh in the Talmud, signifying a wife who must live apart without relations with her husband. Arab. jalmûdu(n) denotes rocky, sterile ground, as in Job 30.3; cf. a wife as a fertile eld in the correspondence of Ribaddi of Byblos in the Amarna Tablets (Knudtzon 1908–15: 74.17; 75.15; 81.51), ‘My land is like a woman without a husband, for it has not been ploughed’, and in the Ras Shamra text Gordon UT 77.22-23, referring to the marriage of the Moon-god and the Moon-goddess: I will make her fallow land into a vineyard, The fallow eld of her love into orchards.
Cf. Song 1.6; 4.12-16; 8.12; and probably the original of the Song of the Vineyard, ‘my lovesong’ (šîr dôî cited by Isa. 5.1-7). rinnh signies a ringing shout of joy. 8. yiqqeû is the imperfect not of nqa (‘to mark, pierce’), but of qa, here a synonym of ’rar (‘to curse’), and denotes a specic curse such as Balaam was requested to pronounce against Israel (Num. 22.11, 17; 23.8, 11, 13, 25, 27; 24.10), where the verb qa is uniformly used. Professional mourners are not denoted, as Calmet proposed, but possibly sorcerers who might make a day inauspicious, and Dhorme connected it with Job’s curse in v. 1, considering it as relating to all unfortunates, citing the drab curse ‘on the day’ of an adversary. MT yôm, however, has been questioned, though it is unanimously supported by the Hebrew MSS and ancient versions. Leviathan in the parallel colon indicates a mythological reference. In view of the signicance of Leviathan as a primaeval monster, the power of Chaos par excellence, like the Sea (ym), Gunkel (1895: 59 n. 1) suggested that MT yôm (‘day’) should be pointed ym (‘sea’), a suggestion adopted by Beer, Cheyne, Horst, Pope, Lévêque and G.R. Driver, who cites an Aramaic incantation ‘I will cast spells upon you with the spell of the Sea and the spell of the dragon Leviathan’ (1955: 72); so too C.H. Gordon (1966). Horst and Pope invoke the evidence of the Ras Shamra texts, where this signicance of Sea and Leviathan is well attested. But the same texts refer to ‘day (of battle) of the Sun and the Manyheaded One’, even the dragon (tnn), in a hymn to the Sun (Gordon UT 62.4452), so interpreted by A. Caquot (1959: 93ff.). This would support MT yôm (so Hitzig, Budde, Hölscher, Fohrer, Tur-Sinai, Mowinckel), the reference being to an eclipse of the sun, which according to Egyptian mythology was the result of the serpent Apophis swallowing the sun. In support of this interpretation we might cite the incantation text from Ras Shamra against snake-bite, where the power of the sun is invoked and there is, on our interpretation,1 reference to 1. See the writer’s study of this text in the official publication in Ugaritica VI (Schaeffer [ed.] 1969: 79-97). 1
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the Apophis myth in its Canaanite counterpart. The conception of the Primaeval monster of Chaos temporarily subdued but still capable of being roused (cf. ‘¿rr liwyÓn) is familiar from Amos 9.3. ‘Óî means ‘ready’ as in Aram. and Syr., but the Arab. cognate means ‘with all equipment prepared’, hence here ‘able and having the relevant incantations and ritual’, so ‘skilled’. 10. biÓnî, lit. ‘my belly’, obviously means ‘the womb that bore me’. For MT wayyastr (‘and it hid’), LXX, in rendering ‘it turned away’ (trans.), read either wayysar or perhaps misunderstood MT wayyastr as the Iphteal of sûr, namely wayyistar, a verbal form attested in the Mesha inscription and in the Ugaritic texts. This would be rather an intransitive reexive, and the direct object ‘eyes’ supports MT. 11. Note ’mûÓ in parallelism with the perfect yÑ’Óî being imperfect in form, but preterite in sense, like the narrative imperfect in the Ras Shamra texts; see above on v. 3. The perfect yÑ’Óî is used before the imperfect ’ew‘ to denote that the action is prior to that of the second verb, which may be taken as the verb in a nal clause. 16. On the reading of v. 16 after v. 11 see Introduction to ch. 3. nel, from the root nal, which is used of ‘dropping’ from the womb (Isa. 26.18), is specically used of abortions (Ps. 58.9, ‘which have not seen the sun’); cf. Eccl. 6.3. Ómûn, lit. ‘hidden’, recalls the fate of the abortion enveloped in darkness in Eccl. 6.4-5. 12. maddûa‘ qiddemûnî birkyim (‘Why did the knees receive me?’) implies, according to some commentators (Duhm, Musil, citing the Arab custom among the Hanajira, Arabia Petraea, III, 1927, p. 214), the father’s acknowledgment of the child (cf. Gen. 50.23). It may, however, simply describe the nursing of the child (so Dhorme, citing the nursing by the city-goddess of Nineveh; so too Budde, Weiser, Horst). For the use of qiddm in parallel with Aram. qibbl, ‘to receive’ (cf. 2.10), of a mother with her child, Dhorme cites Ben Sira 15.2. mah, as the parallel maddûa‘ indicates, may mean ‘why’ as in 7.21, ûmeh l¿’-ti’ iš‘î. Grammatically it may mean ‘what is the signicance of…?’ In mah-ššdayim kî ’înq, the construction mh followed by kî (‘that’) is paralleled in 6.11; 7.17; 15.14; Ps. 8.5, mh ’enôš kî tizkerennû; cf. in the Ras Shamra texts Gordon UT Krt 39: m’at krt kybky
Who is Krt that he should weep?
13. In illustration of the conception of death as sleep Dhorme aptly cites the inscription on the bricks of Sennacherib’s tomb ‘palace of sleep, tomb of rest, eternal dwelling of Sennacherib, King of the World, King of Assur’. 1
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14. In ‘im-mel¤îm wey¿‘aÑê ’reÑ, the preposition is regularly used of comparison in Proverbs, and has probably the same signicance here. ‘Counsellors’ might be synonymous with ‘kings’, as those who, according to royal ideology in the ancient Near East, are executives of the divine purpose (cf. the royal titulary in Isa. 9.5 [EVV 6]; 11.2), or it may denote statesmen who share the knowledge of the king’s purpose and mediate it to the community. In the present context one might think of the statesmen of Egypt, who were favoured with tombs in the vicinity of the pyramids and other tombs of the Pharaohs. But this privilege of spectacular burial was not conned to Egypt, as indicated by the tomb of ‘the brother’, that is, trusted minister, of the queen of the Nabataeans so designated in an inscription at Petra. If orôÓ is a sound reading, meaning literally ‘ruins’, it might refer to the building of monuments, such as tombs, which were subsequently ruins (e.g. Isa. 58.12; 61.4), where orôÓ is the synonymous parallel of š¿memôÓ, or as those passages in Isaiah and T and V suggest, the building up of ruined or desert places. Ewald and Stevenson, assuming corruption of MT, understood the reference to be to the pyramids (Arab. harm), which we consider unlikely, both on textual grounds and as unattested in Heb., Aram. or Syr. Hölscher and Fohrer retain MT, but in the same sense as Arab. harm, the verbal root of which coincides with the regular meaning of Heb. ar (‘to be ruinous, decrepit’). Olshausen and Daiches (1908: 637ff.) seem nearer the truth in taking orôÓ to mean ‘palaces’; so too G.R. Driver (1950d: 349), citing Ethiopic and S. Arab. mrb (‘castle’), which evidently survived in N. Arab., signifying the prestigious quarters of a house, hence a palace. The word in this sense, extant but evidently rare in Hebrew, is used here probably ad hoc to suggest double entendre in the style of the poet in Job in ‘palace’ and ‘ruin’. In possible support of the interpretation of T and V one might cite tombs in Egypt on the desert edge or in desolate valleys like the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, in which the rich grave furniture (cf. v. 15) was a notorious encouragement to tomb-robbing. The context suggests the decay of former palaces rather than ruins as such or graves on the desert edge. 15. In this context the houses which are lled with gold might be the tombs, which were called ‘houses of eternity’ in Egypt and Mesopotamia. This, however, is not explicit in the text, and it may refer to the treasures of the kings in their lifetime. Tur-Sinai aptly cites the Aramaic inscription of BarRekub of Sham’al (Cooke 1903: 63.10-11), which refers to ‘kings, owners of silver and gold’. 17. r¿ez in the OT means generally ‘agitation’, as of the war-horse (39.24) and of thunder (37.2) and of the agitation to which humans are subject (14.1). In Job 3.17 the word is used of the agitation the subject causes. This usage is familiar in Syr. where the cognate verb denotes the wrath of God; cf. Arab. rujzu(n) in the adaptation of the Syriac Christian tradition in the Qur’an. 1
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yei‘ê ¤¿a means ‘exhausted in strength’. The verb meaning ‘to weary out’ or ‘toil at’ is well enough attested in the OT, but the participle is used only here and in Ben Sira 37.12. 18. n¿ denotes the task-master over slaves (Exod. 3.7; 5.14; etc.; Isa. 14.2, 4; Zech. 9.8). The verb, with an Arab. cognate najaa, means ‘to harry’ or ‘beat up (game)’, and is used of the ruler of Abyssinia, the Negus; see below, on 40.19. 19. hû’ means ‘the same’, ‘one and the same’; cf. Ps. 102.28; Isa. 41.4; 43.10, 13; 48.12ff. ošî was a legal term meaning ‘quit of burdens’ and specically, as here, of servitude (e.g. Exod. 21.2, 5). ’a¿nyw as distinct from the singular, means usually ‘his Lord’ as distinct from his human master. Here it is a plural of majesty or dignity; cf. GKC, §124g, i. 22. On the reading ’elê-al for MT ’elê-îl see textual note, adopted by Stevenson, Tur-Sinai, Horst, Fohrer and Pope among modern commentators. Beer, Hölscher and Tur-Sinai connect gal with the verb glal, ‘to roll’, and think of the cylindrical blocking stone rolling in the slot as at the entrance to the tombs of the family of Herod the Great at Jerusalem. But the date of this type of burial is rather late for the Book of Job. gal denotes rather a pile of stones (cf. gal ’anîm, Josh. 7.24; 8.29; 2 Sam. 18.17), either as marking the grave or as a protection for the corpse against jackals. In Palestine during the British Mandate heavy stones were rst piled on the cofn for this purpose before the grave was lled with earth. Horst emphasizes the preposition ’elê, signifying the way to the grave, which is a satisfaction to the wretched. This is perhaps preciose. Dhorme retained MT, rendering ‘They rejoice to jubilation’. Perhaps the original text read gîl without the mater lectionis y to suggest the double entendre gîl (‘joy’) and gal (‘grave-heap’), which is demanded by the parallel ‘a grave’ in the second colon. The citation of Hos. 9.1 in support of MT ’elê-îl is invalid as this is almost certainly a corruption of ’al tl. 23. The conception of one’s way being diverted recalls 19.8, He has walled up my way and I cannot pass And he has set thorns on my path.
The phrase wayyse¤ ba‘aô recalls a¤t ba‘aô of 1.10. The different sibilant is to be noted. The verb, which could be Hiphil either of sû¤ or s¤a¤, but is probably from sû¤, means to erect a screen, which obstructed or concealed as well as protected. So ba‘aô (‘about him’) signies here obstruction and not protection as in 1.10. 1
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24. The couplet, which resumes the theme of Job’s particular misery after the general reections on the futility of life, reects the conventional language and imagery of the Plaint of the Sufferer (cf. Ps. 42.4 [EVV 3]). In view of the usage of lienê meaning ‘in the character of’, ‘like’ (4.19; 1 Sam. 1.16), there is no need to emend with Beer to leî (‘in proportion to’). In lamî the more general sense ‘food’ is to be noted in Hebrew poetry as regularly in Ugaritic. 25. The verb ’Óh (‘to come’) is more common in Aramaic than Hebrew, and is common in Arab. and Ugaritic. The retention of the nal radical y and the direct object after this verb is reminiscent of Arab. usage. 26. On r¿ez, here as in v. 17 in the objective sense, see on v. 17.
1
Job 4 and 5 ELIPHAZ’S FIRST ADDRESS
After Job’s despairing curse on the day he was born the Dialogue proper begins with a solemn statement of conventional wisdom. The mild rebuke to Job (4.2-6) appeals to him as an exponent of traditional wisdom, aiming at the adjustment of humans to the vicissitudes of life in patience and fortitude. The well-attested fact of retribution for sin encourages a person to hope that life is not meaningless, as Job in his anguish had averred, but that under the theodicy a good person might expect not to be disappointed (vv. 7-11). But the sage is sufcient of a realist to know and be disturbed by human limitations. The sages, though professing reason rather than revelation, were still the heirs of the cultic and prophetic traditions of Israel. Thus Eliphaz shared the realistic view of Jeremiah (17.9) that ‘the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt’. When the angels, though executives of God, cannot fully comprehend the divine plan and purpose in all its scope and may in fact be reprehensible, so even the best of human beings must still die defective in wisdom, that is, in the understanding of life and the proper reaction to life’s circumstances (vv. 12-21b). They must then be prepared to suffer the consequences of their lapses under the ordered government of God, which is observable in nature and society (5.3-16) and only a fool who has abandoned the patience and self-discipline practised and counselled by Hebrew wisdom will expostulate with God and yield to despair (5.3). The purposes of God are consistent, and positive even in suffering. Indeed suffering may be a mark of the divine concern (5.17). Therefore the sufferer must take courage, looking to the ultimate deliverance and divine favour, which the sage’s study of life attests (5.17-27). The section falls into nine strophes of ve units of bicola and tricola (4.2-6, 7-11, 12-16, 17-20b, 21b + 5.2; 5.3-5b, 4.21a, 5.5c; 5.6-7 + 1 + 8-11, 12-16, 17-20, 22-27). This arrangement suggests that 5.10 is possibly a later expansion (see Commentary ad loc.) and 5.2 also is possibly a gloss on 4.21b which has come into the text at the wrong place through the attraction of the word ’ewîl, which is common to 5.2 and 5.3 (see Commentary ad loc.). The literary types employed in this section are various. Eliphaz opens with some words of apology and the statement of the grounds for his intromission in the convention of sapiential or forensic dialectic, which is a general feature 1
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of the opening of the address of Job’s interlocutors and also of Elihu (vv. 3237). The general principle of sin and retribution is stated in the second strophe (vv. 7-11) in the sapiential tradition in gures which recall Proverbs, though the unit is not as in most of Proverbs the couplet, but the strophe. In the following two strophes (vv. 12-16 and 17-20b, 21b + 5.2) this principle is reiterated in the form of a prophetic oracle, though in the language and argument e fortiori of wisdom literature. The strophe on the certain discomture of the wicked (5.3-5b, 4.21a, 5.5c) by its description of the wicked as ‘the fool’ betrays its prototype in wisdom literature. The sixth strophe (5.6-7, 1, 8-11), from the same literary tradition, states the antithesis of the retribution of the wicked (vv. 6-7) and the divine vindication of the humble (vv. 8-11), where the divine nature and activity is described in statements in participial form characteristic of the Hymn of Praise on the theme of the establishment of Cosmos by God as King, hence appropriate and evocative of this theme in the argument of Eliphaz for God’s Order in society. This hymnic form is developed to the same end in the seventh strophe (5.12-16). In these two strophes the antithesis of the fate of the wicked and the righteous, which is generally stated in the couplet in the wisdom tradition, as in Proverbs, is stated here at greater length in the compass of the strophe. Eliphaz’s address ends in two strophes (5.17-20 and 22-27) in the true wisdom tradition. The theme is stated in the aphorism ‘happy is the man whom God corrects’ in the couplet at v. 17, which is then developed in a poem on the subject of God’s discipline and providential care. Repeated instances of this are graphically noted, introduced by the numerical convention ‘In six strokes of adversity…yea in seven’ (v. 19), which, if not admittedly conned to wisdom literature, was certainly a favourite macronic device of the sages; cf. Prov. 30.15-17, 18-19, 21-23, 2428, 29-31. Chapter 4 1.
Then Eliphaz the Temanite answered and said:
2.
‘If one took up1 a word with you, could you bear it? Yet who could refrain from words? Look, you have instructed the tremulous,2 And strengthened feeble hands. Your words would raise the fallen, You would strengthen bowing knees. But now when it reaches you you cannot bear it, And when it comes to you you are non-plussed. Is not your piety your assurance, Your perfect conduct3 your hope?
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 1
Recall, what man if innocent ever perished, Or where were the righteous ever destroyed? For as far as I have seen, those who plough in mischief And sow trouble reap it.
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150 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
17. 18. 19.
20. 21b 5.2.
Wanting the breath of God they perish, Wanting the afatus of his nostrils they are no more. The lion may roar and the roarer may cry loudly, But the teeth of the great lions are done away, The lion perishes wanting prey, And the lion-whelps are scattered. But to me a word came quietly, Yea, a whisper of it caught my ear, In intimate thoughts in night-visions When deep sleep falls upon men. Terror confronted me and trembling, And quaking dislocated my bones. And a breath passed over my face, The hair of my body bristled up.4 Before me ( ) stood, But I did not recognize his appearance.5 A form was before my eyes, Silence, then I heard a voice. “Is a man more just than God? Is a man purer than his maker? If he does not commit himself wholly to his servants, And charges even his angels with error, How much more those who inhabit houses of clay, Whose foundations are in the dust, Who are crushed6 as the moth, Pulverized between morning and evening, They perish forever without laying it to heart?7 8They die without attaining to wisdom. For vexation kills the fool, And the death of the simpleton is passion.” ’9
Textual Notes to Chapter 4 1.
2. 3.
4.
5.
1
nissh (‘put to the test’) is a doubtful reading, as is indicated by Aq., Theod., Sym. and apparently also V and S, which read weni’ (so Böttcher, Beer, Hoffmann, Duhm, Peters, Dhorme, Kissane, Hölscher, Stevenson). nissh means ‘to tempt, test’ and not ‘to venture, attempt’ as is assumed by Driver–Gray, Horst, Fohrer and Pope. Hence we read wen’. Reading rîm (from rû) for MT rabbîm; see Commentary ad loc. The parallelism in this couplet is chiastic, and we should be omitted before t¿m as a dittograph after k in tiqwÓe¤. The conjunction might have dropped out before tiqwÓe¤ by haplography after nal k in kislÓe¤ in the Old Heb. script. Reading the Qal tismar (intransitive) as the predicate of a‘araÓ rather than MT tesammr (transitive) as the predicate of rûa, which is treated as masculine in v. 15a. In MT the subject of ya‘am¿ and antecedent of the pronominal sufx in mar’hû might be rûa, which is treated as masculine in v. 15a, the masculine referring to the apparition of a personal agency. In this case if MT is correct the short colon in MT
The Book of Job
6. 7. 8. 9.
v. 16a would include aposeopesis for dramatic effect, but it is more likely that there was explicit reference to a personal agent, which might have been suppressed through motives of orthodoxy. MT yeakke’ûm (‘they crush them’) would signify the indenite subject. S and V read the passive yeukke’û. Reading mîm, a verbal noun for MT mîm; see Commentary ad loc. On the arrangement of the text, see Commentary on 4.21. The couplet 5.2, which does not connect with 5.1 or with 5.3, may have been displaced to its present position in MT through the incidence of the word ’ewîl in both verses. After 4.21b it explains the statement that one dies unwittingly (l¿’ eo¤mh) and may be a gloss.
Chapter 5 3. 4. 5. 4.21a 5.5c. 6. 7. 1. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 1
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‘I have seen the fool taking root, And suddenly his homestead was obliterated,1 His sons abandoned helpless, And crushed in the gate with none to deliver, His harvest eaten by the hungry; Men take it away to their own zeriba.2 Is not their abundance plucked from them,3 And the thirsty4 gasp for their wealth? Nay, mischief does not grow from the earth, Nor trouble sprout from the ground, But man is born to trouble As Reshef’s children to soar high. Call, if there is any to answer you. Yea, to whom of the holy ones will you turn? But I would resort to God, To God would I refer my case, Who does great things beyond investigation, Wonders beyond number, Who gives rain on the face of the earth, And sends water over the surface of the elds, Raising5 the lowly on high, The down-stooping6 are high-established in safety. He frustrates the devices of the crafty, And their hands do not effect their plan; He takes the clever in their cunning, And the purpose of the subtle is marred by haste; By day they encounter darkness, And as at night they grope at high noon; And he has delivered the ruined man7 from their mouth, Yea, the poor man from the power of the strong, And there is hope for the poor, And iniquity has shut her mouth. 8Happy
the man that God corrects! Spurn not the discipline of the Almighty,
152 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.
Job 4 and 5. Eliphaz’s First Address For he makes one smart, but he dresses the wound, He wounds, but his hands also heal. In six strokes of adversity he will deliver you, Yea, in seven shall no harm touch you. In famine he ransoms you from Death, And in battle from the power of the sword; When slander is at large9 you will be hidden, And you will have no fear of calumny when it comes. At destruction and famine you will laugh, Yea, you will have no fear of the wild beasts, But with the waste stones you will make your pact, And the weeds of the eld will be bought into concord with you. And you will be assured that your tent is safe, And will visit your fold and nd nothing amiss. And you will know your progeny numerous, And your issue like the grass of the earth; You will come in full health to the grave, As a pile of sheaves is brought up to the threshing-oor in its season. Lo, this we have searched out; it is true. Hear it and know it for yourself.’
Textual Notes to Chapter 5 1.
2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Reading yûqa, perhaps in scriptio defectiva, from a root cognate with Arab. waqaba (‘to be obliterated’, as the sun in eclipse) or ‘to subside’, for MT ’eqq¿, from qa (‘to curse’). See Commentary ad loc. Reading meÑinnm for MT miÑÑinnîm. See Commentary ad loc. The colon is displaced from v. 21a. See Introduction to chs. 4–5 and Commentary on 4.21. Reading Ñem’îm for MT Ñammîm. Reading ham with LXX and V for MT lûm according to the participial usage characteristic of the Hymn of Praise in vv. 9, 10, 12, 13. Reading q¿eîm for MT q¿erîm as suggested by the parallelism. See Commentary ad loc. Reading the Hophal participle moor for MT mere. See Commentary ad loc. Omitting hinnh metri causa. LXX, S and V read ‘from the scourge’ and one Hebrew MT reads miššôÓ. MT bešôÓ may retain the Canaanite usage of be meaning ‘from’, as in the Ras Shamra texts, though the literary inuence of Canaanite poetry is most marked in mythological references in the Book of Job. But the consonants of MT may be retained, reading bešûÓ hallšôn (‘when slander is at large’). See Commentary ad loc.
Commentary on Chapter 4 2. On the reading n’ for MT nissh see textual note. The perfect is conditional. 3. Tur-Sinai suggests that rabbîm is a Masoretic misunderstanding of a participle rîm from rû, cognate with Arab. rba, yarûbu (‘to take fright, be 1
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confounded’). The parallel with yayim rôt (‘weak hands’), however, indicates the verb rû is rather cognate with Akk. rûbu (‘quaking’). The strengthening of the weak (lit. ‘relaxed’) hands and the stumbling, or bowing, knees was an ideal of the restoration from Exile in Isa. 35.3-4 in language which practically repeats the passage in Job. The phrase ‘to relax the hands’, that is, to enervate, is familiar in the OT and denotes pacist activity in the Lachish Letters (IV, 6) from the end of the Judaean monarchy. ysar in Qal or Piel means ‘to discipline, admonish, chasten’, implying always a positive end and the mind of authority. The parallel with teazzq (‘you have strengthened’) makes Ehrlich’s proposed reading yissat (‘you have supported’) at least feasible. 4. In millîn the Aram. plural is to be noted, occurring, as Dhorme has pointed out, thirteen times in Job as against ten times when it is millîm, surely evidence of Aram. inuence in the Book. 5. The verb l’h means regularly in Hebrew ‘to be weary, exhausted’, hence ‘unable’, and may have this meaning here. In Ugaritic it means ‘to be strong’; cf. the title of Baal ’al’iyn (‘the mighty’). The usual sense in Hebrew ‘to be weary’ means ‘to have exhausted one’s strength’. The root na‘, meaning ‘to reach’, is usually used in the Hiphil in Classical Hebrew, but is found in the Qal in Isa. 16.8; Jer. 4.10; 48.32; Mic. 1.9. 6. Dhorme notes yir’h (‘fear’) with the implication ‘fear of God’ as a peculiarity of the statements of Eliphaz (cf. 15.4; 22.4). It is the regular Hebrew for ‘piety’. 8. ka’ašer r’îÓî (‘For as I have seen’), lit. ‘according to what I have seen’, sc. ‘experienced’, is particularly frequent in Ecclesiastes in the sage’s appeal to empirical fact. The agricultural gure of ploughing in mischief (’wen) and reaping trouble recalls Prov. 22.8 and, at greater length, Hos. 10.13. ‘Ploughing mischief’ may be a pregnant expression for ploughing the ground for mischief, but it probably refers to ploughing in mischief as seed, which the Arabs in Palestine still sow on the surface and then plough in with their shallow plough (Dalman 1932: II, 184). 9. The couplet may be intentionally ambiguous. min may be privative, as in our translation, referring to the animation of humans by the breath of the Creator (Gen. 2.7), on which they totally depend. The preposition may, on the other hand, be causative, ‘by the breath of God they perish…’ Not only the preposition but also ’appô is ambiguous, meaning ‘his nostril’ or ‘his anger’. The latter sense is more congruous with the preceding couplet, the former with what follows, which emphasizes the perishing lion-cubs bereft of their provider. 1
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10f. The relevance of this passage is not immediately obvious, and it has been rejected as not original (Duhm), as a marginal note which has crept into the text (Ball) or a secondary addition by a redactor (Strahan). Tur-Sinai (1957: 88-91) regarded it as an exclamation by Eliphaz, animadverting on Job’s outburst in ch. 3: ‘A lion’s roaring: crying of a great beast: (gnashing of) the teeth of lions that roam about, of a lion straying without prey, of a lion’s whelps scattered abroad’. Whether the passage refers to Job or not, the mention of lions reects the gurative reference to the impious who doubt the Order of God in the Plaint of the Sufferer in the Psalms (7.3 [EVV 2]; 22.14 [EVV 13]) or brutes who show their teeth at the sufferer (Ps. 35.17 [EVV 16]). On this interpretation, which we prefer, the passage may well apply to the discomture of the wicked in vv. 8f., with a warning to Job to curb his outspoken resentment, which is going to nd expression in the Dialogue in his criticism of the current doctrine of the theodicy. 10. nitt‘û (pausal form) has been taken as an Aram. form of the Niphal of the Classical Hebrew nÓaÑ (‘to break down’), which would suit ‘teeth’ admirably, but would leave ‘roar’ and ‘voice’ without a predicate. Israel Eitan (1939: 11ff.) proposed that the verb is a cognate of Ethiopic nata‘a (‘to ee’, hence ‘to cease, or disappear’); so also Fohrer. The synonyms for ‘lion’, ’aryeh, šaal, keîr, layiš and lî’, make translation impossible without preciosity, as in the innumerable appellations of the camel at various stages of the development of either sex in Arab. poetry. keîr, however, possibly refers to the size of the lion, as the word, denoting a great sea-monster in Ezek. 32.2, indicates (so Tur-Sinai). 12. yegunna, here ‘came secretly, or furtively’, has a parallel in 2 Sam. 19.4, ‘and the people came furtively into the city’, where the Hithpael of the verb is used. šemeÑ, known in Hebrew only here and in 26.14 and in the form šimÑh in Exod. 32.25, where the sense seems to be ‘malicious rumour’, is taken by S and T and by rabbinic commentators as ‘a trie’, as possibly in 26.14, but Sym and V render ‘a whisper’, which suggests that it is probably a cognate of Arab. šamiÑa, ‘to speak rapidly, or indistinctly’ (so Hölscher, Horst). 13. e‘ippîm is found in the OT only here and at 20.2 and is variously rendered in the ancient versions, for example, ‘thoughts’ (T), ‘fear’ (LXX, Sym., V), ‘alternation’ (Aq.), ‘sleep’ (S). No feasible cognate has been suggested for e‘ippîm, which we take as a dialectic variant of se‘ippîm found in 1 Kgs 18.21, where it means ‘two minds’ (lit. ‘forking of a branch’); cf. the variants î/sî, û/sû and aq/saq. This indicates that ‘thoughts’ (T) is nearest the meaning, which we render ‘diverging thoughts’; cf. 20.2, which we render ‘racking thoughts’. Sleep, according to Fohrer (1989: 142f.), indicates the 1
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passive attitude conducive to receptivity when the subjective element is minimized. Eliphaz’s terror emphasizes the reaction of the sage to revelation beyond the normal insights of Hebrew wisdom, though of course exaggerated. 14. qer’anî is a byform of qrh (‘to light upon, confront’). The subject of hiî (‘made to tremble’ or ‘dislocated’) is usually taken as paa (‘terror’), with r¿ ‘aÑmôÓay (‘all [lit. “the abundance of”] my bones’) as object. MT r¿, however, may be vocalized as rî, a cognate of Akk. rîbu (‘quaking’) as the subject of hiî; cf. G.R. Driver (1955: 73) (‘and quaking shook my bones’). The verb pa is taken as cognate with Arab. fa¨aa (‘to wound in the thigh’, II form, ‘to separate’), hence (of bones) ‘to dislocate’. The word-play between this verb and paa (‘fear’) in v. 14a is a feature of the style of the author of the Book of Job. 15. la (‘to pass by’) is used of a storm-wind in Isa. 21.1. rûa is ambiguous. Noticing that the predicate is masculine singular, Duhm took rûa to signify a spiritual presence. But rûa in Hebrew most normally denotes ‘wind’, which may be the accompaniment of the advent of God, who presumably speaks in the ‘voice’ in vv. 17-21. The presence of God, which the word symbolizes, may account for the masculine singular of the verb, though rûa is used with the masculine of the predicate in Exod. 10.13, where it means ‘a wind’. On the reading tismar (intransitive), meaning ‘to bristle up’, so used as a predicate of br in Ps. 119.120, see textual note. 16. The arrangement of the passage in bicola suggests that part of a colon has been lost, including the more explicit subject of ya‘am¿, which is probably the antecedent of the pronominal sufx in mar’hû (see textual note). The mention of the apparition (temûnh) indicates a supernatural representative of God and not God himself in direct revelation. The whole passage is reminiscent of the revelation to Elijah at Horeb (1 Kgs 19.12), itself reecting the revelation to Moses at the sacred mountain, particularly the tradition that Moses not only spoke with God face to face, but saw his ‘form’ (temûnh, Num. 12.8), a tradition which may be implied in Deut. 4.12-15, which states that the people as distinct from Moses did not see the temûnh of God, and in Ps. 17.15, where the psalmist declares that he shall see the face of God and be satised with his temûnh. The word may thus denote the exceptionally sure apprehension of the presence of God on the part of rare persons of dedication and spiritual susceptibility. Eliphaz may thus be claiming authority for his statement, as Lévêque (1970: 261) proposes. ‘Silence and a voice’ (demmh wqôl) may be a hendiadys, but demmh may stand pointedly in isolation to indicate the silence, after which the message was heard, as in 1 Kgs 19.12. 1
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18. hn should probably be rendered ‘if’, as Aram. ’in (so LXX). ya’amîn signies reliance upon, implying commitment of one’s secrets and interests to the person trusted. The thought is repeated with reference to the ‘holy ones’ (sc. angels) in 15.15. The ‘angels’ of God means lit. his ‘messengers’. This was taken by T as the prophets, but in the Book of Job one naturally thinks of heavenly agents as those in the divine court in the Prologue. More particularly the passage recalls ‘the saints of the Lord’ in Ben Sira, whose immeasurable inferiority to God prevents them from sharing his knowledge of all the wonders of creation (Ben Sira 42.17). toholh is variously rendered in the versions as ‘crookedness’ (LXX), ‘depravity’ (Jerome, V, T), ‘astonishment’ (S), and ‘vanity’ (Sym., Theod.). The word, if MT is sound, would be a hapax legomenon, a verbal noun from a root cognate with Arab. wahila (‘to commit error’), which has an Ethiopic cognate ‘to wander’. So Pope. 19. ’a is abbreviated from ’a-kî (‘how much less’ or ‘how much more’); cf. 9.14; 25.6. ‘Houses of clay’ are bodies of humans created from the earth (’amh, cf. Gen. 2.6 [J]) or potter’s clay (cf. 10.9; 33.6) and guratively Isa. 64.7 (EVV 8). On the reading yeukke’û for MT yeakke’ûm, assuming dittography of the nal w mistaken for m in the Old Hebraic script, see textual note. In lienê ‘š (‘like a moth’, after LXX and V) T and S have misunderstood this sense of the preposition, on which see on 3.24. 20. ‘From morning till evening’ indicates not continuous afiction but the ephemeral nature of the moth. yukkattû means lit. ‘are reduced to pieces’. In view of the gure ‘crushed to powder’, ‘pulverized’ would be a better translation of the verb kÓaÓ; cf. Deut. 9.21, and the pulverization of the Golden Calf. The form yukkattû is to be noticed as Aramaic or at least as an Aramaizing form of the Hophal. mielî mîm, if correct, assumes the ellipse of l (‘heart, understanding’). If this is so, the Hiphil rather than the Qal is suspicious. Pope after Dahood (1962: 55) suggests that the original text may have read mibbelîm šm (‘without repute’), the enclitic that reinforces the preposition min being mistaken for the preformative of the Hiphil participle in MT mîm written in scriptio defectiva, which is feasible. LXX reads ‘without their being able to help themselves’, which suggests mibbelî îmm lhem neÑa (so Beer, Stevenson). But this overloads the metre, and the original of LXX may be mibbelî môšîa‘, ‘without any being able to deliver them’ (so Merx, Graetz, Houtsma, Dhorme). Here, however, it is unlikely that such a distinctive letter in the context as ‘ayin should have dropped out at any stage of the script. Tur-Sinai makes the feasible suggestion that MT mîm is an Aramaic innitive construct (Qal with the force of a verbal noun; so Horst, who renders ‘unbeachtet’). 1
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21. On the view that v. 21a is displaced from before 5.5c, see Introduction to chs. 4–5. The transposition of v. 21a to what we believe to be its original position leaves v. 19c parallel to v. 20a, and v. 20b parallel to v. 21b. This supports Tur-Sinai’s interpretation of v. 20b as against the various emendations noted above. Here, however, it is important to note that mîm and o¤mh are not passive, as Horst assumed, but active. This is important in view of the arrangement of the text in the sequel, which is a matter of notorious difculty. Commentators differ in the interpretation of the phrase wel¿’ eokmh which is ambiguous, since okmh signies either the Creator’s objective plan and purpose in all things, as in Job 28 and Proverbs 8, or the subjective intelligence or prudence and practical wisdom in the emergencies of life. Horst proposed that it meant that humans die without any intelligent purpose being observable, but that was not in accordance with the orthodoxy of Eliphaz. Budde, Hölscher and Fohrer understood it to mean ‘without knowing how’. Ehrlich and Stevenson, after LXX, rendered ‘for lack of wisdom’, which can scarcely be the meaning in view of death as the common and inevitable fate of all humans. Gray and Driver explain the phrase as ‘without having realized the moral limitations of human nature’. In the context of his reply to Job’s petulance, Eliphaz, we think, is stating that for lack of self-discipline of wisdom to assimilate the experience of life (v. 20b) and to adjust themselves patiently to circumstances, human beings induce their own destruction by their angry rebellion against circumstances (5.2), which Job has evinced in his cursing of his existence in ch. 3. Note that 5.1, which makes no sense in its position in MT, is displaced from before 5.8 (so Dhorme). See Commentary on Chapter 5. Commentary on Chapter 5 2. In le’ewîl, le is the nota accusativa, familiar in later Aramaic, but also known in earlier passages in the OT, for example, 2 Sam. 3.30, where it may be a vestige of Old Aramaic. ka’a is an orthographic variant of regular ka‘as, signifying the emotional strain of resentment with the implication of frustration, which is specically associated with the fool (’ewîl), which signies also the ‘wicked’ in Prov. 27.3. qin’h, which usually denotes exclusive and intolerant devotion, in this context denotes rather the overt self-commitment of the simpleton (p¿Óeh) who is not sufciently subtle to conceal or restrain his feelings. 3. Noting rightly that the Piel of šrš may mean ‘to eradicate’ as well as ‘to take root’, Hoffmann interpreted the passage in the former sense, reading the Pual participle meš¿rš. Dhorme notes that the sudden (piÓ’¿m) destruction of the wicked in the second colon indicates the opposite. Actually the Hiphil expresses the denominative sense ‘to take root’.
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If with Dhorme we take w’eqq¿ as ‘and I cursed’ from qa, after Aq. and V., this would indicate the endorsement of the divine displeasure by a curse, as for instance the punctilio which the Arabs of Jerusalem used to observe in cursing the reputed tomb of Absalom whenever they passed it. This interpretation is excluded by the adverb piÓ’¿m. The reading of the verb, however, is in doubt as indicated by the variations in the versions, for example, ‘his livelihood is eaten up’ (LXX), ‘his abode has perished’ (S). The noun nweh is attested in v. 24 and 18.15 as ‘abode’ or the like. More particularly in Jer. 33.12 it denotes the folds and settlements of shepherds. An Akk. cognate denotes ‘encampments’ in the Alalakh Tablets (Wiseman 1953: 10). Various emendations have been proposed for MT w’eqq¿, for example, werq, ‘and (his dwelling) rotted’ (Merx, Bickell, Siegfried, Hölscher), or wayyirqa (Duhm, Ehrlich, Stevenson, Weiser, Fohrer), with the same meaning. The emendation of Baumgärtel wayy‘qer (‘was eradicated’), which is accepted by Horst, is too far removed from the consonants of MT. Perhaps wayyûqa should be read, the verb being cognate with Arab. waqaba (‘to be effaced’ or ‘to subside’); cf. Israel Eitan’s proposal (1939: 9-23) that wayyûqa should be read, derived from a verb qû cognate with Arab. qba, the II form of which means ‘to eradicate’. An interesting proposal is that of J.J. Slotki (1931: 288) that the consonants of T may be arranged without emendation to read we‘aqqô benwhû (‘and the wild goat is in his household’), taking ‘aqqô as ‘wild goat’ mentioned in Deut. 14.5. But this interpretation also is practically ruled out by the adverb piÓ’¿m (‘suddenly’). 4. ‘The gate’ is the place of public justice; cf. Prov. 22.22, ‘Do not crush the poor in the gate’ (’al-teakk’ ‘nî bašš‘ar), where the same verb is used as in the present passage. The locus classicus for justice and the vindication of the poor ‘in the gate’ is Ruth 4.1-11. 5. For MT ’ašer qeÑîrô r‘ y¿’¤l (‘whose harvest the hungry eats’) LXX reads, with too abrupt a change of subject, ’ašer qÑerû r‘ y¿’¤l (‘that which they have reaped the hungry shall eat’), understanding ‘his sons’ as subject. In v. 5b and c the versions are at variance and give no help beyond attesting MT with only slight variation. miÑÑinnîm at rst sight suggests ‘from the thorns’, or possibly ‘the place of thorns’, though this is not the rendering of any of the versions. The former meaning seems to be contradicted by the preposition ’el (‘to’), but possibly the original reading was lemiÑÑinnîm, with le signifying ‘from’ as in Ugaritic, being reinforced by min; cf. milleô’. The meaning would be that the hungry took the corn of the wicked from the thorns which, like a zeriba, were used, as still among the Arab peasants, to protect the grain from beasts on the threshing-oor until it is brought into storage. Perhaps ’el-meÑinnm (‘to their own zeriba’) may be read as in our translation. G.R. Driver proposes to overcome the difculty of MT ’el-miÑÑinnîm by taking 1
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’el as ’l (‘the strong’) from the root ’ûl. Tur-Sinai proposes to read ’ûlm (‘their strength is dearth’), taking ’ûlam (lit. ‘strength’, so ‘possessions’) as parallel to êlm. ’ûl, however, is not attested in the sense of ‘wealth’. For his reading Ñannîm Tur-Sinai cites the participle ÑenunôÓ (‘shrivelled’), used of ears of corn in Pharaoh’s dream in Gen. 41.23. The third colon, v. 5c, unless this a case of a tricolon punctuating a passage arranged in bicola to indicate the end of the passage according to sense, is suspect, implying an omission or a displacement of a colon, which is possibly to be found at 4.21a, ‘Is not their abundance wrested from them’, as Dhorme proposed. The ancient versions (Aq., Sym., V; cf. S) are unanimous in suggesting that Ñammîm is a corruption of an original Ñem’îm (‘thirsty’). This involves the reading weš’aû, possibly written in scriptio defectiva. The verb š’a, rendered by Hölscher ‘snap after’, means ‘to pant after’, hence ‘eagerly desire’. For ayil a concrete substance such as ‘harvest’ in v. 5a has been suggested, for example, alm, ‘their milk’ (Hoffmann, Beer, Tur-Sinai), or allm, ‘their vinegar’ (Beer), but ayil is well attested in the sense of ‘substance’ or ‘wealth’; cf. 20.15, though admittedly after Ñem’îm some liquid would be expected. 6. Here the force of kî is corroborative. yÑa’ has the specic sense ‘grow out’; cf. Ñe’eÑ’ (‘growth’). 7. Commentators differ in reading ywld as the Niphal as in MT and the ancient versions (Merx, Dillmann, Bickell, G.B. Gray, Ball, Stevenson, Weiser, Horst, Fohrer, Pope, J.C.L. Gibson) or Hiphil yôlî, ‘begets’ (Graetz, Beer, Duhm, Dhorme, Hölscher, Mowinckel, Terrien). Both are possible in the context. The latter might claim the support of Eliphaz’s statement in 4.8 that humans plough in mischief (’wen), and sow trouble (‘ml), and more particularly the statement in Ps. 7.15 (EVV 14) that humans conceive mischief (’wen) and bring forth falsehood (weyla šeqer); cf. Job 15.35, and especially Isa. 59.4, where humans ‘conceive trouble and beget mischief’ (hrô ‘ml wehôlê ’wen). In this case le in le‘ml would be the nota accusativi as in Aramaic. But the comparison with the young eagles or vultures born to soar high (understanding the imperfect yabîhû as the verb in a nal clause asyndetically after the verb implied in yiwwl as in Ugaritic poetry) in our opinion supports MT yiwwl, signifying that humans are born to trouble. J.C.L. Gibson (pp. 46ff.) understands this to indicate a decree of sympathy on Eliphaz’s part for Job as heir to the burden of humankind after the fall of Adam, reecting specically Gen. 3.17-19. In any case, though the entail of Adam’s sin might mitigate that of Job, which Eliphaz assumes, Job is not exonerated from a degree of responsibility for the accumulation of trouble in society, particularly in his readiness to venture more than a mortal ought, in pressing his case with the Almighty. 1
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The verb ‘û suggests that benê reše are birds, and so the phrase is taken in all the versions except T, where it is variously rendered as ‘sons of demons’ or ‘sparks’, whence EVV. In support of the interpretation as birds Dhorme suggests that, as Pss. 76.4 (EVV 3), 78.48 and Song 8.6 indicate, reše means ‘lightning’, with which he associated the eagle. Deuteronomy 32.24 and Hab. 3.5, incidentally, do not support this interpretation, since there reše is parallel to ‘plague’, and is therefore the personication of plague or death en masse, which was the province of the Canaanite god Rešeph, now well known in this capacity in the Ras Shamra texts (e.g. Gordon, UT Krt 18). It is a remarkable fact that in Deut. 32.24 Targum Onkelos renders reše as ‘birds’ and Ben Sira 43.14, 17, LXX and V so render the same word, neither, however, specifying eagles or vultures, which none of the versions does in Job 5.7b. LXX in fact renders reše as ‘vulture’, which has suggested the emendation nešer, which is graphically feasible. In this case, however, the versions would almost certainly have been specic. We seem to be driven back on the interpretation of reše as a forgotten relic of Canaanite mythology. Rešeph was a god who slew humans in mass by war or plague, and is known from a mythological fragment from Ras Shamra as ‘Lord of the Arrow’ (b‘l Ñ) (RS 15.134.3; Virolleaud 1957: 3ff.). Thus ‘the sons of Rešeph’ may be arrows, the normal parabolic ight of which may be described. But in view of the association of Rešeph with mass death ‘the sons of Rešeph’ are probably the vultures (‘where the body is there will the vultures gather’). Their high ight enables them to locate their carrion with speed that appears uncanny (39.27-29). Horst suggestively cites the designation ršp Ñprm in Azitawadd’s inscription from Karatepe (Donner and Röllig 1962: no. 26 A, II, 10-11), where Ñprm may mean ‘birds’, or perhaps more specically ‘birds of prey’, lit. ‘taloned birds’; cf. Ñippôr in Ezek. 39.4. Tur-Sinai comes near to this interpretation, but in the writer’s opinion needlessly identies ‘the Rešeph-birds’ with the Classical harpies. 5.1. This verse is displaced in MT from before v. 8, to which it is the appropriate introduction, not being relevant in its position in MT, where the theme is the retribution of the fool. The identity of qeôšîm in this context is apparently the angels who might intercede for the sufferer, a conception which we encounter again in the speeches of Elihu and which is implied per contra by the ofce of the Ón as ‘public prosecutor’ among the ‘divine beings’ (benê ’el¿hîm) in the Prologue. The usage and theological background recalls Zech. 14.5 (late postexilic) and Dan. 8.13 (second century BCE). Buttenwieser (1922: 165-67), however, proposes that dead ancestors, notable possessors of divine favour and so effective intercessors, like the Arab. wlî, are denoted. In support he cites Saadyah, who renders g¿’l in Job 19.25 as wlî, and Isa. 63.16: You are our father; Abraham does not care for us, Nor does Israel acknowledge us. 1
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You are our father, Our Vindicator (g¿’l) has been your name From time immemorial.
He takes ’el¿hîm in this sense in Isa. 8.19; cf. 1 Sam. 28.13, where it denotes the dead Samuel. The rhetorical question may, however, rather reect the limitations of the ‘holy ones’, the angels of 4.18. 8. This is the natural sequel and contrast to 5.1. derh, familiar in the phrase ‘al-dira (‘according to the fashion of’), as distinct from dr (‘word’), is a forensic or philosophic term denoting ‘case’. 9. Here a participle introduces a Hymn of Praise (vv. 9-16), which is sustained by references in the same style and form to praiseworthy acts of God. This form was familiar in psalms celebrating the providence of God in nature, history and society in the liturgy of the New Year festival and is cited here because of its traditional association with this theme and its variations in the argument of Eliphaz (see above, pp. 49-50). This is also the explanation of what are generally described as doxologies in Amos 4.13; 5.8; 8.8; 9.5ff., which, like the chorus of a Greek tragedy, emphasize the main philosophic theme. The use of this hymnic excerpt results in a strophe longer than usual in the context. nil’ô denotes manifestations of God’s immediate activity, which, by its very nature, dees human explanation by secondary causes. 10. The mention of the rain and of the distribution of water as the rst instance of God’s providence reects the Canaanite origin of the liturgy of the great autumn festival with its theme of the victory of God over the forces of Chaos (J. Gray 1956; 1961). In Canaan this was the exploit of Baal-Hadad, who was manifest in the vital rains and storms of winter. In the Canaanite text celebrating his victory over the power of Chaos represented by the unruly Sea-andRiver, which results signicantly in the establishment of his kingship (Gordon UT 68), Baal is said to drag his defeated adversary away and ‘disperse Sea’ (yšt ym), thereby, we claim, distributing the ood for the good of the land (cf. Ps. 104.6ff.). The verb šla is used of distributing water in an irrigation channel, šîl¿a (Isa. 8.6). ‘The elds’ (ûÑô), lit. ‘places outside’, that is, outside the defensive walls of the settlement (Dhorme), is seldom found, but from Ps. 114.13 and Prov. 8.26 its meaning is not in doubt. 11. The operation of God in raising the humble and abasing the haughty is the theme also of Ps. 138.6 and 1 Sam. 2.7; cf. the emphasis on the humbling of the haughty in Isa. 2.9, 11-17 in consequence of the epiphany of God as king (Isa. 2.10, 19, 21). 1
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In v. 11a ham should probably be read as suggested by LXX and V in keeping with the participial expression of God’s great works in vv. 9-13. ‘Those who mourn’ is a paraphrase of ‘those who go black’ (MT q¿erîm), either in sack-cloth or with blackened or unwashed faces, as a rite of separation in mourning (cf. Pss. 35.14; 38.7 [EVV 6]; 42.10 [EVV 9] etc.), but in the context this may be a scribal corruption of q¿eîm, ‘those who are bowed down’; cf. Gen. 24.26; Exod. 4.31; 12.27; 34.8; etc. (so Peters, Tur-Sinai, Beer, Stevenson, after S). 12. ‘Success’ is probably a secondary meaning of tûšiyyh, which is demonstrated by Hebrew wisdom literature to be generally parallel to ‘wisdom’ (o¤mh, Job 11.6; Prov. 2.7) or ‘counsel’ ‘Ñh (Job 26.3; Prov. 8.14), and ‘foresight’ (mezimmh, Prov. 3.21). Hence the meaning ‘effective wisdom’ is proposed (Driver–Gray 1921: 30-32), and in the present passage ‘plan’ may be the meaning (so Peake, Dhorme, Hölscher). The word is also parallel to ‘help’ (‘ezrh, 6.13) and ‘strength’ (‘¿z, 12.16) where ‘success’ may be the meaning (so Stevenson, Horst). The parallel mašeôÓ in the present passage suggests that the meaning here is ‘plan’, with, however, the implication of the plan realized, or effective. 13. nitlîm means ‘complicated’, lit. ‘plaited’ or ‘twisted’ as a rope. ‘Ñh means ‘counsel’ or ‘plan’, again with the implication of the plan carried through to an effective conclusion, which in this case is frustrated through premature haste (nimhrh). 14. Groping (yemašešu) at noon-day reects the elaboration of the curse of those that contravene the divine commandments in the context of the conclusion of the Covenant-sacrament in Deut. 28.29. This verb would suggest a synonym in the parallel colon, and Tur-Sinai suggests that paš may be a metathetic cognate of Syr. geša. But paš in its usual sense of ‘encounter’ has already the implication of ‘stumbling upon’, which is a sufciently apt parallel to mšaš. 15. In v. 15a a parallel to ’eyôn (‘needy’) is demanded. The simplest solution would seem to be to vocalize MT mare as moor, ‘the ruined one’ (so Michaelis, Ewald, Friedrich Delitzsch, Dhorme, Terrien), thus respecting the consonants of MT which are attested by all the ancient versions. For the gure of the oppressor devouring the aficted, cf. Hab. 3.14; Prov. 30.14. This obviates emendations, of which the nearest to MT are that of Stevenson wayyôša‘ meuyy mippîhem (‘and he rescued a condemned man from their mouth’) and that of Horst wayyôša‘ meere mu (‘and he rescued a man from the sword’).
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16. MT ‘¿lth is attested in Ps. 92.16 in the Qere ‘¿lÓh or probably ‘awlÓh, explained by Dhorme as a poetic form of ‘awlh on the analogy of ‘êÓh, ‘weariness’ (10.22) with a similar shift of diphthong to a long vowel and the feminine ending in -Óh. ‘Stop’ for qeÑh perhaps gives the wrong impression. The verb means ‘to draw together’ (cf. Arab. qafaÑa), hence ‘to shut by clamping the lips together’; cf. Isa. 52.15, of the powers of the world who desist from speaking against the Servant of Yahweh. 17. On omission of hinneh metri causa, with Merx, Dillmann, Beer, Duhm, Ball, Peters, Hölscher and Stevenson, see textual note. So far as sense is concerned the word might be retained as an emphatic enclitic; cf. Arab. ’inna (so Dhorme, Horst). hô¤îa is a forensic term, ‘to bring a person’s guilt home to one’, so in general ‘to reprove’ (6.25, 26; 32.12; 40.2). The emphasis sometimes falls on the argument for this purpose (13.15) and sometimes on the result, ‘correction’, as here and at 13.10; 22.4; 33.19. As implying impartial scrutiny of merits and demerits the verb may also denote arbitration between two parties (9.33; 16.21). The parallel ysar, the root of mûsr, denotes rather ‘correction’ or ‘discipline’. Here occurs the rst of the 31 incidences of šadday, generally rendered ‘the Almighty’, in Job. ’l šadday is the specic name of God in the patriarchal narratives in P (cf. Ezek. 10.5, 4), but may reect earlier usage (cf. Gen. 43.14 [E] and possibly 49.12 [J] after LXX and the Samaritan Pentateuch). šadday has been thought to be connected with the Akk. and Aram. root ‘to pour’, indicating God as the giver of rain or with Akk. šadu (‘mountain’); cf. ‘the rock’ as a divine appellative in Deut. 32.4; etc. A connection with Arab. šadda (‘to be strong’) has also been suggested. The connection with Akk. šadu seems probable, if still not certain. The Rabbinical explanation ‘He who is sufcient’ (Heb. ša-day) is an etymological tour de force, a theologoumenon rather than serious etymology, and is not seriously to be considered. In keeping with the universalistic theme of wisdom, the divine name Yahweh, the God of Israel, is conned to the prologue and epilogue to Job and to the few prose passages elsewhere in the book. The names šadday and ’l or ’elôah are preferred as characteristic of the patriarchal age according to the P tradition and in accordance with the patriarchal setting in which the book is cast. The term ’elôah (singular of ’el¿hîm) is used regularly in Job with ’l and šadday, perhaps to emphasize the unity of God. Dhorme (p. xl) suggests that ’elôah is an Edomite word, in support of which he cites the use in the psalm in Hab. 3.3, where God is associated with Teman in the vicinity of Edom, but here the choice of ’elôah may have been dictated by metric considerations. ’l in Amorite theophoric names from the second millennium BCE and in the Ras Shamra texts is both a generic term ‘god’ and the name of the Amorite and Canaanite high god, known very explicitly from the Ras Shamra texts of
1
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the fourteenth century BCE as the senior god of the Canaanite pantheon, the nal authority in all matters in nature and society, but more specically interested in society (J. Gray 1966). The signicance of the Canaanite conception of El for the development of the conception of Yahweh in Israel cannot be overestimated, as Eissfeldt has emphasized (1956: 37), ‘He (sc. Yahweh) received from him (sc. El) the impetus to an evolution which meant the supplementation of the traits originally belonging to him…a dangerous and bizarre character and jealous vehemence…by the qualities of discretion, and wisdom, moderation and patience, forbearance and mercy’; cf. Fohrer (1953: cols. 196-97), who also sees in the character of El in the Ras Shamra texts the signs of a monotheistic tendency in Ugarit. 19. In view of the verb yaÑÑîle¤ (‘he will deliver you’), bešš ÑrôÓ may mean ‘from six troubles’, be meaning ‘from’ as well as ‘in’ in Ugaritic; cf. Beer, Duhm, who conjectured min for MT be, but this need not be so, as the parallel colon indicates, where be indicates the circumstances in which the person will experience God’s deliverance. The numerical climax to indicate repetition or an indenite number is familiar in Hebrew and Ugaritic poetry; cf. Prov. 6.16, There are six things that Yahweh hates, Yea, seven that he himself abhors…,
and in the Ras Shamra text Gordon UT 51.III.17-18: There are two sacrices that Baal detests, Three (detested by) Him who Mounts the clouds…
20. pe¤ is the declaratory perfect, emphasizing the certainty of the divine action proclaimed, particularly common in prophetic utterance, and sometimes called the ‘prophetic perfect’. The verb ph, with an Arab. cognate, denotes ‘ransom’, a familiar practice in tribal warfare raids, in which the blood-feud imposed an economy of life. ‘From death’ may either denote ransom so that one should not be put to death, or it may denote a personication of death, a reection, of the anthropomorphic gure of Death and Sterility, the archenemy of the life-giving Baal in the Canaanite mythology known in the Ras Shamra texts. 21. bešôÓ lšôn might be another case of be meaning ‘from’ as in v. 19. The common translation is ‘scourge of the tongue’, but Tur-Sinai after Saadya takes šôÓ as ‘to roam’; cf. šûÓ in 1.4; 2.2. He might have cited Ps. 73.9, ûlešônm tihala¤ b’reÑ (RSV ‘And their tongue struts about in the earth’) in support of this interpretation, which accords better with the verb ‘you shall be hidden’ and preserves the parallelism with šô kî yô’ (‘calumny when it comes’). lšôn (lit. ‘tongue’) has probably the pregnant sense ‘calumny’ here; cf. the denominative verb lšan in Ps. 101.5; Prov. 30.10, with cognates with this sense in Arabic and Ugaritic (e.g. Gordon UT 2 Aqht VI.51). The word 1
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articulated in malice or curse was dreaded as having a potent and palpable force; cf. qellh nimreÑeÓ in 1 Kgs 2.8, a curse infected with disease, a crippling curse. The apparent repetition of šô in vv. 21 and 22 indicates, as usual in such cases in Job, a word-play with homonyms. Here šô with an Arab. cognate comes rst and the Hebrew homonym šô (‘destruction’) second, the order being usually the other way round. The parallelism with šûÓ lšôn indicates that the rst šo is the Arab. awdu(n), ‘blackness’, that is, denigration; cf. awwada wajhahu (‘he blackened his face’, i.e. calumniated him). 22. kn (‘famine’) is an Aram. synonym of Heb. r‘b (v. 20). ’al-tîr’ is usually taken as jussive in prohibition, which is explained (GKC, §109b) as the statement of a conviction that something cannot, or may not, happen. Actually ’al is found with the imperfect indicative in the Ras Shamra texts, and this may be a vestige of the poetic diction of Canaan in Hebrew literature; cf. 20.17; 40.32; Ps. 121.3. The menace of wild beasts, such as gazelles, to crops and predatory beasts such as hyenas to ocks and even to human life, was real in the Hejaz, and even till recently in Palestine, where deep ravines, rocks and scrubland and semi-desert regions adjacent to the settled land harboured such creatures. 23. In the context referring to such natural enemies as famine, wild beasts and weeds it is highly unlikely that in ‘the stones of the eld’ there should be any reference to boundary stones. The reference is rather to stones which mar the good land for cultivation either as outcrops of rock or as stony patches (Mt. 13.5) (so Dhorme), or perhaps rock-falls or stones washed over good land by ood or perhaps dry-stone terrace walls washed out by oods. The reading ’a¿nê haeh (‘lords of the eld’, i.e. local eld-spirits) is suggested by K. Kohler, in support of which view Buttenwieser (1922: 170) cites Doughty (1926: I, 177), ‘Many have sown here, and awhile, the Arabs told me, they fared well, but always in the reaping time there has died some one of them. A hidden mischief they think to be in all this soil once subverted by divine judgments, that it may never be tilled again or inhabited. Malignity of the soil is otherwise ascribed by the people of Arabia to the ground-demons, jn, ahlu ’l-’ard or earth-Folk.’ The natural nuisances in the context, however, support MT. The marring of cultivable land by stones is noted in war (2 Kgs 3.19, 25), and their removal and use in terracing is a constant and necessary occupation among the hills of Palestine (Isa. 5.2). We accept G.R. Driver’s suggestion that ayyaÓ haeh in v. 23b means not ‘beasts of the eld’, but ‘weeds of the eld’, Adam’s natural enemies after the Fall (Gen. 2.18 [J]) which by God’s grace should be brought into concord with humankind (hošlemh, a form which occurs only here). On Driver’s interpretation ayyaÓ is cognate with Arab. ayyu(n) (‘cultivated plants or weeds’). 1
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The repetition of haeh is suspect unless, according to the fondness of the writer of Job for word-play, the one represents the familiar Hebrew and the other a cognate less familiar in Hebrew. Here we suggest that the former is Arabic suday (‘forsaken, useless’), hence our rendering: But with the waste stones you will make your pact, And the weeds of the eld will be brought into concord with you.
24. MT šlôm’ohole¤ is suspect. We should expect either the noun šlôm with a preposition (so evidently read by LXXA and Jerome) or a stative verb šlm, which LXX evidently read. The same problem is raised in 21.9, bttêhem šlôm, where LXX, V and possibly also S read the verb šlemû, indicating perhaps metathesis of w and m, which closely resemble each other in the Old Hebrew script. But Dhorme cites other instances where šlôm is apparently used as a predicate after the subject, for example, Gen. 43.27; 1 Sam. 25.6; 2 Sam. 20.9. If these like the present passage are not simply errors of dittography in the Old Hebrew script, šlôm may be the participle of a stative verb šlôm, a byform of the more familiar šlm (‘to be whole’), specically denoting ‘be at peace’. Alternatively MT šlôm in those passages may be šlûm (‘at ease’), the noun šlû with the afformative m which is used as a substitute for, or to supplement, the preposition in Akkadian and Ugaritic, having an adverbial force, as in Heb. yômm, piÓ’ôm, ’omnm and innm. See further on 21.9. As ’¿hel, nweh suggests the desert, not necessarily literally but as a relic of nomadic antecedents, like so much in Hebrew. nweh is the camp and sheepfolds, or corrals, of shepherds on the desert edge (e.g. 2 Sam. 7.8; Isa. 65.10; Jer. 23.3; 33.12; 49.20; Ezek. 25.5; 34.14). The verb pqat may indicate a periodic ‘stock-taking’, which is the primary sense of the verb, which only secondarily means ‘to visit’. Ó’ means ‘to miss the mark, be the loser’ (e.g. 1 Kgs 1.21), with primarily no moral connotation. The meaning ‘to be a sinner’ is secondary. 26. be¤ela has no parallel in Classical Hebrew, and is taken as a scribal error for bela¤, ‘in your vigour’ (cf. Deut. 34.7) (so Ball after Cheyne), beêle¤, ‘in your vigour’ (Merx), or even be¤lh, ‘in the fulness’ (of old age) (Dhorme). Rabbinical ingenuity suggests that Job’s age is indicated (2+20+30+8 = 60)! kela is probably an Aramaism; cf. Syr. kela (‘health’) and Arab. kalia (‘to be stern, rm’). gîš is not a sheaf or ‘shock’ of corn, but the pile of sheaves that were gathered together in the eld as loads to be transported (lit. ‘brought up’) to the threshing-oor (Exod. 20.5; Judg. 15.5) on an airy height by the village. 27. aqarnûh (‘we have searched it out’) indicates the thoroughness of the sage to investigate the declarations of orthodoxy. 1
Job 6 and 7 JOB’S FIRST REJOINDER TO ELIPHAZ (CHAPTER 6) AND HIS EXPOSTULATION WITH GOD (CHAPTER 7)
Job’s reply to the rst round of argument from Eliphaz falls into four parts. In the rst (6.2-13) he justies his resentment under stress of suffering; in the second (6.14-30) he declares his disappointment in his friends, who had failed him with their sympathy in his hour of need; in the third (7.1-15), Job complains of God’s unremitting torment of him, a mere mortal to whom death would have been a welcome release; and in the fourth (7.16-21), this theme is sustained, with the addition that even if Job had sinned he could not harm God so as to merit such punishment. The rst two parts are arranged in four strophes each (6.2-4, 5-7, 8-10, 1113; and 6.14-17, 18-21, 22-25, 26-30), and the last two parts in respectively three (7.1-4, 5-11, 12-15) and two (7.16-19, 20-21). In the rst part, Job replies to Eliphaz’s rebuke of his outburst in ch. 3 and his lack of patience under adversity on which Hebrew wisdom insisted, alleging his exceptional suffering at the hand of God. Job’s excuse for his reaction is rounded out by two proverbs in the Wisdom tradition (6.5, 6). His sufferings are described in the gurative and hyperbolic language of the Plaint of the Sufferer, but his pleading reects the forensic controversy, with the signicant difference that Job’s plea is not for acquittal but for ‘easeful death’, reecting 3.11-13 from Job’s initial expostulation. This is his response to Eliphaz’s exhortation to sue for God’s mercy, with the promise of rehabilitation (5.8ff.). This variation of the literary prototype makes the plea particularly poignant. In the second part the literary form is the forensic controversy, with the disloyal friends in place of the legal opponents of the sufferer. The passage in its subject as well as its gurative language recalls the sufferer’s complaint of his friends’ alienation in the Plaint of the Sufferer in Pss. 31.12 (EVV 11); 38.12 (EVV 11); 41.10 (EVV 9); 55.13-15 (EVV 12-14; 69.9ff. (EVV 8ff.). More particularly the gure of the friends as a dry wadi (6.15-21) recalls Jeremiah’s reproach to God in Jer. 15.18, though the distinctive contribution of the author of the Book of Job must be noted in the expansion of the original to a striking Homeric simile. In ch. 7 in response to Eliphaz’s exhortation to make his petition to God (5.8), with the prospect of a ‘happy ending’ (5.17-26), with signicant change from the plural to the singular of the one addressed, Job directly and simply 1
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addresses God; his address, however, is expostulation rather then prayer. The language reminiscent of Eliphaz’s reference to the frailty of humans vis-à-vis the angels as prone to sin (4.17ff.), Job cites the hard lot and natural frailty of humans in general and his own hard lot in particular, with the inevitable prospect of death and oblivion to invite the mercy of God to ‘let him be’ in his miserable life (7.19) or to give him the coup de grâce (7.15; cf. 6.8f.). Chapter 7 reects two sapiential texts, with, however, signicant adaptation. First it recalls Hezekiah’s prayer in Isa. 38.10-18, with the harrowing recital of sufferings with the grim prospect of Sheol (Isa. 38.10). This, however, is the prelude to the hope of survival as distinct from Job 7, where Sheol is the culmination of Job’s sufferings (7.8, 10, 21). Second, again perhaps animadverting on Eliphaz’s theme of human frailty in 4.19ff., the passage, particularly 7.17ff., is a parody of Ps. 8.5ff. (EVV 4ff.). The psalmist asks ‘What is man?’, physically so insignicant in the universe, that God should pay him special attention as the apex of creation; with mortals’ limitations in mind Job asks the same question why God should sustain and promote them simply to subject them to inquisition and torment. In this context the citation of the mythological theme of God’s inveterate hostility to ‘Sea and Tannin’, in view of the traditional association with the Hymn of Praise celebrating the victory of God as King conrming the establishment of Order against the menace of Chaos which it naturally evoked in Jewish readers, is tantamount to questioning the justice of ‘the Judge of all the earth’. Chapter 6 1.
Then Job answered and said,
2.
‘Would that my resentment were weighed And that they put my ruin1 with it in the balances; Then it would prove heavier than the sand of the sea; For this reason are my words impassioned, For the arrows of the Almighty are against me And my spirit drinks their venom; The sudden attacks of the Almighty wear me out.
3. 4.
5. 6. 7.
8. 9.
1
Does the wild ass bray over his pasture? Does the ox low over his fodder? Is that which is insipid eaten without salt? Is there any taste in bland from cheese? My very being refuses to eat, My inwards2 loathe3 my food. Would that my request were realized, That God could grant what I hope for! That it would please God to crush me, To unleash his power and cut me off!
The Book of Job 10.
Even that would be my consolation, I would leap for joy in my unremitting anguish,4 That I had not concealed declaration concerning the Holy One.5
11.
What is my strength that I should hold out? What my appointed end that I should patiently endure? Is my strength the strength of stones? Is my esh bronze?6 Even if I were to increase my help a hundred-fold7 My effective power would be driven from me.
12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.
18. 19. 20.
21. 22. 23. 24. 25.
26. 27. 28. 29. 30.
1
To one who is in despair8 ill-will from his friend Is as though one abandoned the fear of the Almighty. My brothers are ckle as a winter torrent, Like empty watercourses,9 which have owed away, Which are dark by reason of the ice-oe, And in which snow ows, But when they run off they vanish, In the heat they are extinguished from their place. The caravans make a detour,10 They go off into the desert and perish; The caravans of Tema looked out, The trains of Sheba set their hopes on them; They were confounded in their trust,11 They reached the wadi and were disappointed. Even so12 you have been to me,13 You see a single terror14 and are afraid. Is it that I have said “Give me something”? Or “Give a bribe on my behalf from your wealth”’? Or “Rescue me from the power of the enemy”? Or “Ransom me from brigands”? Instruct me, and I will be silent, Make me to understand wherein I have erred. How aggravating are the words of rectitude! But what sort of censure is censure from you? Is it your intention to criticize my words, The utterances of a desperate man (spoken) for relief? Yea, you would cast lots for an orphan, And haggle over your friend. Now please face up to me, Surely I will not lie to your face. Be done.15 Let there be no injustice; Relent, for my case is still just.16 Is there distortion on my tongue? Can my palate not discriminate words?’
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Textual Notes to Chapter 6 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
Reading hawwÓî with LXX, S, V, T and four Heb. MSS for MT wehayyÓî; see Commentary ad loc. Reading keî for MT kiewê; see Commentary ad loc. Reading zihamh for MT hmmh after LXX and supported by the parallelism. Reading îlî for MT îlh; see Commentary ad loc. The colon after the bicolon which closes the strophe 6.8-10 may refer to Job’s satisfaction in stating a case against God’s undue persecution of a mere mortal in ch. 7, but in the context of 6.8-10 and 11f. it seems a gloss, as indicated by the term ‘the Holy One’, the only such designation of God in the Book of Job. Reading neušh, attaching h of the following ha’im of MT to the unfamiliar form nûš. Reading ha’am’enn (‘ezrÓî î) for MT ha’im ’ên ‘ezrÓî î after Graetz. Reading lannms or lenms for MT lamms; see Commentary ad loc. Reading ka’aîqîm lîm for MT ka’aîq nelîm; see Commentary ad loc. Reading yelappeÓû for MT yilleÓû to supply the transitive verb which the object darkm requires. Reading bÓeû with S and T for MT bÓ. Conjecturing kn for MT kî. Reading lî with LXX, S and one Heb. MS for MT l¿’. Reading aÓ’Ó ’aaÓ in a four-beat colon to balance the metre of v. 21 after the emendation of MT kî to kn. Reading šobbû, taking the verb as cognate of Arab. Óabba, ‘to be ended’ (of a matter) or ‘to settle down’ (of a person), so we might paraphrase ‘rest the case’. Reading bî for MT bh, y being corrupted to h in the Old Heb. script.
Commentary on Chapter 6 2. lû introduces an unrealizable wish (GKC, §159.3; §151.2). hayyÓî should probably be emended to hawwÓî, as in 30.13; cf. haww¿Ó (Prov. 19.13; Pss. 57.2; 91.3). 3. kî-‘atth, which introduces a letter after the greeting, here introduces the apodosis after the protasis which states the condition potentially fullled. Sand was proverbially heavy; cf. Prov. 27.3 and the Wisdom of Ahiqar VII, 112f., ANET, p. 429: ‘I have lifted sand and I have carried salt, but there is nothing which is heavier than (anger)’. The sand of the sea is hyperbolic. In view of the reference in Prov. 27.3 to the fool as heavier than sand Job 6.3 may specically allude to Job’s impatient expostulation under stress of adversity in 4.5 and 5.3, so out of character in a sage. The root l‘h is used of rash oaths in Prov. 20.25, though the pointing in that passage suggests a different root, either l‘a‘ or a variant of Arab. wala‘a (‘to be impassioned’). Tur-Sinai evidently takes the verb as a cognate of Arab. laa(w) (‘to babble’), rendering (‘my words) are stammering’. Job’s assurance, however, and his articulate argument is far from stammering; though certainly impassioned. 1
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4. For ‘immî, ‘against’, we may cite Ugaritic ‘im; cf. Heb. nilam ‘im (‘to ght against’) and yÑ’ ‘im (‘to make a sortie against’). Wounding by the arrows of God is a conventional gure for afiction in the Plaint of the Sufferer (e.g. Ps. 38.3 [EVV 2]); cf. Job 16.12f., where Job declares that he is the target for the arrows of God. Mowinckel (1955: 325), Steinmann (1955: 111) and Fohrer (1989: 169) think of the arrows of the plague-god Rešeph, called in Phoenician inscriptions b‘l Ñ (‘lord of the arrow’); cf. Greek Apollo ‘the Far-Shooter’, but, as the sequel indicates, the military gure is intended. rûa in this context probably denotes the spiritual element of God-given reason, patience and self-control which distinguishes humans from the beasts, deriving from their consciousness of afnity with God (cf. 10.12). We would retain v. 4c to form a tricolon punctuating the strophe vv. 2-4 as against the proposal to treat it as a gloss (so Fohrer). bi‘ûÓîm, usually rendered ‘terrors’, is found in the OT only here and in Ps. 88.17, but may rather be connected, as G.R. Driver (1955: 73) suggested, with Arab. baata (‘to come suddenly upon’), hence ‘sudden attacks’, as in 3.5. ya‘are¤ûnî seems at rst sight to suggest a connection with ma‘are¤h (‘battle-line’) in the context of a military metaphor; so V, T and S. ‘ra¤ in the sense ‘to dress the ranks’ is usually transitive, but is used without an explicit object (e.g. Judg. 20.30; Jer. 50.14), but the direct object of the person against whom the ranks are formed is highly suspect. LXX and Jerome in his commentary render ‘goad me’, which suggested to Siegfried the reading ya‘areqûnî. Beer, Dillmann, Budde and Hölscher assume metathesis in MT and read ya‘a¤erûnî (‘troubled me’). Peters, following S seraaÓnî (‘has terried me’) proposed the emendation ya‘arîÑûnî. MT, however, is defended by G.R. Driver, who takes ‘ra¤ as a cognate of Arab. ‘araka (‘to wear out’). 5. The verbs nhaq and g‘h (‘bray’, ‘low’) are used in parallelism in the Ras Shamra legend of Krt (Gordon, UT Krt 120f., 224f.) in a passage relating to beasts in the starvation of a siege (cf. Joel 1.18). This long-attested usage of nhaq, which is used besides only once in the OT (Job 30.7), despite its incidence in Aram. and Arab., should warn us against the assumption that it is either an Aramaism or an Arabism in Job. pere’ is the wild ass, or onager, which dees domestication (39.3-8). It is selected as parallel to the domestic ox to give a comprehensive picture. Fittingly its food is described as deše’, natural grass (Gen. 1.11) as distinct from ‘fodder’ (belîl, lit. ‘mixed’, i.e. chopped straw [Arab. tibn] and corn, Isa. 30.24; cf. billl, ‘to give fodder’, Judg. 19.21). 6. tl is used here in its literal sense, ‘insipidness’; see further on 1.22. The context indicates that rîr allmûÓ denotes an insipid substance. allmûÓ is the doubtful word. The only help given in the ancient versions is in S and T. The former reads ‘juice (rîr) of the anchusa’, or purple plant (rîrh dalemÓ’) (so Terrien), or some other plant (Hölscher, Stevenson, Fohrer, 1
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Gordis, Horst). T renders ‘the white and the yolk of an egg’. rîr (1 Sam. 21.13) would support one or the other in the sense of ‘juice’ or ‘uid’. As the more familiar substance the white of an egg (lit. the saliva around the yolk), this might seem more likely in the context. A.S. Yahuda (1903: 702), however, suggested that allmuÓ is cognate with Arab. alûmu(n) (‘soft cheese’). In this case rîr would be the insipid uid left after cheese-making, that is, ‘bland’ (so Pope). 7. See textual note. našî is ambiguous, meaning either ‘myself’ or ‘my appetite’ or even ‘my throat’. The passage re-echoes 33.20. ling¿a‘ immediately suggests the well-known Hebrew root na‘ (‘to touch’), which again, as G.R. Driver suggests (1944a: 168), may be cognate with Arab. naja‘a (‘to eat food to one’s advantage’), and would explain the lack of a direct object, which na‘ (‘to touch’) demands. After the reference to insipid food zihamh keî lamî (‘my inwards’, lit. ‘liver’, ‘loathe my food’), as Dhorme after Wright, Driver–Gray, Budde, Beer et al. for MT hmmah kiewê lamî (‘they are as sickness of my food’) is most apposite; cf. 33.20 for support of the emendation. 9. The root y’al is found always in the Hiphil, meaning ‘to consent’, followed naturally by the jussive. yattr (‘let him unleash’) is the Hiphil jussive of nÓar, a rare verb in this sense in Isa. 58.6, and meaning ‘to set (prisoners) free’ in Pss. 105.20; 146.7. biÑÑ‘ means ‘to cut off’ a part from the whole; cf. Arab. ba‘atu(n) (‘a piece’), ba‘u(n) (‘divorce’). 10. The adverb ‘ôd should be emphasized, meaning ‘yet’, with the sense of ‘nevertheless’, as in the Plaint of the Sufferer, Ps. 42.6, 12 (EVV 5, 11). The root sla is not known elsewhere in the OT, but is known in postBiblical Hebrew meaning ‘to recoil’. LXX and T support the meaning ‘would jump for joy’. The verbal noun (inn. constr.) îl means ‘writhing’, for example, in childbirth (Isa. 26.7) or anguish (Exod. 15.14). The masculine singular preformative in yam¿l indicates that beîlî should be read for MT beîlh, y being corrupted to h in the Old Heb. script. If v. 10c is original it would be the third colon of a tricolon, which might be used for punctuation, as occasionally in the Ras Shamra couplets. Stevenson and Horst see in this verse and particularly in v. 10c a reference to the author’s consciousness of his task as a sage of insight not to conceal declarations concerning ‘the Holy One’, so that the truths he had reached in his ordeal should be communicated as his contribution to nal truth (so Weiser). Taking ki in the sense of ‘efface’ or ‘deny’, which it occasionally has, and ’imrê as ‘commandment’ (cf. Prov. 2.1; 7.5; 19.7; Isa. 41.26), Terrien understands 1
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Job to be imploring God’s coup de grâce that he may die before he is tempted to deny God’s commandments. But it is probably a gloss (so Siegfried, Duhm, Beer, Hölscher, Mowinckel, Fohrer). See textual note ad loc. 11. The parallelism with ’ayal indicates that ’a’arî¤ našî denotes ‘patience’; cf. tiqÑar rûî (21.4) and qÑr npš in the Ugaritic Krt text (Gordon UT 127.34, 47), meaning ‘one whose endurance has been foreshortened’. This passage refutes Dhorme’s objection that if patience were denoted in 11b rûa and not neeš would have been used. He accordingly translates ‘I should prolong my life’. qÑ denotes the appointed end, or term, rather than simply ‘the end’ (cf. LXX ‘the time’), as the parallel of middaÓ ymay (‘the measure of my days’) in Ps. 39.5 (EVV 4) indicates. qÑ is familiar in the Dead Sea Manual of Discipline, the War of the Sons of Light and the Hymns, meaning ‘the appointed time’; cf. Arab. qaa(y) (‘to decide’). We recall the expression of an Arab guest at the end of a meal qaayt(u) (‘have nished’). 13. The double interrogative in MT ha’im is awkward, and was felt as such by the ancient versions, which, however, are not in agreement. Modern commentators also disagree, following either S or V in reading h’ ’im (‘Behold, if…?’) (so Hölscher) or LXX ‘or had I not trusted in him?’ (so Driver–Gray). The former reading points the Aramaic particle h’ (‘Behold’), which would be an exception in Job. Duhm read h’ m’ayin ‘ezrÓî î (‘See, where is my help in me [coming from?]’). LXX suggests a reading hal¿’ ’ên ‘ezrÓî ô (‘Is it not that I have no help in him?’); cf. Dhorme, hal¿’ m’ayin ‘ezrÓî î (‘Is not my help in me a nonentity?’). Horst retains MT, stressing ha’im in the only place it occurs in the OT, Num. 17.28, where, however, the text is equally doubtful. After Buttenweiser and Sutcliffe v. 13 begins with the interrogative participle ’im, h being displaced from the end of neûšah (MT nûš). Kissane reads hû’ after neûšah which would include the aleph of MT ’im and permit a reading m’ayin ‘ezrÓî î (‘My help in myself is nothing’, i.e. ‘my own help is nothing’). But see textual note ad loc. on Graetz’s reading ha’am’enn ‘ezrÓî î, taking ’am’enn as a denominative verb, Piel with the energic ending of the imperfect (so also Dahood 1965: 13). ‘ezrÓî indicates that the parallel tûšiyyh means ‘effective power’. See above on 5.12. 14. MT as it stands might conceivably mean lit. ‘to one who is melting loyal love is due from his friends, even though he would abandon the fear of God’ (so Weiser and Terrien). msas means secondarily ‘to despair’ (e.g. Josh. 2.11; 5.1; 7.5; Isa. 13.7; Neh. 2.11), but there the verb is in the Niphal and the subject is ‘heart’. In view of this attested usage MT lamms may be a corruption of lenms; alternatively it has been suggested (Hitzig, Friedrich Delitzsch, Snaith 1968: 111) that ese here, as in Lev. 20.17 and Prov. 16.34, and in Syr. and Aram., 1
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means ‘envy’ or ‘ill-will’, giving the meaning ‘To one in despair ill-will from his friend is as though one forsook the fear of God’. Assuming that ese has its usual meaning ‘loyalty’, LXX, S, V and T make the further assumption of the reading mš (‘withdrawing’) from mûš, generally intransitive, but transitive in Zech. 3.9. This would give the sense ‘As for (MT le) the man who withdraws loyalty from his friend, he abandons the fear of the Almighty’, which to be sure accords with the context, but no more than the interpretation of Hitzig and others we have noted. The assumption of mš for MT ms (possibly nms) is very doubtful and the deviation of the versions is caused by their failure to notice that the poet is effecting a word-play with ese in the sense opposite to the more familiar one in a convention known in Arab. literature as ‘ad. Dhorme, Stevenson, Hölscher and Fohrer take v. 14 as a marginal gloss to v. 15, thus, in the opinion of the writer, failing to appreciate the idiom so characteristic of the poet in Job. 15. The gure of the ash ood recalls Jer. 15.18. The repetition of naal is intolerable in the original and here we would suggest an emendation of ’aîq nelîm to ’aîqîm lîm (‘empty watercourses’); cf. ’ar-rub‘u’l¨l, the Empty Quarter in SE Arabia. ya‘a¿rû is formally, meaning either ‘to overow’, or, as here, ‘to ow away’. The clause is relative with the omission of the relative particle, as frequently in Ugaritic poetry and in Arab. after an indenite antecedent; cf. 11.16 kemayim ‘erû (‘as water that has owed away’). 16. In q¿erîm minnî-qera, Dhorme, after Avronin and Rabinowitz and certain rabbinic authorities, takes q¿erîm to mean ‘covered’ (lit. ‘darkened’), but there is no objection to rendering ‘darkened by reason of the (minnî) iceoe’. One suspects that the rabbinic rendering of q¿erîm was prompted by the parallel yiÓ‘allem-šele, where the verb was assumed to be the familiar word ‘to obscure’. But this may rather be cognate with Arab. ‘alima meaning in the IV form ‘to ow’. 17. This couplet caused some trouble to the ancient versions and to modern commentators through the uncertainty as to the meaning of the hapax legomenon yez¿reû. The parallelism with beummô has suggested yeÑ¿reû, ‘they are scorched’ (cf. Prov. 16.27; Ezek. 21.3), the phonetic variation Ñ/z being attested in Ñ‘aq/z‘aq. But yez¿reû may be retained as cognate with the Arab. root from which mizrab (‘canal’) is formed; cf. Late Heb. marz (‘gutter’), as recognized by Qimchi, hence the translation ‘melt, run off’. ÑmaÓ is well attested, meaning ‘to annihilate’ in the OT and in Ugaritic (Gordon UT ‘nt II.8); cf. Arab Ñamata (‘to be silent’). The nal waw in MT beummô should probably be attached to the following ni‘a¤û (‘they are extinguished’). 1
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18. On the reading yelappeÓû (transitive before darkm) see textual note. t¿hû, the description of primaeval chaos (Gen. 1.2 [P]) means here ‘desert’, and is parallel to mibr in Deut. 32.10 and used of a trackless wilderness in 12.24 and Ps. 107.40; cf. Arab. tîhu(u) (‘desert’). It aptly describes the tangle of wadis off the beaten track in the desert. ’a means ‘to go astray’ in 1 Sam. 9.3, 20; Jer. 50.6; Ezek. 34.4, 16 and perhaps Deut. 26.5. Both this meaning and ‘to perish’ would suit the present context. 19. On Teima and Sheba see above, p. 36. Here Sheba may denote the mercantile kingdom of S. Arabia, and not as in 1.15 a locality in the Hejaz like Teima. 20. Read bÓeû; see textual note. b¿šû means ‘they were confounded’ or ‘disappointed’ as in Isa. 1.29; 20.5; Jer. 2.36; 12.13; 48.13; Ezek. 32.30; 36.32, the verb being parallel with ar (‘to be abashed’, ‘disappointed’), as in Pss. 35.26; 40.15. 21. On the reading kn…lî see textual note. aÓÓ is a hapax legomenon in the OT, perhaps the nomen unitatis of aÓ (‘terror’) (41.25; Gen. 9.2); cf. Ass. ¨attu (‘terror’). Perhaps the singular should be emphasized in the present passage, ‘a single terror’. This may refer to the ‘infectious’ danger of associating with one evidently under the wrath of God, which prompted Job to sit on the ash-heap. 22. k¿a is used here in the unusual sense of ‘wealth’, like ayil; cf. Prov. 5.10. šiaû (lit. ‘give a bribe’) gives a graphic insight into the ancient Semitic community where friendship extended even to bribing ofcials in the interest of one’s friends. 23. The nature of the oppressor (Ñr) is not specied, but ‘rîÑîm implies highhanded oppressors, such as chiefs of raiding desert tribes and others. In those circumstances ransom (cf. tidûnî) must have been often in demand. 25. After T and Rashi mah-nnimleÑû (‘how sweet’) is read by Graetz, Duhm, Dhorme, Hölscher; cf. 119.103. The text and usual sense of mraÑ and its Arab. cognate need not be altered, since Job is presenting the correct, but unsympathetic, moralizing of his friends in his distress, which has the same effect as ‘a crippling curse’ (qellh nimreÑeÓ) in 1 Kgs 2.8. Hence with Horst we render ‘How aggravating are the words of rectitude!’ 26. The emphasis in v. 26a lies on millîm (‘words’), the captious logical arguments of the friends being criticized. The translation of v. 26b ‘the 1
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speeches of one that is desperate (n¿’š; cf. Arab. ya’ia, “to be desperate”) are for the wind’ rather misses the point. The sense is rather that the sufferer must nd relief in speech; cf. 32.20, ’aabberh weyirwa- lî, ‘I will speak to nd relief’. 27. The sentiment is the disapproval of ‘kicking a man when he is down’, applying the letter of logic as men apply the law in the case of the orphan sold for his parent’s debts instead of exercising sympathy. The Hiphil of nal, understanding gôrl (‘lot’), is instanced in 1 Sam. 14.42. krh (‘to buy’; cf. Deut. 2.6; Hos. 3.2), has the force of seeking to buy, expressing the activity of merchants, in 40.30, where, as here, it is used with ‘al, and may be translated ‘haggle over’, here signifying ‘chop logic with’, or insist impersonally on the moral law of sin and retribution. 28. Now in forensic style Job turns from criticism of his friends to a pointed plea to respond seriously to the justice of his case. pnh be meaning ‘to look at’, ‘address oneself to’, occurs in Eccl. 2.11. ’im ’akazz is the strong negative in the truncated oath-formula with the omission of the oath in the apodosis. 29. On our reading of MT šûbû in v. 29a, š¿bbû, cognate of Arab. Óabba (‘to be ended’, of a matter, ‘to settle down’, of a person), see textual note. For MT šuî in v. 29b read šûû ‘withdraw’ from the attitude assumed by Job’s friends. This is another case of word-play between a more familiar word (here šûû in colon b) and the less familiar homonym in colon a. Ñeeq is used here in its forensic sense of having a just case. 30. The unexpected collocation of ikkî (‘my palate’) and yîn (‘understands’, here in the radical sense ‘discriminates’) must be noted. Job has not only a discriminating mind, but this is reected in his speech and arguments, which follow in the Dialogue, despite the allegation of the friends that Job is a loudmouth and a windbag (8.2, Bildad; 11.2f., Zophar; 15.2, Eliphaz). We agree with Pope in taking hawwôÓ, not as ‘calamity’ as in 6.2 and 30.13, but as the plural of Ugaritic hwt and Akk. awatu (‘word’), with a cognate in modern Syrian Arab. The sentiment is reected in 12.11: hal¿-’¿zen millîn tin we¤ ’¿¤el yiÓ‘am-lô. Does not the ear test words, And the palate taste food?
1
The Book of Job
Chapter 7 Job’s Expostulation to God 1. 2. 3. 4.
5.
6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.
1
‘Has not a man a time of service on the earth? Are not his days as the days of a hireling? Like a slave that gasps for the shade, Or like a hireling that longs for his wages, So I have been allotted months of emptiness, And nights of trouble are assigned to me. Whenever I lie down I say, “When shall I rise?” And as night is dragged out I have my ll of tossing until dawn. My esh is clothed with corruption And scab has covered1 my skin. (It has broken out and suppurated.2) My days are swifter than a loom, They are gone without hope. Remember that my life is but wind, My eye shall not again see good. The eye that looks for me will not mark me; Your eyes will be on me, and I shall not be there. A cloud is gone and passes, Even so he who goes down to Sheol does not come up. He returns to his house no more, And his place recognizes him no more. But even I will not withold my speech, I will speak in my anguish of spirit, Complain in my bitterness of soul. Am I Sea or Tannin That you set a guard over me? If I say, “My couch will give me comfort, My bed will ease the burden of my complaint”, You terrify me with dreams And frighten me with hallucinations, So that I would cordially choose strangling, Death rather than my torment.3 I have had enough,4 I shall not live forever; Hold off from me, for my days are but a vapour. What is man that you rear him And pay any heed to him, Taking note of him every morning, Testing him every moment? How long will you refuse to look away from me, Not letting me alone till I swallow my spittle?
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21.
Job 6 and 7. Job’s First Rejoinder If I sin how can I affect you, You who watch men? Why do you make me a mark for your attacks? And why am I a charge upon you?5 Why not unburden me of my sin, And pass over my iniquity? For then I should lie down in the dust, And you would seek me and I would not exist.’
Textual Notes to the Chapter 7 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Reading weûš ‘ar ‘ôrî for MT weûš ‘r ‘ôrî; see Commentary ad loc. A secondary expansion; see Commentary ad loc. Reading ‘aÑÑeôÓy for MT ‘aÑemôÓy; see Commentary ad loc. Reading missattî for MT m’astî; see Commentary ad loc. A scribal adjustment (tiqqûn s¿erîm), ‘lay being written for ‘ley¤ to obviate the theological difculty of the conception of God as liable to any burden.
Commentary on Chapter 7 1. Ñb’, as Aq. and V appreciate, refers to a period of military service, as in 14.14 and Isa. 40.2, though LXX and Jerome in his commentary take it in the more general sense of ordeal, which would also suit Isa. 40.2. ¤îr may also be used in the more general sense of ‘hired servant’ or daylabourer (LXX), but probably denotes a mercenary soldier, as in Jer. 46.21; cf. the verb in 2 Sam. 10.6. 2. p¿‘al means ‘work’ and also the reward of work; cf. Jer. 22.13. In this sense pe‘ullh is more common (Lev. 19.13; Prov. 10.16; Ezek. 29.20). 3. LXX, S and V read the passive munnû for MT minnû (‘have been allotted’, lit. ‘numbered’). MT may nevertheless be retained as an instance of the active verb with indenite subject with the signicance of a passive. 4. ’im with the perfect is used to express ‘as often as’; cf. Gen. 38.9; Num. 21.9; Judg. 6.3; Pss. 41.7; 94.18; Isa. 24.13. In this case it may be followed by waw and the perfect, as here. The sentiment re-echoes Deut. 28.67. midda, if MT is sound, must be the adverbial accusative, ‘throughout the length…’ LXX has a fuller text, which may have read: ’im š¤atî we’martî mÓay hayyôm ’qûm ûmÓay ‘ere middê ‘ere a‘tî neuîm ‘aê-nše As often as I lie down I say, ‘When will it be day?’ I rise up (and say), ‘When (will it be) evening?’ The whole night long I have my ll of tossing until dawn. 1
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The last colon is abnormally long, and middê ‘ere may have crept into the text as a variant on MT mÓay ‘ere. In this case MT represents a telescoped text. 5. In MT wyš ‘r, gîš or gûš is rendered ‘clods’ in LXX and T, which would signify in this context the crust of the earth (Dhorme), so guratively ‘scab’. G.R. Driver (1955: 73-76) cites Arab. ja’u(n), ‘rough skin’, and takes ‘pr not as a noun ‘r, as in MT, but as a verb ‘ar, cognate with Arab. afara (‘to cover’), reading the second colon in v. 5 as weûš ‘ar ‘ôrî (‘And scab covers my skin’). This is an excellent suggestion, and Driver continues, reading raa‘ wayyimmas for MT ra‘ wayyimm’s and rendering ‘It breaks out and suppurates’. raa‘ wayyimmas or MT ra‘ wayyimm’s, however, is suspect as either a defective third member of a tricolon, for which there is no reason here, or as a gloss, as which it is treated by Driver. 6. Tur-Sinai has questioned the usual rendering of ’ere as ‘a weaver’s shuttle’, proposing that the word is cognate with Arab. ’arija (‘to exhale a smell’) and rendering ‘smoke’, which is noted as being quickly dispelled. This is just possible, but unlikely. The verb ’ra and its participle ’¿r are familiar in the OT, meaning ‘to weave’ and ‘loom’ (Exod. 28.32; Judg. 16.13; 1 Sam. 17.7; 2 Sam. 21.19; 2 Kgs 23.7; Isa. 59.5). ’ere in the Samson story (Judg. 16.13) means ‘loom’ rather than ‘shuttle’ which, however, the present gure particularly visualizes, as the word-play on tiqwh (‘hope’, thread’) indicates. Dhorme renders be’ees tiqwh as ‘for lack of thread’, be’ees having this sense in Prov. 26.20. This interpretation had occurred already to ibn Ezra, and there is probably a word-play here between tiqwh, ‘thread’ (cf. Rahab’s scarlet thread in Josh. 2.18, 21), which connects with what precedes, and the more familiar tiqwh which in the word-play so beloved of the author connects with what follows. Unfortunately this cannot be so neatly expressed in translation. 7. ‘Remember that my life is but wind (rûa)’ seems like a quotation of Ps. 78.39, ‘And he remembered that they were but esh, a wind that passes and comes not again’. 8. The verb šûr is limited to poetic parts of the OT and found more often in Job than elsewhere (cf. 17.15; 20.9; 24.15; 34.29; 35.5, 13, 14). It means generally ‘to regard, mark’, and in Hos. 13.7 ‘to watch’ as a lurking leopard. But here it is a synonym of r’h (‘to see’) as in the poetic Balaam-oracles in Num. 23.9; 24.17 (JE). 9. Sheol, thought of as under the earth, as the verb yra indicates, is for the Hebrews as for the Mesopotamians ‘the land of no return’ (Akk. ’arÑu lâ târu, 1
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cf. Job 10.21). It is nebulous, neuter existence (3.13-19), where humans have no hope of ‘seeing good’. It is against this prevailing conception of the afterlife that passages like 19.25-27 must be critically considered. 10. In ‘And his place recognizes him no more’ (wel¿’-yakkîrennû ‘ô meq¿mô) the author makes a verbal citation of Ps. 103.16, with the general sentiment of which on the transience of human life without prospect of a hereafter he is in agreement, like contemporary Jewish thought. 11. With the tricolon Job’s account of his troubles ends and vv. 12ff. are occupied with his complaint directly to God. 12. Sea (ym) and tannîn are now known from the Baal myth of Ras Shamra to be powers of Chaos which militated against the Order of God in nature. The nature of tnn in those texts is not specied. This imagery was adopted in Israel in the liturgy of the great autumn festival, to which it properly belonged in Canaan. Thus Sea became the inveterate enemy of God and his Order, especially in Enthronement Psalms in the OT (e.g. Pss. 46.2-3 [EVV 1-2]; 74.12-15 [EVV 11-14]; 89.10-11 [EVV 9-10]; 93.3-4; 98.7-8; 104.6-7) with echoes elsewhere in Hebrew literature (e.g. Isa. 51.9-11; Ezek. 29.3; 32.2ff.) where Egypt is equated with Tannin and Rahab ‘the Restless One’, that is, the Sea. So in Dan. 7.3ff. the great beasts, which militated against God and his people, came up from the sea. In the Apocalypse of Baruch after the establishment of the Messiah as King and before his nal judgment on all peoples the earth is threatened by a ood of black waters (2 Bar. 70.1ff). In the Psalms of Solomon (2.28ff.) the providence of God is vindicated in the downfall of Pompey, which is described in the same imagery: ‘But thou, O Lord, delay not to recompense them on their own heads, to cast down the insolence of the dragon (Syr. tanînâ’) in humiliation’. The setting of a guard (mišmr) over the sea refers generally to the conception of the power of Chaos against which God continually has to assert his authority in myth and ritual in Mesopotamia and Canaan and, with its own adaptation, in Israel, and refers perhaps particularly to Marduk’s conning the defeated monster Tiamat, the Lower Deep, under bolts, posting guards over it, as is described in the Babylonian New Year liturgy in the myth Enuma elish. The consciousness of being watched narrowly by God, ‘the watcher of humans’ (n¿Ñr ’m) (v. 20), supports the normal meaning of mišmr (‘guard’). 13. kî is employed here as the conditional conjunction by way of variation from the more usual ’im. n’, meaning ‘to share the burden of’, followed by be is found in Num. 11.17. Here be may have the sense of the more regular min as in Ugaritic with the partitive force (cf. 21.25; 39.17). 1
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15. Reading ‘aÑÑeôÓy, from ‘aÑÑeeÓ (‘sorrow’) for MT ‘aÑemôÓy (‘my bones’); cf. 9.28. 16. Fohrer regards MT m’astî as a gloss on v. 15, but the 4:4 meter used in v. 16 as a variation from the regular 3:3 meter is against this. Reiske, Merx, Siegfried and Duhm retain m’astî, connecting it with mweÓ m‘aÑemôÓy in v. 15b, rendering ‘I despise death more than my pains’, or, as Duhm prefers, ‘Death I despise because of my pains’. Driver– Gray (1921: II, 47) object that m’as means ‘to reject’, but cf. 9.21, 19.18; Amos 5.21; Prov. 15.32; Judg. 9.38 (hal¿’ zeh h‘m ’ašer m’asth bô, ‘Is not this the people that you despised?’). Pope proposes that m’astî is the verb in a relative clause without the relative particle, of which the antecedent is ‘aÑÑeôÓy, which he renders ‘my loathsome pains’. This again, however, ignores the 4:4 meter in v. 16. Tur-Sinai’s suggestion, however, may be adapted, to read missattî (‘I have had enough’) from a root msaÓ with this sense, familiar in Aram. and Syr. and attested in Classical Hebrew in Deut. 10.10. It restores the parallelism with aal mimmennî (‘hold off from me’). ‘My days are but a vapour’ (heel). This noun is used guratively as ‘vanity’ in the famous refrain in Ecclesiastes, but means radically ‘vapour’, as in Arab. bahlatu(u). 17. The verse which contrasts the signicance of ephemeral humans with the scrupulous visitation of a critical God is a parody of Psalm 8, the language of which it re-echoes, and of Ps. 144.3-4, which contrasts the apparent insignicance of humans with God’s peculiar love and care for them. As regularly in Hebrew, the heart (l) is the seat of cognition rather than affection. 18. On pqa, here ‘to take special note of’, see on 5.24. lieqrîm means ‘every morning’; cf. lire‘îm (‘every moment’). This noun (cf. berea‘, 21.13) is derived from a verb describing the ickering, that is, of an eyelid (cf. Prov. 12.19 [of the tongue]), and may be a metathetic cognate of Arab. re’aja meaning in the VIII form ‘to tremble’. 19. kammh means ‘how much’ (13.23), ‘how often’ (21.17) and ‘how long’ (Ps. 35.17, and here). š‘h (‘to look steadily at’) is used with min, ‘to look away from’, in the sense of overlooking, or averting one’s gaze from, in 14.6 and Isa. 22.4, as here. ‘Till I swallow my spittle’ recalls the Arab. expression cited by Schultens, ’abli‘nî rîqi (‘Let me swallow my spittle’, i.e. ‘Leave me a moment’). 20. The metrical arrangement here is suggested by 35.6a, where Elihu quotes Job’s arguments (‘If you sin now do you affect him?’), as follows: Ó’Óî mh’ e‘al l¤, where Ó’Óî is a hypothetical perfect in a conditional sentence (GKC, §159b, h). The following words n¿Ñr h’m are thought to give too short a colon in v. 20b, but if they are stressed to give the effect of 1
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bitter irony this difculty is overcome. In this case there may be double entendre in n¿Ñr, ‘watcher’, in the sense of ‘protector’ (cf. Arab. naÑara, with this meaning of watching critically, and Arab. naÓara ‘to watch’, e.g. crops; so Prov. 27.18). In the present passage the emphasis falls rather on God as ‘Grand Inquisitor’. ‘A mark for your attacks’, mig‘, lit. an object of encounter’; cf. mig‘îm, ‘the ‘targets’ of lightning (36.32) and 16.12, ‘he has set me up as his target’ (maÓÓrh). As the mark of the arrows of God we may render both nouns as ‘butt’. On the scribal adjustment ‘lay lema’ for ‘ley¤ lema’ see textual note. Lindblom (1966: 214) makes the interesting suggestion that this couplet refers to two sports or trials of skill, the second to the lifting and heaving of a heavy stone as a trial of strength, to which Ben Sira 6.21 and possibly Zech. 12.3 refer. This is possible, though we prefer the translation ‘Why am I a charge upon you?’ (i.e. ‘are you obliged to punish my sin?’). 21. We should see a word-play on n’ in ma’ in v. 20c, and in ti’ in v. 21a, the rst indicating burdening oneself with the obligation of exacting retribution for sin and the second lifting off the burden of sin. There is a similar polarity of meaning in the verb šû ‘to return to God’, ‘repent’ and ‘to relapse into sin’. ‘The dust’ here is not merely the synonym of ‘ground’ (’ereÑ), as it often is, but the dust of Sheol. šir, used in 24.5 of wild asses looking for their food, denotes anxious search or expectancy. It may be connected with šaar (‘dawn’), hence may mean ‘to seek early, or urgently’, as, with God as object (Isa. 26.4; Hos. 5.15; Ps. 63.2 [EVV 1]; 78.34 [EVV 33]) and Wisdom (Prov. 1.28).
1
Job 8 BILDAD’S FIRST EXPOSTULATION
The argument, mainly a sapiential controversy, in support of the theodicy, is arranged in seven strophes of three couplets (8.2-4, 5-7, 8-10, 11-13, 14 + 15 + 19, 16-18, 20-22), of which 8.11-13, 14, 15, 19, 16-18 are gures. The recognition of this arrangement suggests that v. 19 is displaced in MT from after v. 15, where with vv. 14-15 it forms a strophe (so Fohrer). The rst strophe (vv. 2-4), as often in the rejoinders of the friends of Job, is in the form of sapiential controversy. The second (vv. 5-7) has as a formal prototype the prophetic warning of the conditional nature of God’s grace, which has its ultimate origin in the public address on the subject of blessings and curses in the context of the Covenant Sacrament at the meeting of the sacral confederacy (Deut. 28). The third strophe (vv. 8-10) asserts the principle of retribution in true sapiential tradition on the basis of traditional experience, and the fourth (vv. 11-13) sustains the theme of the failure of the wicked on the basis of a gure from nature (vv. 11-12), while the fth (vv. 14, 15, 19) and sixth (vv. 16-18) strophes elaborate the theme by the gure of a spider’s web and a blasted plant respectively. The last strophe (vv. 20-22) asserts the theodicy with regard both to the innocent and the wicked in antithesis in the tradition of wisdom literature, which has also a counterpart in the statement of faith in the Plaint of the Sufferer in the Psalms. This has a variation in the promise of relief (v. 21) and the threat of retribution of the wicked (v. 22), the former echoing the promise of relief (šû šeûÓ) from the liturgy of a great public festival, voiced by the prophets, and the latter recalling the curse of the sufferer’s adversaries as a token of the theodicy in the general context of the Plaint of the Sufferer, particularly in Pss. 35.8, 26; 40.14-15 (EVV 13-14); 58.6-9. Bildad upholds the wisdom tradition in animadverting on Job’s impatient and impassioned reaction to his misfortune (vv. 1-2), asserting the sapiential dogma of sin and retribution (vv. 3, 20), referring Job to the authority of ancient sages (vv. 9-10), and defending the justice of God (v. 3) against those who would deny it on the evidence of the apparent ourishing of the wicked who ignore God’s grace on which they depend, citing the swift withering of the reeds cut from the marsh (vv. 11-13), their substantial and precarious support by the gure of the fragile spider’s web (v. 14) and by the withering of 1
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a plant rooted among stones (vv. 16-18). He does not charge Job explicitly with his own sin as the cause of his suffering, though that is implied. But signicantly he does not abandon belief in this causal connection, assuming the possibility of Job’s suffering for the sins of his family (v. 4; cf. 1.5), though to be sure this is only a possibility. But, like Ezekiel (18.4; cf. Deut. 24.16), he advances from communal to personal responsibility (v. 6), and like Eliphaz (5.8) he counsels the sufferer to seek the mercy of the Almighty (v. 5), and like Eliphaz he presents the prospect of hope (vv. 6f., 21) The sapiential tenet of the theodicy in its negative and positive aspects is summarily stated in the concluding strophe (vv. 20f.; cf. Ps. 1). Chapter 8 1.
Then Bildad the Shuhite answered and said:
2.
‘How long will you say these things, And the words of your mouth be as a great bluster? Does God pervert Justice, Does the Almighty do violence1 to what is right? If your sons have offended He has given them over into the power of their sin.
3. 4. 5. 6.
7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 19. 1
If you too look earnestly to God And seek the mercy of the Almighty, If you are pure and upright, Then he will protect you, And keep your righteous homestead intact. Though your beginning has been insignicant Your latter end shall be greatly abundant.2 Nay, but ask a former generation, Apply yourself to the researches of their fathers, For we are but of yesterday3 and know nothing, Our days on the earth are as4 a shadow. Will they not teach you, declaring to you, And bring forth words from their minds? Can papyrus grow without marsh, Reeds abound without water? If it is cut,5 still fresh as it is, It withers sooner than any grass. Even so is the latter end6 of all who forget God, And the hope of the impious perishes. His condence is a cobweb,7 His trust a spider’s dwelling. He leans upon his house, and it does not stand fast, He grasps it, but it does not stand rm. Lo, this is the dissolution8 of his way, And from the dust another springs.9
The Book of Job 16. 17. 18. 20. 21. 22.
185
He is as a fresh plant before (sc. struck by) the sun, Its suckers spread over the yard where it grows; Its roots entwine about the stone-heaps, Taking hold between the stones.10 Suddenly11 it is destroyed12 from where it grew, (Its place) will deny it, (saying), “I never saw you”. Indeed, God does not spurn the innocent, Nor does he hold the hand of wicked men; He will yet13 ll14 your mouth with laughter And your lips with shouts of joy. Those who hate you will be clothed with shame, And the tent of the wicked will be no more.’
Textual Notes to Chapter 8 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.
ye‘awwh
Reading for MT ye‘awwÓ to obviate the repetition of the verb ‘wa. See Commentary ad loc. Reading tige’ for MT yigeh. See Commentary ad loc. Reading mittemôl with T for MT Óemôl. Reading û¤eÑl with S for MT kî Ñl. Reading leyiqqÓ (le enclitic with jussive) for MT l¿’ yiqqÓ. Reading ’aarî with LXX for MT ’oreôÓ. Reading qiššurê qayiÓ for MT ’ašer yqôÓ. See Commentary ad loc. Reading mesôs for MT meô; cf. LXX. See Commentary ad loc. Reading yiÑm with LXX, S and one Heb. MS for MT yiÑmû. Reading bên ’anîm with one Heb. MS. Reading piÓ’¿m, metri causa for MT ’im. Reading the passive imperfect energic yeulle‘enn for MT active. Reading ‘ô for MT ‘a. Reading yemall’ with certain Heb. MSS for MT yemallh.
Commentary on Chapter 8 1. On Shuhite, see above, p. 136. 2. milll, attested in the OT only here and in 33.3; Gen 21.7 (J); Ps. 106.2, is generally taken as an Aramaism. The incidence in Gen. 21.7 might seem to modify that assumption, but that might be an old Aramaism; cf. local features in N. Israelite sources in the Elisha narratives in Kings (J. Gray 1963: 417f.). The ambiguity of rûa is to be noted, meaning ‘wind’ and ‘spirit’; cf. dierê rûa in 16.3. kabbîr, ‘mighty’, is conned to Heb. poetry, but is commonly attested in Aram. and Arab., though it has a Phoenician cognate, which may go back to an earlier Canaanite root, so far unattested in the Ras Shamra texts. 3. It is unlikely that a poet such as the author of the Book of Job should have repeated the verb ‘awwÓ in two parallel cola, and LXX, V and T indicate two 1
186
Job 8. Bildad’s First Expostulation
different verbs. The phrase ‘awwÓ mišpÓ recurs at 34.12, and the verb is generally found in later passages (e.g. Ps. 119.78 and Eccl. 1.15; 7.13; 12.3), though appearing somewhat earlier in Lam. 3.36 and even in Amos 5. It is likely that MT ‘awwÓ in v. 3b should be emended to ye‘awwh (‘do violence to’), possibly cognate with Arab. ‘ha ya‘h, meaning in the II form ‘to bring calamity upon’. 4. Formally wayešallem might belong to the protasis of the conditional sentence introduced by v. 4a, in which case vv. 5-7 would be the apodosis, itself containing a condition in vv. 5 and 6a. But we prefer to take the verb introduced by waw consecutive as apodosis, concluding the rst strophe (cf. Gen. 43.9). In any case the distinction is made between communal and personal responsibility (cf. Deut. 24.16; Ezek. 18.20), which is indicated by the repeated ’atth in vv. 5f. Formally, however, wayyešallem might continue the protasis in v. 4 before the apodosis in vv. 5-6, itself containing the condition of Job’s innocence and plea for mercy (vv. 5-6). In this case Bildad would not have quite rid himself of the conception of the involvement of the innocent man in the sin of his family, though admitting, through upright conduct and conscious dependence on the grace of God, personal emancipation. 5. On the verb šir see above on 7.21. 6. On the incidence of yšr (and tm) in wisdom literature see above on 1.1. The adjective za¤ is relatively rare in the OT, where it is usually used in the physical sense ‘rened’, for example the oil for the lamps of the sanctuary (Exod. 27.20; Lev. 24.2) and the incense in the Tent of Meeting (Exod. 30.34; Lev. 24.7). With a moral connotation it is conned to Job 8.6; 11.4; 16.15; 33.9; Prov. 16.2; 20.11; 21.8, all in wisdom literature. The verb hiÓannn is used of supplication in extreme distress or difculty, as when Joseph pleads for his life with his brothers (Gen. 42.21), Ahaziah’s ofcer before Elijah (2 Kgs 1.13), and Esther before Ahasuerus (Est. 4.8; 8.3), and less urgently in Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the Temple (1 Kgs 8.59). 6. The collocation of y‘îr and šillam suggests the formula of greeting in letters from Ras Shamra: ’ilm trk tšlmk (‘May the gods protect you and keep you safe!’, PRU II.9; Gordon UT 95; 101; 117; 138; cf. Eissfeldt 1960: 41), but cf. LXX, ‘he will listen to your prayer’, indicating a reading kî y‘Ór le¤ (‘He will hear your prayer’). The tricolon among bicola has suggested to Bickell, Ball, Dhorme, Hölscher, Horst and Fohrer that one of the cola (v. 6a) is a gloss, or that a colon has been omitted after v. 6c (so Stevenson, Tur-Sinai, Mowinckel). The Ras Shamra poems, however, have familiarized us with the occasional tricolon for punctuation or to vary the monotony of the prevailing bicola, and MT here may well be retained. 1
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7. waw with the perfect in wehyh expresses the protasis in a conditional or concessive sentence, for example, in Gen. 44.22 (GKC, §150g). gh is a variant of g’ (‘to grow tall, be exalted’), as in v. 11, for example, of a palm tree (Ps. 92.13). The verb should be extended to tige’ or tigeh in agreement with the subject ’aarîÓe¤. 8. kônn, understanding l (‘heart’, sc. ‘understanding’) in the sense of ‘x your attention on’, has been thought to be a corruption of the more common bônn (‘understand’), but cf. Isa. 51.13. 9. On the text, see textual note. 10. The third masculine plural personal pronoun refers back to ‘fathers’ in v. 8, alluding to their utterances. This is taken by some commentators as a secondary expansion. The verb y¿’merû is weak, and LXX suggests weyaggîû, which is to be preferred as expressing attendant circumstances. 11. This couplet is doubtless the citation of a popular proverb, perhaps a saying of the ancients mentioned in v. 8, which asserted the principle of cause and effect like the proverbs in Amos 3.3-5. It is not certain, however, that this was the sense in which it was used by the author here, emphasizing the collapse of the wicked who fail to appreciate that their prosperity depended on the sustaining grace of the God they reject. g’h here means ‘to grow tall’, with the connotation of ourishing (cf. 10.16, of the head) and of God in Exod. 15.1, 21. g¿me’ is used of reeds in the Nile delta (Exod. 2.3) and of reed skiffs of the Nile (Isa. 18.2). It is an Egyptian loanword km , denoting papyrus, the tallest of reeds, reaching a height of 6 feet. ’u is also an Egyptian loanword derived from ¨ ¨ (‘to be green’). It was known to the Ugaritic poets as a feature of the Huleh marshes, ’a¨ smk in N. Palestine (Gordon UT 76.II.9, 12). It was evidently a smaller plant than g¿me’, as it was grazed by the cows in Joseph’s dream (Gen. 42.2, 18). 12. ’ is found in the OT only here and in Song 6.11. The word is a cognate of Akk. ebbu (‘ourish’) and Ugaritic ’ib (Gordon UT 1 Aqht 30), meaning ‘verdure’; cf. the parallel here, Ñîr, ‘herbs of pasture’, and Arab. ¨uratu(n), lit. ‘greens’. On the reading, leyiqqÓ, where the emphatic enclitic le has been taken by the Masoretes for the negative l¿’, see textual note; cf. 29.24, ’esaq ‘alhem l¿’ ya’amînû, where the negative contradicts the sense and must therefore be read as the enclitic le, ‘I smiled at them; they indeed gained condence’. In 8.12 we take the verb as the jussive in the protasis of a conditional sentence (GKC, §109h, i).
1
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Job 8. Bildad’s First Expostulation
13. On the reading ’aarîÓ, suggested by LXX, for MT ’oreôÓ, see textual note. This is read by most commentators, but S and V support MT, which is read by Horst. The sense of LXX is supported by v. 12. The parallel with ‘those who forget God’ indicates that n may be derived from a verb cognate with Arab. ¨anafa (‘to turn back, repudiate’). The verb is known to denote a godless, impious act in Jer. 3.1; Ps. 106.38; Isa. 10.6; etc., and is known in Ugaritic in the phrase ¨np lb of a reprobate (Gordon UT 3 Aqht rev. 17). A cognate in Syriac denotes ‘pagans’ most of whom to the Syrian church were Arabs, hence the word may have been used by Muhammad to distinguish Muslims who claimed spiritual descent from Abraham and Ishmael, whom Muhammad declared as the rst of the unaf’u. The initial guttural will be noticed as distinct from ¨ of the cognate we propose for the Hebrew word. It must be remembered, however, that Arab. unaf’u in the Qur’an is a loanword from Syriac. 14. If this verb is original, which is denied by Stevenson, MT yqûÓ is either an intransitive verb, either an Aram. form of Heb. qûÑ, a byform of qÑaÑ (‘to cut off’; cf. Arab qaÓÓa, ‘to cut off short’), as Weiser proposes, or, as is more likely in view of the gure in the second colon, a noun. Tur-Sinai proposed that yqûÓ is a cognate of Arab. wqîÓ (‘a depression where water gathers’), so a puddle quickly evaporating, but this is not a good parallel to the spider’s web in v. 14b. Duhm proposed qûrîm (‘spider’s webs’) after Isa. 59.5ff.; Budde, wishing to retain qÓ of MT, read qûrê qayiÓ (‘spider’s webs in summer’), taking qayiÓ as the Aram. form of Heb. qayiÑ. Nearer MT is Peters’s reading qiššurê qayiÓ for MT ’ašer yqûÓ, meaning ‘summer bands’; cf. Sommerfaden and Saadya’s Arab. ablu’s š-šami (‘sun cord’); so Hölscher, Horst, Fohrer. For the general sentiment, cf. Qur’an, Surah 29.40 (‘The Spider’, ’al-‘ankabût; cf. Heb. ‘akkîš), quoted by Driver–Gray, who compare the faith of polytheists to a spider’s web for frailty; cf. 27.18; Isa. 59.5. 15. If this is original and not, as Budde and Hölscher maintained, a gloss on v. 14b, bêÓô may signify ‘his family’ rather than ‘his house’. 19. The gure of a plant in vv. 16-18 is elaborated in a self-contained strophe. The gure of the spider’s web, like the others in vv. 11-12 and 16-18, is best rounded off by a general truth pointing the comparison with the fate of the wicked; hence it probably ends with the displaced v. 19. MT meô, ‘joy’ (so V, T and Bickell, Peake, Driver–Gray), if correct, would be ironical. The more natural sense is ‘destruction’, as suggested by LXX, which indicates the reading mešô’h, or perhaps ‘dissolution’ (mesôs) (Beer, Hölscher, Horst). More particularly Dhorme suggests that MT may mean ‘eaten with maggots’, the root û or sûs being cognate with Arab. a (‘to be eaten with maggots’), which has an Akk. cognate. For MT yiÑmû, for which one Heb. MS reads the singular (so LXX and S), the singular should probably be read. The plural of MT is barely admissible on the understanding that the subject ’ar is a collective singular; cf. Ezek 28.3, 1
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where, however, the text is suspect. In cases of the collective singular with plural verb cited in GKC, §145d the nouns other than in Job 8.19 and Ezek. 28.3 are categories naturally understood as collective singulars. 16. The abrupt change of gure indicates a new strophe. lipenê here mean ‘exposed to’ rather than ‘before the sun’ (sc. sunrise). Either sense is comprehensible. The verbal root rÓa is found meaning ‘to be wet’ in 24.8, but the Arab. cognate means ‘to be fresh’, e.g. ripe dates. In this passage there has been much difference of opinion. We would emphasize the reference to the hold (yeezeh) of the plant’s roots on stones (’anîm) or ‘stone-heap’ (gal), as in Gen. 31.46, 48, 51, 52; Josh. 7.26; 8.29; 2 Sam 18.17. We propose that gannô refers not to ‘garden’, but enclosed ‘yard’, of the Oriental house, in which the plant has taken root (‘its yarn’), where there would be no cultivated ground. The fortuitous growth is further suggested by the verb yesubb¤û; cf. sîrîm sebu¤îm ‘tangled thorns’ (Nah. 1.10). Mutatis mutandis the gure might signify the same as the seed sown on stony ground in the parable. On this interpretation lipenê šemeš, ‘before the sun is up’, as Dhorme proposed, is possible, though we admit the ambiguity of the phrase. 18. The conditional clause is suspect (so Stevenson), and the rst two letters aleph and mem may be the fragment of piÓ’¿m (‘suddenly’), which the meter would support. LXXA, ‘if one swallow it up’, supports MT, but cf. Theod., S and V, ‘overpowers’, which seems to suggest the root b‘al. bla‘, however, is attested in the sense ‘to overwhelm, or destroy’, and may be the cognate of Arab. balaa, ‘to reach’, with aggressive nuance. The verb is found in the Piel as here in parallelism with hišîÓ (‘to destroy’) in 2 Sam 20.19f. The subject of kiš (‘to deny’) is ‘its place’. 21. On the text, see textual note. Though the assertions of Bildad are the general statements of Wisdom, the opening couplet indicates that Job’s questioning of the theodicy is in his mind. Even the hope that he holds out to Job (vv. 6f.) is conditional upon his sincere piety. Bildad’s address abates nothing of the rm dogma of sin and retribution, virtue and reward, as emphasized by the inclusio in vv. 3, 20-22. In the nal colon vv. 20-22 the parallel ¿n’ey¤ // reš‘îm alludes to the critics of the sufferer, who is assumed to have incurred the wrath of God, which they abet, for example, in Ps. 21.9 (EVV 8). More particularly, both negative and positive aspects of the theodicy are emphasized, as in the assurances at the end of the Plaint of the Sufferer as the person falsely accused, namely the nal encouraging oracle (v. 21; cf. Ps. 142.8 [EVV 7]) and the condemnation of the sufferer’s critics or opponents (20, 22), which may be amplied by a curse (e.g. Pss. 5.11ff. [EVV 9ff.]; 6.11 [EVV 10]; 141.8f. [EVV 7f.]).
1
Job 9 and 10 JOB’S SECOND REJOINDER
This is arranged in three parts: 9.1-24, on the theme of the transcendence of God; 9.25-35, Job’s despairing allegation of God’s inaccessibility; and 10.122, where Job accuses God of indifference to the sense and purpose of his own creation or of hostility, and anticipates his challenge to God to hear his case (ch. 31). The passages 9.2-24 and 10.1-22 are composed each of ve strophes of unequal length, 9.2-4, 5-10, 11-14, 15-21 and 22-24, and 10.1-2, 3-7, 8-12, 1317 and 18-22, and the intervening section 9.25-35 of three strophes, 9.25-28, 29-31 and 32-35. The statement is introduced in the style of controversy at law or in the Wisdom schools (9.2-4). Job then cites a Hymn of Praise on the subject of God’s Omnipotence and transcendence, where his exploits and properties are characteristically introduced by participles (9.5-10). This introduces the more particular statement in the dialectic of the LawCourt and Wisdom school on God’s inaccessibility in moral issues (9.11-14), particularly in Job’s individual case (9.15-21), which provokes the allegation of God’s arbitrary disposition (9.22-24). Job’s weakness by contrast is presented with the accumulation of sufferings in a series of gures in the literary convention of the Plaint of the Sufferer (9.25-28, 29-31), while 9.32-35 resumes the theme of the inaccessibility of God and anticipates Job’s appeal for direct confrontation and hearing. The theme of an appeal for a hearing is continued in 10.1-2. Job objects to the indifference of God to humans as the object of His own creation and to the compulsive censoriousness which is more human than divine (10.3-7). The former theme in 10.3-7 is developed in the next strophe (10.8-12) and the latter in 10.13-17. The last strophe (10.1822) resumes the theme of Job’s opening statement (esp. 3.11ff.), where he questions God’s purpose in creating and sustaining the life of a man destined to misery; and wishes for relief in the remainder of his life before the ultimate oblivion of death.
1
The Book of Job
Chapter 9 1.
Then Job answered, and said:
2.
‘Truly I acknowledge that this is so. Yea, how can mere man maintain his right against God? If he pleased to contend with him (A man) could not answer him one (charge) in a thousand. Be he wise in heart or strong in might, Who has stubbornly opposed him with impunity?
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
1
He it is who removes mountains and they are not left undisturbed,1 Who overturns them in his anger; Who shakes the earth from its place, And its pillars quake; Who commands the sun and it does not shine, And seals up the stars; Who stretches out the heavens Himself And treads on the back of Sea; Who makes the Bear and Orion,2 And the Pleiades and the Chambers of the South; Who does great things beyond investigation, Yea, wonders beyond number. Lo, he passes by me and I see Him3 not, Passes on4 and I perceive Him not. If he shatters, then who5 shall restore? Who can say to him, “What are you doing?” A god could not turn back his anger, Under him bow the champions of Rahab. How much less then could I answer him And choose my arguments with him? Since, though in the right, I should not be answered;6 I should have to supplicate my opponent;7 If I were to cite him and he to answer me, I have no condence that he would really listen to what I have to say, For he would buffet me with a tempest, And redouble my blows without cause. He does not let me recover my breath, But he gives me my ll of bitterness. If it be a matter of strength he is strongest;8 And if a matter of justice, who could hold him to an appointment9? Though I were in the right, whatever I said would convict me; Though innocent he would make me out perverse. 10I care not for myself; Nay, I despise my existence. “It is all one.”11 So I say, Innocent and guilty he annihilates.
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Job 9 and 10. Job’s Second Rejoinder
192 23. 24.
When the scourge slays suddenly, He mocks at the despair of the innocent. The land is given into the power of the wicked, He covers the face of the judges therein. 12 If not he, then who?
25.
13My
26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.
Lo,15 I will be found guilty. Why then do I labour in vain? Though I were to wash myself in16 soapweed And cleanse my hands with lye, You would plunge me in lth,17 And my clothes would abhor me. For he is not a man like myself that I could answer, “Let us go to court together!” Would that18 there were an arbiter between us To lay his hand on the two of us. Let him put aside His rod from me, And let His terror not appal me. Then I should speak and not fear Him, For have I not a19 clean conscience?’
Textual Notes to Chapter 9
_ 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 1
days are swifter than a courier; They ee; I see no good. They pass on like reed-ships, Like a vulture swooping on its prey. If I think,14 “I will forget my trouble, I will compose my features and smile”, I dread all my torments, I know that you will not clear me.
Reading yu‘û (pausal) for MT y‘û (see Commentary ad loc.) Reading û¤esîl, assuming the omission of w before k in the Old Heb. script. Reading ’er’hû for MT ’er’eh with S and V. Reading yaal¿ for MT weyaal¿ with two Heb. MSS. Reading ûmî for MT mî with T and several Heb. MSS. Reading ’‘neh with LXX, Theod. and S. See Commentary ad loc. Conjecturing lea‘al mišpÓî for MT limešoeÓî. See Commentary ad loc. Reading ’ammîÑ hû’ for MT ’ammîÑ hinn. Reading yô‘îennû for MT yô‘înî after LXX and S. Omitting tm-’nî as a dittograph. See Commentary ad loc. LXX omits ’aaÓ hî’ of MT which, however, is necessary to the meter, the couplet being 4:4. Reading ’im-lô’ hû’ mî ’ô’ for MT ’im-l¿ ’ô’ mî-hû’, though this may be a gloss. Omitting MT we as a dittograph before y in the last stage of the Heb. script before the nal form of the square script. Reading ’martî for MT ’omerî with LXX, T and one Heb. MS. Reading hn ’n¿¤î for MT ’n¿¤î, metri causa. Reading bemô for MT bemw.
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17. Reading beuôÓ (orthographic variant of suôÓ) for MT bešaaÓ. See Commentary ad loc. 18. Reading lû’ or lû with LXX, S and several Heb. MSS for MT l¿’. 19. Perhaps reading kî hal¿’ ¤n ’n¿¤î ‘immî for MT kî l¿’-¤n…, assuming the omission of h by haplography after y in the Old Heb. script. See Commentary ad loc.
Commentary on Chapter 9 2. In Job’s argument mah-yyiÑdaq ’enôš ‘im-’l should be taken in the sense, ‘What shall a (mere) man adduce to maintain his right against God?’, thus sustaining the legal idiom and understanding that Job is controversially adapting Bildad’s thesis of the justice (Ñeeq) of God (8.3). Here, in view of Job’s statement of the might, majesty and transcendence of God (vv. 5-14), the choice of ’enôš emphasizes the weakness of humanity; cf. ’naš in Isa. 17.11; Jer. 15.18; Ps. 69.21 (EVV 20); Job 34.6; with Ass. and Arab. cognates. The adversative force of ‘im and the forensic sense of yiÑdaq is supported by the phrase lrî ‘immô in v. 3. 3. yap¿Ñ, as in 13.3; 21.14; 33.32; Deut. 25.7f.; 1 Kgs 9.1, means ‘is pleased to’, with the nuance of condescension as in Est. 6.5.The couplet is formally ambiguous. NEB renders ‘If a man chooses to argue with him God will not answer him one question in a thousand’. This might be supported by God’s long-deferred answer to Job’s complaint and challenge in the Divine Declaration (38.1ff.) and by the fact that there God does not give the expected answer to Job’s problem but a rebuke. If we take God as the subject of v. 3a, which the regular meaning of yap¿Ñ (‘choose, be pleased to’) would suggest, condescending to the confrontation (rî) for which Job longs, the inability of a human to answer ‘one question in a thousand’ might be instanced by the plethora of questions in the Divine Declaration which bafe Job. Under this consideration we prefer the latter interpretation. 4. hiqšh, lit. ‘to make hard’, sc. ‘¿re (‘neck’), means ‘to make difculties’ (Exod. 13.15). 5. Verses 5-14, on the subject of the transcendence of God in Creation and in the great catastrophes in nature, has, with the participles, the hall-mark of a Hymn of Praise to the Almighty. It is then not unapt to Job’s complaint that God is beyond contention in a human’s plea for justice (vv. 2-5, 15ff.), and, to be sure, the theme and style of the Hymn of Praise is used in the addresses of Job’s three friends in support of their argument for the sovereignty of God in society (5.9ff., Eliphaz; 11.7ff., Zophar; 25.2, Bildad) and, more extensively, in the Elihu addendum (36.22ff.; 37.1ff.). The form may be used ironically by Job in his arguments against his friends. When that is said, however, formally and thematically it interrupts Job’s argument in legal style in vv. 2-4, 15ff., so 1
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that it may be a secondary insertion. Some such explanation is suggested by the fact that vv. 5-7 on the destructive activity of the Almighty, preceded the passage on the positive aspect of His creation in vv. 8-10, which Fohrer (p. 205) takes as possibly two separate fragments of Hymns of Praise. The passage certainly seems secondary, perhaps suggested by the original in vv. 11-14 and particularly v. 12, ‘If he shatters then who shall restore?’, which may have been elaborated in vv. 5-7, and the passage on God’s power over Rahab, the force of chaos par excellence in v. 13, which may have been elaborated in vv. 8-10. Alternatively, in pursuance of the theme of the transcendence of God in vv. 2-4, the author may have used a hymn of praise (vv. 8-10); cf. Psalm 104 and the doxologies in Amos 4.13, 5.8f.; 9f., and 5-7 in that order, which was subsequently reversed by a redactor through motives of reverence, like the orthodox conclusion to Ecclesiastes (12.13f.). ‘Óaq in Classical Hebrew means ‘to move on’ (intrans.) and in Arab. and Aram. ‘to grow old’. It is found in the Qal in 14.18 and 16.4 and in the Hiphil as here of mountains being moved. The subject of y‘û (pausal) is uncertain. If personal and indenite, it might indicate the removal of the mountains beyond human powers of anticipation or detection of where they had once stood. The plural, however, suggests rather the subject hrîm. In that case as a complement to he‘eÓîq the verb may rather be cognate of Arab. wada‘a, ‘to leave’, sc. undisturbed (as a horse given free rein), cited by W. Johnstone (1991: 54f.) from Lane on the basis of native Arab lexicographers. ha¤ is used of drastic overturning, for example, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Amos 4.11) and similar catastrophes. raz is used of earthquake in 1 Sam. 14.15, Amos 8.8 and Isa. 14.16, where it is parallel to r‘aš, the regular word for the quaking of the earth. The conception of the earth propped on pillars over the lower deep (tehôm) is familiar in Ps. 75.4, where the pillars are said to be kept rm by God; cf. Job 26.11, where the sky also is propped by cosmic pillars. The verb plaÑ occurs only here in the OT, though derivatives are found, e.g. pallÑûÓ, ‘shuddering’ (Job 21.5; Isa. 21.4; Ezek. 7.18; Ps. 55.6), mileÑeÓ, ‘something to shudder at’, Maacah’s cult symbol, perhaps a scribal parody of miseleÓ, ‘a graven image’ (1 Kgs 15.13), and tileÑeÓ, ‘horror’ (Jer. 49.16). eres is a rare word, found in the OT only here and doubtfully at Judg. 14.18 and in the place-names Timnat-eres in Judg. 2.9 (cf. Josh. 19.20, where the corruption sera indicates the consciousness of the scribes that ares meant ‘sun’, with associations with a pagan nature-cult at the locality), and har-eres (Judg. 1.35), with probably this association with sun-worship, and ‘the Ascent of eres’ in Transjordan in Judg. 8.13. ’mar in h’¿mr has probably the Arab. connotation ‘to command’. The obscuration of the sun may be the result of eclipse or of the dust-laden sirocco, peculiarly the accompaniment of the theophany of Yahweh as the God of the desert mountain in Sinai. 1
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8. In n¿Óh šmayim the conception is that of stretching out the heavens as the web of a tent is pegged out by Bedouin and stretched on its poles, called in Arab. ‘awmid (lit. ‘pillars’); cf. the ‘pillars’ (‘ammûîm) of the earth in v. 6b. The phrase ‘stretches out the heavens himself’ is reiterated with slight variation in Isa. 44.24. For MT ym some Heb. MSS have ‘ (‘cloud’). In Heb. bmôÓ means ‘humps’ usually of earth, such as grave-mounds, or literally ‘backs’ of humans or animals (Deut. 33.29). Here we should see a reminiscence of the triumph of Baal over the unruly waters in Canaanite mythology, the Canaanite version of the triumph of God over the powers of Chaos and His assumption of kingship which guarantees His Order in nature, which belonged to the liturgy of the autumn festival, and was adapted by Israel in Enthronement Psalms. The specic reference is to the victor setting his foot on the back of the prone enemy, and Marduk’s treading upon ‘the legs’ of the vanquished Tiamat in the cosmic conict in the Babylonian New Year myth may here be cited. The image of God treading on the back of Sea or on the summit of the waves may recall the stele of Baal at Ras Shamra, where the god strides out over two registers of undulations, symbolizing perhaps his victory over the waters, now consigned to the sky and under the earth (Schaeffer 1939: pl. xxiii, g. 2; J. Gray 1964: pl. 28, pp. 127ff., 230). 9. Compare the doxology on the subject of God’s creation and ordering of the constellations in Amos 5.8, in support of his general theme of God’s sustaining of the moral order, which the prophet understands in the context of His theophany as King and the whole related ideology of the autumn festival. Here it must be noted that LXX reverses the order of the constellations ‘š and kesîl under the inuence of 38.1-32 and Amos 5.8, where the rst constellation to be named is kîmh, then kesîl, ‘the fool’ (cf. 8.14; 31.24) or Orion, called by the Arabs ‘the Giant’ (’al-Jabbr). ‘š is rendered in Arab. by Saadya as bant an-na‘aš (‘Daughters of the Cofn’), which signied for the Arabs the Great and the Little Bears. ‘The Chambers of the South’ (aerê Ómn; cf. 37.9), the place from which the whirlwind comes, is rendered ‘the intimate places of the South’ in T. G.R. Driver (1956b) connects eer with the root ‘to encircle’ (Ezek. 21.19) and sees a reference to circulus Austrinus. kîmh is rendered by LXX here and at 38.31 as ‘Pleiades’ and so by Sym. and T. In Amos 5.6, Sym. and Theod. render it by the same term. In the present passage Saadya renders it arîya, lit. ‘the wet’ (constellation), i.e. the Pleides. The word is taken generally to signify a cluster of stars like a herd of camels (Arab. kûmatu[n]), but in 38.31 ‘Do you bind the bonds of kîmh?’ Dhorme proposes to see a word-play between ‘bind’ and the root kâmu, known in Ass. in the meaning ‘ to tie’; cf. kimtu (‘family’). The Pleiades herald the season of cold weather and the vital winter rains in Palestine, and hence are a manifestation of God’s positive Order. 1
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10. In view of the limitations of humans vis-à-vis the might and method of the Creator (vv. 10f.) the worthy sufferer complains that he cannot expect vindication by the canons of human justice (vv. 11-22, 25-32). It seems to Job in his cumulative and unmitigated suffering that God is susceptible neither to justice or mercy (v. 15), and in mocking the sufferings of the innocent, encourages the abuse of human rights (v. 24), and sets a precedent for the rule of might over right. The wrath of God, from whom one might expect mercy if not justice (5.17ff.), is signicantly emphasized in v. 13, being instanced in the vast destruction by God in his own Creation in what we regard as the obverse of the Hymn of Praise in vv. 8-10 and 5-7 in that order. The conclusion of Job’s vehement statement of the indifference of God to good or evil in society (vv. 22-24) is tantamount to blasphemy, to which Job commits himself in full knowledge that it is a capital offence (v. 21). 12. The verb Óa occurs in the OT only here and in the nominal form eÓe in Prov. 23.28, where it describes the objective of the lurking adulteress. Hence it is taken to mean ‘prey’, but that seems to assume a connection with Arab. ¨aÓafa (‘to snatch’), which actually has a Heb. cognate Óa (Judg. 21.21; Ps. 10.9). In Job, however, the verb is not Óa but Óa. This suggests the Syr. cognate att (‘to break in pieces’); cf. Arab. atfu(n) (‘death, or ‘dissolution’), and hence our translation ‘he shatters. Who can then restore?’ If the ending -ennû in MT yešîennû is the pronominal sufx rather than the energic ending the sense would be ‘Who could turn God back (from his purpose)?’ 13. Verse 13b is a citation from the mythology of the conict of Cosmos and Chaos from the liturgy of the autumn festival. The Mesopotamian myth relating to the spring New Year festival at Babylon celebrated the triumph of Marduk over Tiamat, the monster of the lower deep and its allies (rêÑu). raha is one of the monsters which menace God’s Cosmos in the Psalms and Prophets in the OT, for example, Ps. 89.10f. (EVV 9f.), where, as in Job 26.12, it is parallel to Sea (ym), Isa. 51.9, where it is parallel to tannîn in the same connection, and Isa. 30.7, where it is used guratively for Babylon and Egypt respectively, the historical expression of the forces of Chaos. The fact that among the other enemies of Cosmos in the Ras Shamra texts raha is not named may indicate that it was an appellation of Sea, the arch-enemy of Order in Canaanite and Hebrew, meaning ‘the Agitated One’; cf. Aram. reha (‘to be agitated’), with Syr. and Arab. cognates meaning ‘to tremble’, usually through fear, and Akk. ra’bu (‘to be irritated’). ‘The allies of Rahab’ indicates familiarity with the Mesopotamian myth Enuma elish from the liturgy of the Babylonian New Year festival, where Tiamat created as allies the hydra, the red dragon, the la¨amu, the great lion, the wolf with the foaming mouth, the scorpion man, raging tempests, the sh man, the horned goat and others. 1
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15. On the readings ’‘neh and ba‘al mišpÓ, with forensic connotations like vv. 2-4, see textual note. 16. Job declares that if God did deign to answer He would do so on his own terms without particular reference to his questions. This is what actually happens in the Divine Declaration in 38.2–40.14. Note again the technical terms of a law-suit, qr’ (‘to cite’) and ‘nh (‘to respond’). 17. The root šû is well attested in Heb. (e.g. Gen. 3.5) and in Aram., meaning ‘to beat, bruise’. e‘rh, if correct, must be an orthographic variant of se‘rh; cf. Nah. 1.3, where ‘the way of Yahweh is in the whirlwind (sûh) and storm (e‘rh)’, the demonstration of the wrath of God in natural catastrophes. In the present passage there may be an allusion to Bildad’s reference to Job’s vehement protest as ‘a great bluster’, ‘mighty wind’ (8.2). NEB renders bie‘rh as ‘for a trie’ (lit. ‘for a single hair’) which might be supported by ‘without cause’ (innm) in the parallel colon. 19. On the reading yô‘îennû see textual note. The verb means ‘hold him to an appointment’, or ‘confrontation’; cf. 24.1. 20. ‘My mouth’ (pî) means ‘my speech’, or ‘whatever I said’, and is the subject of yaršî‘nî (‘would convict me’), though probably not of wayya‘qešnî (‘would make me out perverse’) in v. 20b. Job’s statement in v. 3b ‘though innocent He would make me out perverse’ is his retort to Bildad’s rhetorical question, ‘Does the Almighty pervert the right (Ñeeq)?’ (8.3). 21. MT tm-’anî may be repeated from v. 20b by scribal error; the second colon, moreover, is short of a beat, so Hölscher and Horst propose to insert Ñdaqtî or Ñaddîq ’anî (‘I am right’). We propose that kî with the adversative sense is omitted by haplography after -šî in našî in the Old Heb. script, restoring the text: l¿’ ’a‘ našî kî ’em’as ayyy
I care not for myself; Nay, I despise my existence.
ya‘ meaning ‘to care for, to take special note of’ is attested in Gen. 39.6; Deut. 33.9; Amos 3.2; Ps. 31.8 (EVV 7). 22. ‘al-kn indicates that in his desperate case, with nothing to lose, Job will dare to assert that God deals indiscriminately with the good and the bad. The phrase is omitted by Duhm as a gloss (so also Stevenson). 23. šôÓ means ‘lash’; cf. Arab. awÓu(n), hence Latin ‘plague’. Beer suspected this reading and suggested šiÓô (‘his rod’) after S, denoting the ruler’s sceptre, which signalled life or death; cf. Est. 5.2. 1
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massaÓ may be derived from nsh (‘to try’) or from msas (‘to melt’ or ‘be destroyed’). The parallelism indicates the latter. The Niphal of msas is used with the subject ‘heart’ denoting despair (e.g. Josh. 2.11). 24. On the text of v. 24c, seîr, see textual note. 26. ‘im, ‘with’ or, as regularly in Ugaritic and occasionally in Heb. ‘against’, is used of comparison occasionally in Ugaritic (e.g. Gordon UT 49.I.23) and in Classical Heb. (e.g. 37.18; 40.15; Pss. 73.5; 106.6). ’eh, hapax legomenon in the OT, has an Ass. cognate abu, denoting ‘papyrus’, which is supported by kelê g¿me’ (‘vessels of papyrus’) in Isa. 18.2. The speed of the craft suggests skiffs in the Nile current rather than ‘ships’, though sailing ships of bundles of papyrus reeds are attested in Egyptian sculpture and painting and by Thor Heyerdahl’s experiment with the Ra. nešer is either the vulture or the eagle, like Arab. niru(n). Óûš is a hapax legomenon in the OT, but is found in Late Heb., Aram. and Syr. Óûs (‘to y’), of which it may be a dialectic variant. The reference may be either to the deceptively swift gliding ight of the eagle or vulture, or its coming immediately from the incredible distance from which it spies carrion. 27. On the reading ’martî, here ‘I think’, see textual note. If ’e‘ezeh pnay formally might mean ‘will leave (off) my (sad) face’, the reference would be to scowling; cf. Cain’s scowling brows in Gen. 4.6. But the verb may be a homonym, meaning ‘to prepare’, here in the sense ‘compose’, e.g. Neh. 3.8, with a cognate in Ugaritic ‘db (so Dahood 1959: 303-309). It may alternatively be an unknown Classical Heb. word meaning ‘to sweeten’ cognate with Arab. ‘auba, used in this sense in the IV form, the phrase thus meaning ‘I put on a cheerful countenance’ (so G.R. Driver 1955: 76), which would also be feasible in the context. bla (cf. 10.20) is cognate with Arab. balaja, of faces ‘beaming’ on acquittal in the Qu’ran; cf. Ps. 39.14. 28. gûr is a strong verb meaning ‘to fear, be in terror of’ (transitive); cf. 3.25. 29. On the reading hn ’nô¤î see textual note. ’erš‘ is used in the forensic sense, ‘I am guilty’, and not in the moral sense, ‘I am wicked’. 30. šele, which normally means ‘snow’, so understood by S and T, cf. Qere bemê šele (‘in snow water’), probably means rather ‘soap-weed’, Akk. aslaku, Mishnaic Heb. ’ešla (Preuss 1923: 431; Löw 1924: I, 648f.). bôr, from the root brar (‘to be pure’) is here a substance known as cleansel in Isa. 1.25 (cf. bôrîÓ in Jer. 2.22), which was made from the ashes of certain plants, possibly mixed with olive oil, which was known in Mesopotamia c. 2000 BCE 1
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(so Dhorme [1910: 111], citing Thureau-Dangin). Mowinckel (1955: 311) proposes that there is a reference to a rite of exculpation; cf. Deut. 21.6; Ps. 26.6; 73.13; MT 27.24; but in such a context as the present the language is gurative. 31. On the reading beuôÓ, preferred to MT baššaaÓ (‘in the pit’) by Hoffmann, Beer, Duhm, Ehrlich, Dhorme, Hölscher, Stevenson, Horst and Fohrer after LXX, see textual note. The word may be an orthographic variant of sûh (‘offal’) in Isa. 5.25. 33. MT l¿’ yš is suspect, ‘there is not’ being normally expressed by ’ayin; hence with LXX, S and many Heb. MSS and most commentators. lû (‘would that’) may be read. MT, however, is retained by V, T, Dhorme, Hölscher, Weiser, Horst and Fohrer. mô¤îa denotes normally a judge, who gives an impartial verdict strictly according to the norm of justice, with the implication of reproof and punishment of the guilty party. Here it denotes an arbiter. Strahan (1914: 102) sees here ‘an unconscious prophecy of incarnation and atonement’, where he does well to qualify his statement by ‘unconscious’. 35. MT kî l¿’-¤n ’n¿¤î ‘immî has never been satisfactory to commentators, though it was evidently unquestioned in the ancient versions. Dhorme proposed to transpose the two cola, reading, Since it is not thus (sc. since there is no arbiter) I will reason with myself and not fear,
transposing ’n¿¤î ‘immî from the end of v. 35b to the beginning of v. 35a, which upsets the meter. Fohrer retains MT, but assumes that ’n¿¤î is a doctrinal adjustment of an original hû’ (1989: 200), ‘For he does not deal rightly with me’. A simple explanation would be to assume the scribal omission of an original interrogative h after y in kî in the Old Heb. script, and to take kn, as Fohrer does, as an adjective ‘true’; cf. Gen. 42.11, 19, 31, 33, 34; Exod. 10.29; 2 Kgs 7.9; etc.; thus we should read kî hal¿’ ¤n ’n¿¤î ‘immî (‘For am I not true with myself?’, i.e. ‘Have I not a clear conscience?’). Chapter 10 Job’s Second Rejoinder (Continued) In utmost desperation, ‘taking his life into his hand’ in Heb. idiom (cf. 9.21), Job, condent of his innocence (10.7), presses his plea directly to God in 9.2831, demanding the specic charges against him (v. 2b) though, before God transcendent he has no hope of an adequate hearing (9.3f.) as in human court guaranteed by an arbiter (9.33). Job’s afiction before regular condemnation after a fair hearing is surely an abuse of God’s marvellous, superhuman power 1
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(10.16f.). Beyond human limitations (vv. 4f.), God might be expected to transcend justice in mercy, it may be implied, rather than acting like an overzealous inquisitor (vv. 4-6), like the Ón of the Prologue, to which the passage may obliquely refer. The detailed passage on the conception and birth of a mortal as a manifestation of God’s creative activity (vv. 8-12), the object of God’s ‘visitation’ (pequh), here in the sense of God’s special benecence, may be taken as the application to the individual of the theme of the Hymn of Praise to the Creator of inanimate nature in 9.8-10, while His unrelenting and intensied afiction of a man like Job (10.8, 17) seems a similar application of the same theme in its negative aspect (9.5-7)—which might justify the view that the citation of the Hymn of Praise in 9.5-7 and 8-10 may be indeed from the author of the Book of Job adapted to suit his theme. The sufferings of the innocent in fact seem for Job to negate any positive purpose in God’s creation of humanity (v. 3), while the withholding of mercy to the limited extent to which the worthy sufferer seeks it (v. 20) only sharpens his argument. In view of the limited prospect of the after-life in the Book of Job (vv. 21f.), beyond the interest or inuence of God, the suffering of the blameless without relief or vindication seems to make nonsense of an honest person as ‘the noblest work of God’ (cf. vv. 18-22). If this is the end of the life of humans with their potential and will for good, like Job in happier times (ch. 29), Job may well reecho the curse of the day of his birth (vv. 18f.; cf. ch. 3). Chapter 10 Job’s Second Rejoinder (Continued) 1. 2.
3.
4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 1
‘My inmost being loathes1 my life; I shall give free scope to my complaint, I shall speak in my bitterness of soul, I will say to God, “Do not condemn me”. Inform me of your case against me. Do you like to oppress me, that you spurn your own hands’ labour? (And shine on the purpose of the ungodly.)2 Have you eyes of esh, Do you see as man sees? Are your days as the days of mankind? Are your years as the years of a man, That you subject my iniquity to your inquisition And seek out my sin, Though you know that I am not guilty, and that there is none to deliver (me) from your hand? Your hands have knit me together and nished me, And after that3 you have turned4 and overwhelmed me. Remember that it was of5 clay you made me,
The Book of Job 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
16. 17.
18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
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And back to dust you will return me. Did you not pour me out like milk, Curdling me like cheese,6 Clothing me with skin and esh, With a framework of bones and sinews? You have invested me with life,7 And your special visitation has preserved the spirit within me. But these things you laid up in your heart, I know that this was your intention, If I defaulted you would have me in custody, And would not clear me of my sin; If I were guilty, woe betide me! Or if innocent, I may not lift my head, 8(Sated with humiliation and lled9 with afiction, And if [my head] were raised up proudly you would hunt me like a lion And renew your prodigious exploits against me.)8 Your renew your attack10 against me, And intensify your anger against me; And you send in fresh forces11 against me. So why did you bring me forth from the womb? Would that I had expired and eye had not seen me! I should have been as if I had not existed, Should have been carried from the womb to the grave. Are not the days of my life12 few? Desist13 from me that I may have a little cheer Before I go, never to return, To a land of darkness and gloom A land of thick darkness [ ],14 The shining of which is as blackness.’
Textual Notes to Chapter 10 Reading nqaÓÓh for MT nqeÓh, from qÓaÓ, possibly a byform of qûÓ. Though an occasional tricolon is used in a predominant arrangement of bicola in Heb. and Ugaritic poetry, this is probably a later gloss. 3. Reading ’aar with LXX and S for MT yaa, ’ being corrupted to y in the Old Hebraic script and r to d at this or a later stage. 4. Reading sabbôÓ or the innitive absolute s¿ for MT sî. 5. Reading m¿mer for MT ka¿mer (‘like clay’), assuming the corruption of m to k in the Old Hebraic script. 6. Reading geînh for MT geinnh. 7. Reading ayyîm šatt ‘immî for MT ayyîm wese ‘îÓ ‘immî, metri causa. See Commentary ad loc. 8. Probably to be omitted as a secondary expansion which impairs the argument. 9. MT ûre’h may be genuine, r’h being a byform of rwh (‘to be sated’). See Commentary ad loc. 10. Reading ‘eye¤ for MT ‘ey¤ (‘your witnesses’). See Commentary ad loc. 1. 2.
1
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11. Reading wetaalî Ñe’ôÓ ‘immî for MT alîôÓ weÑ’ ‘immî. See Commentary ad loc. 12. Reading yemê eldî for MT ymay yedl. See Commentary ad loc. 13. Reading še¿Ó for MT yešîÓ. See Commentary ad loc. 14. Omitting kemô ’¿pel ÑalmweÓ as a secondary expansion.
Commentary on Chapter 10 1. On the reading nqaÓÓh see textual note. neeš means ‘life’ or, as in Arab. ‘very self’, which is the meaning demanded here since ‘my life’ (ayyay) is the object. ‘za in the sense ‘let go free’, recurring in 20.13, recalls Exod. 23.5 (E) and the original ritual or legal phrase ‘Ñûr we‘zû (‘restricted and free’) in Deut. 32.36; 1 Kgs 14.20f.; 2 Kgs 9.18; 14.26. The Ugaritic cognate ‘db is used of releasing a hawk in the Ras Shamra Legend of Aqht (Gordon UT 3 Aqht 22f.). 3. ‘šaq, which means commonly in the OT ‘to oppress’, gave offence to Jewish scribes as a divine activity, and the MT kî-Óa‘aš¿q was read as ‘that I am wicked’ by Aq. and LXX in the texts they translated. The verb means also ‘to act violently’. As the predicate of ‘river’ in 40.23, it is cited by Dhorme, assuming that it refers to the river in ood, yeîa‘ kappey¤ (lit. ‘toil of your hands’) implies achievement with labour and pains as distinct from ma‘aeh, which signies ‘achievement’; cf. Isa. 41.4, mî-‘al we‘h (‘Who wrought and achieved?’); cf. ‘h used of creation in Ps. 95.6 and specically of the creation of humanity in Ps. 119.73 and Genesis 1. hôîa‘ with God as subject describes His epiphany (Deut. 33.2) as effective ruler (š¿Ó) in Ps. 94.1; cf. Pss. 50.7; 80.2 (EVV 1). With the traditional implication of the vindication of God’s people and the imposition of his Order it has peculiar point here in the case of Job, who thus rebukes God for intervening in support of those whom he should particularly have condemned. Here the noun ‘Ñh is ambiguous, meaning ‘plan’ or ‘purpose’ or, as in the Qumran Manual of Discipline, ‘party’. 6. biqqš, which usually means in Classical Heb. ‘to seek’, has here the meaning rather ‘to examine’ or ‘inspect’, with the nuance of inquisition. le in la’aw¿nî is probably the nota accusativa, as in Aram. 7. ‘al in this context means ‘although, despite’. Commentators have found no parallelism in this bicolon, and so Beer and Duhm propose to emend MT we’ên miyye¤ maÑÑîl (‘there is none to rescue me from your hand’) to we’ên beyî m‘al (‘there is no perdy in my hand’), which is just graphically feasible though doubtful. Ehrlich sought to restore the parallelism he assumed by emending ’erša‘ in v. 7a to ’ewwša‘, which is 1
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graphically more feasible, reading ‘al da‘Óe¤ kî-l¿’ ’ewwša‘ (‘Though you know that I cannot save myself’). But with Fohrer we should retain MT, taking the bicolon, admittedly and exceptionally not in the usual parallelism, in the whole context of Job’s argument in the rst strophe, particularly vv. 3ff., the point of which is that God was not bound to act as a human, punishing sin automatically, but had scope for mercy, even when persons might not be able to prove their innocence to his satisfaction. Job suggests that the mere fact that God had created humanity suggests a more positive purpose, which is belied by summary visitation. This is implied in v. 7b, which hints at the mercy of God since the sufferer has no other help. 8. ‘Ña, the preliminary of ‘h, the nished work of creation of humanity (see above on v. 3), suggests a connection with ‘aÑabbîm (‘graven images’), and an Arab. cognate ‘aaba has been suggested (BDB); but Heb. Ñ does not correspond phonetically to Arab. , and so this etymology must be rejected. The correspondence is with Arab. ‘aÑaba and Syr. ‘eÑa, both used of a surgeon binding up a limb (so Ball and Koehler–Baumgartner). Hence we agree with Fohrer in his rendering ‘you have knit me together’, at which he arrived by the analogy of the creation of humans in v. 11 clothed with esh in a (binding) framework of bones and sinews. On the reading ’aar sabbôÓ (or sô), see textual notes. Dhorme’s suggestion, however, should be noted, that sî means ‘utterly’, citing 19.10. 9. On the reading m¿mer (‘of clay’) see textual note. For the conception of humans as moulded from clay, cf. 33.6; for ¿mer (‘clay’) parallel to ‘r in the constitution of humans, cf. 4.19, and for their return to the dust, cf. Gen. 3.19. 10. geinnh (‘cheese’) is not elsewhere attested in Classical Heb., but its cognates Aram. gun’ and Arab. jubnu(n) are well known. The narrative imperfect in tattî¤nî and taqpî’nî, with the force of the Greek aorist and the force and form of the Akk. preterite, is regularly used in the Ugaritic myths and legends. 11. s¿¤¤ (‘constructing a framework’) is used in the same connection in the Qal in Ps. 139.13. 12. The phrase ‘h ese ‘im (‘to deal kindly with’) is familiar, but ‘h ayyîm is strange, and ayyîm is suspect; cf. the various proposals to emend. Beer’s proposal, followed by G.B. Gray, to read n (‘grace’) for MT ayyîm, is the most feasible and is supported by the collocation of n and ese in Est. 2.17. MT is read by Dhorme, Stevenson, Hölscher and Horst. The meter demands one word fewer, however, and LXX ‘you set’ for MT ‘îÓ suggests the reading šatt, which would take ayyîm as the object. ese may then be 1
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secondary, perhaps suggested by ‘immî, involving the change of šatt to ‘îÓ (so Lindblom). Alternatively it is suggested that the compound phrase ese ‘îÓ ‘immî should be retained and ayyîm taken in apposition to ese (so Dhorme and others). This leaves the difculty of the overloaded colon. pequddh means a visitation or special note taken here in kindness, though often in wrath and retribution. The spirit in humans, preserved by God’s special visitation (pequddh), is God’s special gift which peculiarly gives humans afnity with God; cf. Isa. 31.5. See on 6.4. 13. ‘im denotes intimacy; cf. ‘im lea dwi ‘the purpose of David’ (1 Kgs 8.17). 14. šmar here is used not in the sense of protection, but of marking or detaining in custody. 15. ’alelay is probably interjectional, derived from a root ’lal, probably onomatopoeic, with an Arab. cognate, ‘to moan’ (in sickness). It occurs only here and at Mic. 7.1. The raising of the head may signify deance (Judg. 8.28; Ps. 83.3), pardon (11.15) or relief, as here; cf. the Baal myth of Ras Shamra (Gordon UT 137.23, 27), where the gods lower their heads on their knees in discomture and raise them in relief. re’h ‘onî (cf. MT ‘onyî, with dittography of y) recalls Ben Sira 34.28, yayin ništeh b‘Ó ûre’î (‘wine drunk at the right time and to satiety’), in Prov. 23.31, ’al-tre’ yayin kî yiÓ’addm (‘do not drink wine to satiety when it is red’), and probably Prov. 31.4, where re’h is parallel to eÓô (‘drinking’) (Thomas 1962: 499f.); cf. Gordon UT ‘nt I.12-15: bk rb ‘m r’i, ‘a large goblet of mighty draught’. In the light of this evidence re’h may well be genuine rather than rewh with the same meaning, which has been proposed. 16. ‘And if my head exalted itself’ is a paraphrase of MT weyi’eh, which the ancient versions read and paraphrased thus. Ball after S read we’e’eh (‘and if I exalt myself’), assuming the scribal error of y for ’, feasible in the Old Heb. script. tiÓpall’ is used ironically. The word implies the immediate effect of God’s power without recourse to secondary causes for His own purpose and glory and beyond natural processes and human understanding. Terrien has well observed that this is an ironical reference to God’s exploits as the theme of Hymns of Praise, as in Exod. 15.11 (cf. Ps. 77.15, and, with particular reference to the present passage, Isa. 29.14). The verb expresses the shocking effect of such activity. 17. ‘eye¤ (‘your attack’), cognate with Arab. ‘adiya in the II and IV forms (‘to be hostile’), is obviously to be read for MT ‘ey¤, ‘your witnesses’ (so 1
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Ehrlich, Dhorme, Stevenson, Steinmann, Pope). LXX reads a singular noun, but renders ‘examination’, thus seeming to support MT ‘witnesses’. We read weÓalî Ñe’ôÓ ‘immî for MT alîôÓ weÑb’ ‘immî, which, however, is possible assuming the omission of w before Ñb’ and understanding alîôÓ (‘relays of forces’) as the predicate of teaddš (‘you renew’). alîh means a change of clothes (Judg. 14.12) or relief from duty (14.14). The emended text refers to the sending in successive waves of fresh troops; cf. Arab. ¨alîfatu(n) (‘Khalif’, ‘successor’). Note the adversative sense of ‘im; cf. nilam ‘im (‘ght against’). 18. ’egwa‘, like ’ehyeh and ’ûbal in v. 19, expresses a wish which should have been fullled at a xed point of time in the past (GKC, §107n). 20. In v. 20a LXX, S and Jerome read ‘the time of my life’ which suggests the reading yemê eldî to Wright, Bickell, Beer, Budde, Duhm, Ehrlich, G.B. Gray, Dhorme, Hölscher, D.W. Thomas and Fohrer for MT ymay yedl. In v. 20b yšîÓ is doubtful and various emendations have been proposed, e.g. še‘h (‘look away’), as Graetz, Beer, Ball, G.B. Gray, Hölscher, Fohrer, which has the support of LXX, 7.19 and Ps. 39.14, hša‘ mimmennî we’alîh. Admirable as that may seem, we nd it unlikely that such a distinctive letter as ‘ could have been corrupted to y in MT yšiÓ at any stage of the development of the Heb. alphabet. Hence we prefer Lagarde’s šeboÓ, which is graphically feasible in the Old Heb. script. 22. This verse has been regarded as a series of glosses on ‘a land of darkness and deepest gloom’ (’ereÑ ¿še¤ weÑalmweÓ) in v. 21b (so Bickell, Beer, Duhm, Hölscher, Fohrer, who limits the glosses to MT kemô ’¿el Ñalmwet) (so Budde, Oort, Dhorme, Stevenson, Horst), reducing the couplet to the following: ’ereÑ ‘êÓh wel¿’ serîm watt¿a‘ kemô-’¿el.
‘êÓh may be noted as a rare form; cf. ‘êh (Amos 4.13). serîm, if it is the plural of ser in its usual sense of ‘order’, might indicate the ordered succession of day and night regulated by the sun; cf. Gen. 1.16-18 (P). LXX has suggested the reading nhr (so Peters) or sehrîm (‘celestial globes’ [Beer]), which, however, is only attested in post-biblical Heb. G.R. Driver (1955: 76f.) is nearer the truth, following the clue of LXX, in suggesting that serîm is cognate with Arab. sadira (‘to be dazzled’), taking serîm as ‘beams of light’.
1
Job 11 ZOPHAR’S FIRST ADDRESS
Zophar’s expostulation is arranged in six strophes which may be arranged according to their sense as vv. 2-4, Zophar’s rebuke to Job’s eloquence and moral condence; vv. 5-6, 7-9, 10-12, the assertion of God’s higher wisdom and human inadequacy; and vv. 13-16, 17-20, the assurance of God’s grace on repentance. In the rst strophe the literary afnity is with the sapiential controversy; the second uses the diction of the controversy at law; the third states the transcendent wisdom of God in the style and diction of the Hymn of Praise; and the fourth is cast in the literary convention of the Wisdom Psalm on the theme of God’s cognizance of human sin. In the second part of Zophar’s address the fth strophe directs an admonition particularly to Job, the literary afnity of which is the prophetic admonition and promise of blessing. The theme of blessing is sustained and elaborated in the last two strophes and, as a foil, the sapiential theme of the theodicy is asserted in the statement of the discomture of the wicked. In asserting the transcendence of God (vv. 7-9), Zophar agrees with Job 9.11-16, 32; but, while Job deplores the inaccessibility of God in his desire for justice, Zophar urges that the same divine transcendence does not entitle one to dispute the sapiential doctrine of sin and retribution. Evil cannot escape God’s notice though humans may not sufciently consider their sin (v. 11), thus animadverting obliquely on Job’s refusal to admit sin as the cause of his suffering. For the obtuseness of humanity in general and the mindless persons who ignore and dispute the tenets of Hebrew Wisdom he quotes what is possibly a proverb: An inane man will get sense As soon as a wild ass of the steppe may be trained as a donkey. (v. 12)
Thus Zophar urges the sapiential doctrine of retributive justice like Eliphaz and Bildad, but more brusquely and impersonally. Like them he asserts the positive as well as the negative aspect of the belief, with the prospect of blessing, which like Eliphaz he holds out to Job (vv. 16-19) conditional upon his ordering his mind (v. 13a), that is to display the traditional patience of the wise man who controls his passion (cf. per contra 5.2) and supplicate the 1
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mercy of God (13b; cf. 5.8ff. and 8.5-7). Characteristic of the more rigid Bildad and Zophar, the obverse of the blessing thus promised is the condign punishment of the wicked (20; cf. 8.22). The encouragement of all three friends is signicantly lacking in the rest of the dialogue except, characteristically, in the last appeal of the more mature Eliphaz (22.21-28). Chapter 11 1.
Then Zophar the Naamathite answered and said:
2.
‘Must the voluble talker1 be answered? Is a man right because he is glib? Shall your babbling silence men, And you scoff2 and none reproach you? “Yea”, you say,3 “my doctrine is pure”, And you are4 clean in our eyes.
3. 4. 5. 6.
7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 1
But would that God would speak,5 Might open His lips against you! Yea, declare to you secrets of wisdom— For his immediate activity6 is related to its effect— But be certain that God will question you7about your sins. Can you nd out the ultimate truth of God? Can you reach the connes of the Almighty? It is higher than the heavens.8 What can you do? Deeper than Sheol. What can you know? Longer than the earth in measure, And broader than the sea. If He arrests and connes And arraigns who shall answer Him? For He knows false men And sees evil, though men do not consider that. For an inane man will get sense As soon as a wild ass of the steppe be trained as a donkey.9 If you settled your mind And spread out your hands to Him, If evil be in your hand remove it, Nor let wrong abide in your tent,10 Then you would lift up your face stainless, And you would be rmly established with no fear. In that case11 you would forget trouble, As water which has owed away you will remember it. Darkness12 shall become as noontide,13 Thick gloom shall be as morning; And you will be condent because there is hope, And you will be protected,14 lying down in security; (And you shall lie down and none shall make you afraid;)15
208
20.
Job 11. Zophar’s First Address And many shall court your favour; But the eyes of the wicked shall fail; They will lose the means of ight, And their hope will be the expiration of breath.’
Textual Notes to Chapter 11 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
Reading ra for MT r¿ with LXX, Sym., V and T. See Commentary ad loc. Reading weÓil‘a for MT wattil‘a. Reading weÓ¿’mar for MT watt¿’mer. Reading hayîÓ for MT hayîÓî, according to the sequel. See Commentary ad loc. Reading yeabbr for MT dabbr, which is nevertheless possible. Reading el’yw for MT kilayim. See Commentary ad loc. Reading yiš’le¤ for MT yaššeh le¤. See Commentary ad loc. Reading ge¿hh miššmayim with V for MT gehê šmayim. See Commentary ad loc. Taking ‘ayir as displaced from after pere’ ’m and reading yillm for MT yiwwl. Reading singular with several Heb. MSS for MT plural, but see Commentary ad loc. Reading ‘atth with S for MT ’atth. Reading hle¤ (pausal) for MT hle, as suggested by the parallelism. See Commentary ad loc. Reading keÑohorayim for MT miÑÑohorayim, assuming corruption of k to m in the Old Heb. script. Reading weuppart for MT weart. This colon is probably a secondary expansion after Isa. 17.2 and Zeph. 3.13.
Commentary on Chapter 11 2. On the reading ra derim for MT r¿ derîm (‘volubility’) see textual note. The parallel ’îš eÓayim (‘the glib one’) (so Pope) indicates a personal subject. 3. baddîm means ‘babbling’, possibly signifying disarticulated or incoherent speech, if derived from Heb. b, with an Arab. cognate meaning ‘to be divided’; cf. ‘babbling’ in Isa. 16.6; Jer. 49.30. 4. For liqî S reads le¤tî (‘my conduct’). leqa is found outside Proverbs and Job only in Deut. 32.2 and Isa. 29.24, in both cases with associations of instruction in the formation of intelligence. In the present passage the sage projects his own person into the character of Job, and leqa may therefore be admitted, probably contrasting with baddîm. bar, lit. ‘bright’ (cf. Song 6.10), is now well illustrated from deeds of emancipation from the palace of Ras Shamra, which declare ‘as the sun is clear (br) so shall X be clear’. Since Job’s constant complaint is that God treats him as a condemned sinner, the sense cannot be as MT implies, that Job declares that he is right in God’s eyes. Hence, as the sequel indicates, the text 1
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must be emended to read either hyîÓ e‘êney¤ (‘you were in your own eyes’), so Tur-Sinai, Pope, or, in direct speech like v. 4a, hyîÓî e‘ênay (‘I have been in my own eyes’), so Siegfried, Duhm, or hyîÓî e‘ênwy (‘I have been in his eyes’), so Merx, Hölscher, Fohrer after LXX. 5. Though MT dabbr might be admitted as the inn. constr., or verbal noun, as direct object of yittn, yedabbr should be read on the analogy of 6.8 and 14.13. The meter would demand perhaps the omission of ’elôah or we’ûlm. 6. MT kî-¤ilayim leÓûšiyyh was read by LXX and V and defended by Dhorme, who renders the colon, which he takes as parenthetical, ‘For they are ambiguous to be understood’. kilayim means ‘double’ in Isa. 40.2, but this is quantitative, and the sense of ‘ambiguous’ is not attested. tûšiyyh is parallel to ‘wisdom’ (o¤mh) and ‘counsel’ (‘eÑh) in Wisdom literature, and is so understood by Hölscher. But o¤mh and ‘eÑh also denote respectively the foresight which envisages the implications and end of an action and the effective realization of one’s plan; hence Fohrer renders tûšiyyh (‘Erfolg’ and our ‘effect’ have the same implications). For MT kilayim Merx, Bickell, Hölscher, Horst and Fohrer suggest kiel’îm (‘as wonders’); cf. Budde, G.B. Gray, Buttenwieser and Stevenson, who omit k as a dittograph after kî, which we accept. We should press the signicance of pel’îm as manifestation of God’s immediate activity to the realization of His purposes, discarding the complexity of secondary causes which enable humans to understand His activity. It is thus that God’s wonders are secrets (ta‘alumôÓ), and require the special revelation and explanation, which this verse promises. What is stressed is that humans should not prejudge any case; it is the nal effect (tûšiyyh) that is really signicant in God’s immediate activity (pel’îm). The imperative da‘ emphasizes the certainty of the following statement (GKC, §110i). MT of v. 6c, ‘And know that God will make you forget part of your sins’, is not in accord with the context, which emphasizes the automatic connection between sin and retribution and God’s inexorable justice by the most censorious of Job’s friends. Hence the following emendations should be seriously considered: yešawweh le¤ ¤a‘aw¿ne¤ (‘adjusts [your punishment] to your fault’), so Budde, Bickell and Loisy after LXX, or yiš’ale¤ m‘aw¿ne¤ (‘will question you about your sin’), so Ehrlich, Dhorme, Sutcliffe (1949: 67), for which Dhorme cites Arab. a’ala ‘an (‘to question about’, lit. ‘to question from’). 7. Lévêque has well observed (p. 622) that qer, signicantly occurring ve times in the rest of the OT and seven times in Job, is a word of exceptional theological intensity, denoting not only search (Job 8.8), investigation (Job 5.9; 9.10), enquiry (Job 34.24) but also the inaccessible object of search (Isa. 40.28; Ps. 141.3), e.g. the bottom of the abyss (Job 38.16), the secrets of a king’s heart (Prov. 25.3) and the ultimate motive of the Creator (Job 11.7). 1
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The usage of the word in Isa. 40.28, Ps. 145.3 and Prov. 25.3 indicates the salutary sense of limitations acknowledged by Hebrew wisdom despite its earnest belief that the fullment of life depended upon the recognition of a Divine Order in nature and society of which it was possible to discern evidences and to which it was possible to adapt oneself. mÑ’ might mean, as usually, ‘nd’, but as in Josh. 2.22, 1 Kgs 14.14, etc., it may also mean ‘to reach’ in the sense of ‘overtake’ or ‘arrive at’, as the Aram. cognate meÓ’ (Dan. 7.13). The fondness of the author of Job for wordplay indicates that in v. 7a it means ‘nd’ and in v. 7b ‘reach’ as the locative preposition ‘ad indicates; cf. Arab. maa(y), ‘to pass right on’, hence ‘to penetrate to’. ta¤lîÓ from klh (‘to be complete’), may mean ‘perfection’ (e.g. Ps. 139.22) or ‘limit’, as in 26.10; 28.3, where the verb qar governs ta¤lîÓ. 8. For MT goehê šmayim LXX ‘the heavens are high’ indicates a reading ge¿hîm šmayim, which may be a corruption of ge¿hh miššamayim through the corruption of h to y in the Old Heb. script and the wrong division of consonants. This reading is supported by the comparison in the parallel colon. 9. middÓh should possibly be read for MT middh. 10. In this verse MT ’im-yaal¿ weyasgîr weyaqhîl ûmî yešîennû recalls 9.11b-12a, weyaal¿ wel¿’-’în lô hn yat¿ mî yešiennû, and has been taken as a gloss after this passage (so Bickell, Beer, Duhm, Hölscher). We suggest that it is indeed an echo, but mindful of the fondness of the author for word-plays, we consider that he exploits certain homonyms, la as a synonym of ‘ar, as in 9.11, and la as the cognate of Arab. ¨alafa, the VIII form of which means ‘to seize from behind’, i.e. ‘to arrest’. In yaqhîl the verb may be cognate with a Syr. root from which qahlanay’ (‘litigious’) is derived, and so may mean ‘arraign’. Guillaume cites Arab. qahala (‘to administer a severe reprimand’). In yešîennû the Hiphil of šû (‘to return’) understands the object ‘word’, but as this is tantamount to the transitive verb ‘to answer’ it takes a personal direct object. 11. If MT wel¿ yiÓbônn is accepted it has been suggested that the sense is that God knows the evil of humans immediately without having to consider the evidence narrowly (so G.B. Gray). Alternatively for the negative l¿’, lô is suggested (cf. S), which omits the negative (so Reuss, Duhm, Dhorme, Hölscher, Kissane). Hölscher objects that hiÓbônn (reexive) never takes le before the object, but this objection is invalid if lô is taken as an ethic dative, which seems to be implied in S. On the other hand the reference to ‘an inane man’ (’îš nû) in v. 12a suggests a word-play with yiÓbônn so that l¿’ yiÓbônn may mean ‘one does not consider it’, or, if the subject is meÓê-šw’ in 1
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v. 11a, nal w of an original yiÓbônenû may be omitted by haplography before the initial w of the next word (so substantially Lindblom, Hertzberg, Szcygiel and Horst), ‘they do not consider it’. Alternatively the meaning may be that God sees evil but permits no scrutiny of himself. 12. In ’îš nû yill Guillaume (1963: 111) has correctly noticed a word-play on l, meaning ‘heart’ and ‘intelligence’ in Heb. (cf. Arab. ’albb and lubbu[n], ‘pith’), while nû has an Arab. cognate ’unbûb, ‘a hollow tube’; cf. ’inbb used in the Baal myth of Ras Shamra of the shaft communicating between the earth and the remote home of the gods in Gordon UT ‘nt IV.178 and ‘nt pl. ix.II.4. The phrase pere’ ’m must be taken as a compound phrase. Dhorme suggests that ’m pere’ signies that the subject has all the attributes of the species, and translates ‘a proper onager’. Unfortunately he cannot cite evidence for this use of ’m. A more likely explanation is that of Dahood (1963a: 124f.) that ’m here and in pere’ ’m (the desert-dwelling Ishmael) in Gen. 16.12 means ‘steppe’; cf. the better known Arab. ’adîmu(n), which has this meaning, and cf. 36.28 yir‘aû ‘alê ’m r (perhaps rî, ‘They drip as showers on the steppe’). MT yiwwl is explained by Dhorme as ‘becomes, assumes the nature of’, citing Prov. 17.17, be¤ol-‘Ó ’¿h hra‘ we’ leÑrh (perhaps leÑr) yiwwl, which he understands as ‘A friend loves in every emergency but a brother becomes a rival’ (cf. Ñrh, ‘a rival wife’ in 1 Sam. 1.6, Arab. arratu(n), but the meaning may rather be ‘a brother is a born rival’ (NEB). Fohrer reads yillm for MT yiwwl, rendering ‘and an onager stallion be trained’. Though ‘ayir is masc., certainly in Gen. 32.16, there is no positive evidence that it meant specically stallion, though that is likely. It denotes a mature riding animal, cf. Judg. 10.4; 12.14; Zech. 9.9 and the Ras Shamra texts Gordon UT 51.IV.4, 9, 1 Aqht 52, 57. The point is that the word signies a domestic animal in contrast to the wild ass of the steppe. The original text of v. 12b may have read ke‘ayir pere’ ’m yillm, assuming corruption of k to w in the Old Heb. script. 13. For MT ha¤înôÓ LXX reads hazî¤ôÓ (‘you puried’). Dhorme retains MT, citing h¤în l in Ps. 78.8 and Ass. kûn libbî, ‘faithfulness of heart’. The parallel in Ps. 78.8 suggests ‘stability’, hence our translation ‘settle your mind’. The spreading out of the hands (kappîm, lit. ‘palms’) denotes the conventional attitude of prayer in ancient Israel (Exod. 9.29, 33; 1 Kgs 8.22, 38). 15. The raising of the head signies condence as well as deance (see above on 10.15) and also acquittal. min in mimmûm is privative, thus ‘stainless’. 1
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mûsq, lit. ‘molten’, e.g. of metal smelted from ore (28.2) and also ‘set’ (37.18), hence here ‘rmly established’. 16. ‘atth should probably be read for MT ’atth. See textual note (so Reiske, Merx, Siegfried, Hölscher, Weiser, Fohrer after S). 17. The parallel colon suggests that the initial m in miÑÑohorayim is scribal corruption of k in the Heb. script. MT le (pausal) has been thought to demand the pronominal sufx, so elde¤ is proposed (Duhm, Budde, G.B. Gray, Beer, Kissane after T). The parallelism supports Ehrlich’s proposal that le¤ (‘darkness’) is to be read; cf. Arab. alika (‘to be very black’). MT t‘uh, a verbal form from the root ‘û or ‘î (‘to be dark’), is rather to be pointed te‘uh, a verbal noun with preformative t (so S and T). The usage of qûm meaning ‘to become’ is paralleled in Arab. qma yqm (‘to stand in place of’). 18. For Ehrlich’s reading weuppart for MT weart (so also Dhorme, Hölscher, Steinmann), cf. Arab. afara (‘to protect’). See textual note. 19. weillû pney¤ (lit. ‘and they will sweeten your face’) is borrowed from religious usage, where it may have originally denoted the anointing of some symbol of the divine presence (pnîm). 20. mappa-neeš means lit. ‘the breathing out (root na) of the breath’, i.e. expiring.
1
Job 12–14 JOB’S STATEMENT
The rst part of Job’s statement (12.2–13.12), which is directed against his friends, consists of six strophes in the literary convention and idiom of sapiential controversy (12.2-3, 4-6; 13.1-3, 4-6, 7-9, 10-12). Into this direct argument of Job the passage 12.7-25 is inserted, probably the citation of a Wisdom poem1 on the subject of natural knowledge of God’s sovereignty in nature and history, where the cumulative activities of God are introduced by participles in vv. 17ff., a feature of the Hymn of Praise. The sapiential poet has adapted the Hymn, the subject being introduced in 12.7-8, 11-12, which, following Dhorme’s arrangement, we take as the rst strophe of the Wisdom psalm. In the context of the Book of Job the passage 12.7-25 serves to indicate Job’s familiarity with the orthodox faith and morality which he criticizes. It has been suggested that it was a later interpolation (so Siegfried, Tur-Sinai, Gordis, Fohrer). But, whatever its origin, the emphasis on the negative aspect of the omnipotence of God reects the mood of Job throughout the Dialogue and seems to us a strong argument for the adaptation of the poem, if not indeed the actual composition, by the author of the Book. In the second part of his address (13.13-27) Job prepares to address his case directly to God (vv. 13-19), which he does in vv. 20-28. The gure and the dialectic of the contention at law characterizes this section, which may be divided into ve strophes (vv. 13-15, 16-19, 20-22, 23-25, 26-27 + 14.5c). In the third part (ch. 14) in eight strophes (14.1-2 + 13.28 + 14.3; 14.4-6, 79, 10-12, 13-14, 15-17, 18-19 + 14a, 20-22) Job deplores the brevity and misery of human life (14.1-2; 13.28) which he contrasts with a tree (14.7-9, 10-12) and in the second half he appeals to God to set a term to his suffering and eventually admit his appeal, but ends in a statement of despair. Here there is a mixture of juristic phraseology and gure and the arguments of the sapiential controversy, with analogies from natural phenomena reminiscent of Proverbs. In any case it is well adapted to Job’s argument and is a striking elaboration of his statement in 7.6-10. Chapter 14 ttingly ends the rst part of 1. Fohrer regards this passage as two Wisdom poems separate or in fusion, dividing the passage 12.7-11 and 12-25. Since both parts concern the sovereignty of God, even if with Dhorme we were to regard vv. 9-10 as displaced from before v. 13, it is not difcult to accept the unity of the passage. 1
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Job 12–14. Job’s Statement
the Dialogue, anticipating Job’s direct appeal to God for vindication (cf. 16.13-22; 17.3), the statement of his sufferings, elaborated as in the Plaint of the Sufferer (16.7-17; 17.1-3, 4-16; 30.1-19, 26-31), with his nal appeal in his great oath of purgation (31.5-32). There is possibly some displacement of the text in chs. 13 and 14 as well as in 12.7-12. Chapter 12 1.
And Job answered and said:
2.
‘Indeed you are the community, And with you wisdom will die; But I also have sense as you, (I am not inferior to you)1 And who has not his share of the like?
3.
4.
5. 6.
7. 8. 11. 12. 9. 10. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.
1
I am one who is a laughing-stock to his neighbour, As one who appealed to God and he tormented him.2 (The innocent and perfect man is a laughing-stock.)3 “We may despise calamity” is the thought of him who is at ease; But4 it is an urgent certainty for him whose foot slips. The tents of brigands are at ease, And those who trouble God enjoy security. (Regarding him who had brought God into his power.)5 But ask the beasts6 And the birds of the sky that they may tell you, Or the reptiles of the ground7 that they may instruct you,8 Or the sh of the sea that they may tell you. Does not the ear test words, And the palate taste food? Decrepitude is not the repository of wisdom, Old age is not identical with understanding. Who among all these does not know That this is the effect of the power of Yahweh, In whose hand is the life of all that lives, And whose gift10 is the spirit of all esh? With him is wisdom and might; He has both purpose and insight. If he destroys nothing can be rebuilt; If he closes (the door) on a man it may not be opened; If he restrains the waters they dry up; And if he lets them go they overwhelm the land. With him is strength and effective purpose; To him relate the deluder and the deluded. He makes delusions of the plans of counselors,11 Makes fools of rulers.
The Book of Job 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.
215
He unfastens the belt12 of kings, And fastens a loin-cloth on their loins; He makes priests walk away barefoot, And overturns established persons. He deprives spokesmen of speech, And takes away the discrimination of elders. He pours contempt on princes, And loosens the belt of the strong, Revealing deep things from the darkness, And bringing forth deepest gloom to light. He makes peoples great and then destroys13 them; He spreads peoples14 abroad and abandons them.15 He takes away the sense of the leaders of a people,16 And causes them to wander17 in pathless deserts; They grope in darkness with no light, And stagger18 like a drunkard.
Textual Notes to Chapter 12 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.
This, which is not in LXX, is probably a gloss from 12.2. Reading waye‘annhû for MT way‘anhû (‘and he answered him’). This also is wanting in LXX, and is probably a secondary expansion. Assuming the omission of w after m and before n¤ôn in the Old Heb. script. Probably to be omitted as a gloss. Omitting MT weÓ¿rekk as a dittograph of weÓ¿rekk in v. 8a. Reading z¿alê ’reÑ for MT îa l’reÑ. See Commentary ad loc. Reading wey¿rû¤ for MT weÓ¿rekk in agreement with the plur. subject z¿alê ’reÑ. Reading l¿’, emended from lô, the last word in v. 11, which must be transposed to v. 12 metri causa Reading ’ôš for MT ’îš, assuming corruption of w to y in the stage of the development of the script represented by the Qumran MSS. See Commentary ad loc. Reading mile¤ê yô‘aÑîm mešôll for MT môli¤ yô‘aÑîm šôll. See Commentary ad loc. Reading môsr for MT mûsr. Reading wî’abbem for MT waye’abbem. Reading le’ummîm for MT laggôyim. Reading weynîm for MT wayyanm. Omitting MT h’reÑ. Reading weyÓ‘m for MT wayyaÓ‘m. Reading weyitt‘û for MT wayyaÓ‘m, taking m as dittograph of following k in the Old Heb. script.
Commentary on Chapter 12 2. In MT ’omnm kî ’attem-‘m commentators have suspected the indenite ‘m and have suggested various emendations, e.g. h‘m (Duhm, Weiser), ‘with him’, i.e. ‘for him’ (Loisy), ‘arumîm, ‘cunning’ (Beer), y¿e‘îm, 1
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‘knowing ones’ (Steinmann, Horst), hayy¿e‘îm, ‘the knowing ones’ (Klostermann, G.B. Gray, Ball, Hölscher, Stevenson) and ‘am-Óa‘am, ‘discriminating people’ (Reiske, Horst). The ancient versions support ‘m or h‘m, and the alliteration ‘am…‘imm¤em is probably intentional. If ‘m or h‘m is to be read (so Dhorme, Tur-Sinai, Fohrer) the sense may be ‘you comprise the tribe, or community, and its inherited traditions and experience’, understanding ‘am in its Arabic sense. There is thus an emphasis laid on the traditional generalizing doctrine of the community against which Job cites his personal experience. The passage introduced by ’omnm is keenly ironic. In v. 2b Aq. and Sym. translate ‘with you is perfection of wisdom’, indicating a reading tummaÓ, or tummôÓ, o¤mh (so Tur-Sinai and J. Reider). This is feasible and deserves serious consideration. 3. la denotes the heart as the seat of cognition (cf. 11.12), v. 2a probably alluding to Zophar’s remark on the lack of sense in ‘the inane man’ in his reply to Job in 11.12. Verse 2b is probably to be omitted as an inadvertent scribal repetition of 13.2b (so Merx, Siegfried, Beer, Duhm, G.B. Gray, Ball, Dhorme, Hölscher, Stevenson, Fohrer). For the use of nal (‘to abase onself’), cf. Est. 6.13. 4. Job’s whole complaint is that he appeals to God and is not answered, so MT wayya‘anhû (‘and he answered him’) may be pointed either weya‘anhû, ‘that he might answer him’ (so Reiske, Hoffmann, Oort, Hölscher, Stevenson, Horst) or wayye‘annhû, ‘and he tormented him’. We would see a probable word-play between the expected answer (‘nh) and the actual response, torment (‘innh). Fohrer retains MT. 5. lappî bûz (‘for calamity contempt’) is probably a citation of the attitude, or thought (‘aštûÓ) of ‘him who is at ease’ (ša‘ann). le before ‘aštûÓ is explicable as the emphatic enclitic found before predicates in Arab. and Ugaritic. n¤ôn, the Niphal participle of kûn, means ‘certain’ in Deut. 13.15; cf. ‘xed and prepared’ (Prov. 19.29; 2 Chron. 8.16). The verb m‘a (‘to slip, totter’) is attested only in Heb. poetry, e.g. 2 Sam. 22.37 // Pss. 18.37; 26.1; 37.31. 6. In MT as it stands v. 6c has a general reference to v. 6ab but the sing. verb and pronominal sufx in v. 6c indicates a different subject. Hölscher takes v. 6c as the second colon of a decient bicolon ‘Woe to him…whom God has brought into his hand’. Bickell, Siegfried, Beer, Ball, Fohrer regard it as a gloss on v. 6ab, meaning ‘regarding him who has brought God into his power’ either by magic (so Fohrer) or, as we prefer, having enlisted God secondarily to his material power, in agreement with Hab. 1.11: zû ¤¿¨ô l’l¿hô (‘whose own strength is his god’). 1
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8. For MT îa l’reÑ (‘shrubs of the earth’), where le is questionable. z¿alê ’ereÑ is proposed (Duhm, Beer, Dhorme, Stevenson, G.B. Gray, Mowinckel, Terrien), which is graphically more feasible than ayyaÓ h’reÑ (BH3, adopted by Fohrer) or šela l’reÑ, ‘send to the earth’ (Horst; cf. Pope’s reading of MT ‘speak to the earth’). In the context of the reference to beasts, birds and sh ‘reptiles’ (z¿alê ’ereÑ) is most natural. 11-12. This passage, probably displaced in MT, concludes the sapiential introduction to the passage on the natural knowledge of the Sovereignty of God. The introductory strophe vv. 7-8, 11-12 emphasizes the signicance of natural knowledge; each person has the ability to assess, reason and discriminate (v. 11), and this is not the monopoly of age (v. 12). On the transposition of lô from the end of v. 11 to the beginning of v. 12 and the emendation to l¿’, see textual note. Alternatively Dhorme retains lô in v. 11 as an ethic dative and assumes the omission of hal¿’ at the beginning of v. 12 by haplography after hal¿’ at the beginning of v. 11. But this contradicts the sense of the strophe. 12. yšîš (‘old man’) is well attested (2 Chron. 35.17; Ben Sira 8.6; and particularly Job 15.10; 29.8; 32.6). Here it has the nuance of its Arab. cognate waÓwaÓa (‘to be decrepit’). The allusion is to Bildad’s emphasis on the wisdom of the fathers (8.8). 9f. This passage is more apt as the introduction to the sapiential adaptation of the Hymn of Praise in vv. 13-25 in supplying in ‘Yahweh’ the required antecedent to the pronominal sufx in ‘immô in v. 13. 9. The signicance of z¿’Ó is problematic. It has been referred to Zophar’s statement of the providence of God, culminating in his statement after his assurance to Job of rehabilitation after supplication that ‘the eyes of the wicked shall fail…’ (11.20) or that God is omnipotent. We would refer it to a single proposition already expressed. This we nd in Job’s animadversion on the security of the wicked with impunity (v. 6), the survival of the strongest independent of moral considerations being characteristic of the beasts. Here exceptionally in the Book of Job the divine name Yahweh is used in the poetic portion of the Book, and it is to be noted that the more regular term ’elôah appears here in ve Heb. MSS. The name Yahweh, however, may be explained on the assumption that the writer has the citation of the Hymn of Praise (vv. 13-25) in mind, which recalls particularly hymns of praise in Deutero-Isaiah, and Dhorme has proposed that an original ’elôah was altered to MT ‘Yahweh’ by a writer who recognized the afnity of the passage in Job with Isa. 41.20. 10. In reading ’ôš for MT ’îš and rendering ‘gift’ we follow Dahood; cf. Arab. ’awu(n) (‘gift’), the Nabataean-Aram. name ’aws al-Ba‘ali (Cooke 1903: no. 1
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104, 1.2; cf. 103) and the Heb. name Joash. This restores the chiastic parallelism in the colon, the pronominal sufx in beyô doing double duty for the pronominal sufx wanting in the parallel ’ôš, as regularly in Ugaritic. ay may denote ‘living creatures’ and br specically humankind in the physical aspect, as in Gen. 6.12, 13; Num. 16.22; 27.16 (all P); Deut. 5.23; Pss. 45.21; 65.31; Isa. 40.5, 6; 49.26; 66.16, 23, 24; etc., though kol-br also includes animals in Gen. 6.17, 19; 7.21; 9.11, 15ff.; Lev. 17.14; etc. If kolbr in the present passage denotes specically humankind, rûa may denote the divine afatus which gives humans afnity with God as distinct from physical animation (neeš). See above on 6.4. 13. o¤mh here in conjunction with geûrh, means ‘know-how’, the phrase corresponding to ‘brains and brawn’ in English idiom; ‘Ñh is the rmly conceived purpose as well as the plans for carrying it out (see above on 5.12f.), and teûnh here denotes the divine intelligence and discrimination in the relation of his plan to the total situation, which is so often impugned by Job. Note also the association of ‘Ñh and tûšiyyh in the function of Wisdom in Prov. 8.14. The element of discrimination is probably dominant in the verbal root bîn from which teûnh is derived; cf. bên (‘between’ and Arab. bâna[y], ‘to be separated, conspicuous’). 14. Here hn means as in Aram. ‘if’; cf. Arab. ’in. hras is a strong word meaning ‘to bring down in ruins’, e.g. pagan altars (Judg. 6.25; 2 Sam. 11.25; 1 Kgs 18.30; 19.10, 14; 2 Kgs 3.25), strongholds (Ezek. 26.4; Lam. 2.2), walls (Ezek. 13.14: 28.12), and the house destroyed by a foolish woman (Prov. 14.1). 15. The same conception of divine ‘constraint’ (here ya‘Ñ¿r) on the waters in drought, but with a different verb (Ñrk), occurs in the Ras Shamra legend of Aqht (Gordon UT 1 Aqht 42). In God’s control of the waters it is to be noted that it is not His benecence in restraining the oods and sending the necessary rain that is emphasized in v. 15, but his destructive potential in drought and ood, where the same verb (ha¤) is used as in the overwhelming of Sodom and Gomorrah (Amos 4.11). 16. On tûšiyyh meaning, ‘effective purpose’, see above on 5.12. Duhm proposed to emend MT š¿ to š¿h, the more familiar form, which is actually found in certain Heb. MSS (cf. 6.24; 19.4), but š¿ may well be a byform; cf. Lev. 5.18, Num. 15.28 and Ps. 119.67, which are all late like the Dialogue in Job. 17. In MT the repetition of môlî¤, the rst word, and šôll (pausal), the third word, in vv. 17 and 19 is suspect, and may be the inadvertency of a copyist. 1
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LXXA
reads ‘the counsellors of the earth’, which is adopted by Duhm, who further emends MT šôll (‘barefoot’) to ikkl (‘has made fools of’); cf. in a similar context ikkl in Isa. 44.25, which is supported by Sym. (so also Beer). Hölscher and Mowinckel also read ikkl, but for môlî¤ Hölscher reads mela¤, thus mela¤ yô‘aÑîm ikkl (‘he brings to nothing the counsel of counsellors’). Horst also reads mela¤ in its Aram. sense of ‘counsel’, but for MT šôll understands ‘plunders’, which does not suit the predicate ‘counsel’. The verb ikkl would be an apt parallel to yehôll, though graphically not a likely original of the corrupt šôll. Accordingly we adopt Horst’s reading mile¤ê yô‘aÑîm (‘the plans of counsellors’), but read mešôll for MT šôll from a verb, admittedly not attested in the OT, but cognate with Arab. âla, yaûl meaning in the II form ‘to delude’, following G.R. Driver (1936: 160). 18. For MT mûsar (‘chastisement, correction’) the general sense and the parallelism indicate the reading môsr (‘belt’, lit. ‘bond’); so V and T. pÓa (‘to open out’, here a knot) is the opposite of ar (‘to put a girdle on, or, to gird on armour’; cf. 1 Sam. 17.39; 1 Kgs 20.11; Isa. 45.1). Dhorme takes this to mean that God sets kings free (looses their bonds); so too Fohrer, taking the noun to mean ‘fetters’; and so also T possibly thinking of Manasseh (2 Chron. 33.13) and ‘he binds fetters on them at will’ (v. 18b); so too Hölscher. But môsr is more likely to be a girdle of honour or uniform of a warrior and ‘zôr in v. 13b a loincloth; cf. Arab. ’îzr (‘waist-sash’). This sustains the antithetic parallelism and may be supported by Isa. 45.1, moÓenê mel¤îm ’aatta. 19. It is perhaps signicant that k¿hn (‘priest’) occurs nowhere else in Job, which may indicate that the passage vv. 17-21 refers specically to the Exile, when all the dignitaries mentioned were deported. MT šôll is found in the OT only here and in Mic. 1.6 (Qere) associated with ‘rôm (‘naked’). It may be the corruption of the participle mešulllîm with haplography of m preformative and afformative respectively after m and before w in the Old Heb. script. The verb may be cognate with Arab. alla (‘to draw out’, e.g. a sword from the sheath). ’Ónîm is used in the singular in Amos 5.24 of a perennial wadi, and in the plural of the regular ‘former rains’ of early winter in Palestine, whence the name of the month Ethanim. As here it denotes persons ‘rmly established’ in Num. 24.21, môš ’Ón (‘a rm seat’); cf. Arab. watana (‘to remain long in a place’). sla in the Piel is used meaning ‘to subvert’ in Exod. 23.8 and Prov. 23.6. 20. As is demanded by msîr (‘turning away’) l here denotes ‘from’, as in Ugaritic; cf. T minne’emnîm. Dhorme took ne’emnîm to mean ‘sincere’, i.e. trustworthy. The ancient Jewish commentators connected the word with ne’um 1
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(‘oracle, prophetic declaration’), which the attribute h might support. In any case it denotes the accredited leaders of society; cf. k¿hn ne’emn in 1 Sam. 2.35, custodians of the traditions and interests of the community, as Fohrer suggests, and so, we consider, as indicated by h, its spokesmen. The parallel ‘elders’ supports this interpretation. 21. The parallelism and the general sense indicates that ’aîqîm cannot have the usual meaning ‘streams’, and this is appreciated by T and S in rendering ‘strong’ (teqîîm), and Beer so emends MT. But an Assyrian root epêqu (‘to be strong’) may be adduced, thus making emendation of MT unnecessary (so Dillmann, Friedrich Delitzsch, Dhorme, Perles, Hölscher, Stevenson, Horst, Fohrer); cf. Arab. ’af îqu(n) (‘excelling in noble qualities’). mezîa is the same as meza of Ps. 109.18. Dhorme cites Ass. meza¨, a synonym of mezirru (‘belt’). 22. This verse is obviously a secondary expansion from some hymn, as maintained by Budde, Dhorme, Steinmann, Fohrer, Pope. ‘amuqôÓ, ‘deep things’, with the nuance of ‘wise’, as in English, recalls Akk. nemegu (‘wisdom’). 23. šÓa means ‘to spread out’, with an Arab. cognate aÓaa which, like the Hebrew verb, means either ‘to spread out’ or ‘extend’, like dough rolled out, or ‘prostrate’, for example, of a camel made to couch. So v. 23b could mean either ‘He spreads people abroad and abandons them’, reading weyannîm for MT wayyanm (see textual note) or ‘He prostrates them and brings them into abeyance’ (lit. ‘causes them to rest’, i.e. abandons them). The ancient versions and later commentators differ in reading MT magî’ (‘makes great’ or ‘numerous’), as V, T, Delitzsch, G.B. Gray, Dhorme, Mowinckel, Hölscher, Horst, Fohrer, Pope, Terrien, and mašgh (‘misleads’), as Theod., LXX, S and certain Heb. MSS, Merx, Graetz, Siegfried, Tur-Sinai, Stevenson. The problem is not conclusively solved by the complementary verb wî’abbem (see textual note), which means either ‘He causes them to perish’, which would support MT, or ‘He causes them to be lost’ (cf. 1 Sam. 9.3, 20), which would support mašh. The parallel colon, reading weyannîm, indicates the meaning ‘destroys’. 24. In v. 24a LXX omits ‘am from MT r’šê ‘am-h’reÑ, which Jerome questioned. In v. 24b wayyaÓ‘m beÓ¿hû l¿’-re¤ (‘and he caused them to go astray in a pathless desert’) corresponds verbally to Ps. 107.40b, by which it may be directly inuenced. In l¿’-re¤ and in l¿’-’ôr in v. 25a the compound phrase is tantamount to a negative adjective. 25. mšaš (‘to grope’) in the Piel is attested in 5.14. The direct accusative ‘darkness’ is noteworthy, indicating the nuance of ‘feeling’ or ‘touching’ as in the Arab. cognate, cf. Exod. 10.21 (‘darkness that can be felt’), alluding perhaps to the dullness of the dust-laden sirocco. 1
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For MT wayyaÓ‘m LXX, followed by Bickell, Beer, Duhm, G.B. Gray, Dhorme, Peters, Hölscher, Horst, reads wayyitt‘û (‘and they staggered’), which is supported by Isa. 19.14; 28.7, here also associated with kaššikkôr (‘like a drunkard’). Chapter 13 Job’s Argument (continued) Verse 28 is obviously incongruous with its context in ch. 13, and is displaced from after 14.2, and 14.5c is probably displaced from after v. 27c. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
1
‘Lo, my eye has seen all these things,1 My ear has heard and understood. I know as well as you, I am not inferior to you. But I would speak to the Almighty, Yea, I am determined to argue my case with God. But you2 plaster up a façade of delusion, Quack doctors all of you. Would that you would keep silent; It would pass for wisdom with you. Hear now the argument of my mouth,3 And pay attention to the contention4 of my lips. Will you speak what is wrong on God’s behalf, And chant5 deceit for his sake? Will you patronize the Almighty?6 Will you plead for God? Would it be well if He were to examine you? Do you trie with him as you would trie7 with a human? He will remonstrate severely with you If dishonestly you show partiality to him.8 Will not his majesty appal you, All his terror fall upon you? Your maxims are ashes raked out, Your answers9 are silted-up cisterns.10 Be silent before me that I may speak, Come upon me what may. 11 I shall take my own esh in my teeth, And shall lay my life in my hand. If he kill me, I am (in any case) without hope; I will defend my conduct in argument to his face. Yea, this12 might be my salvation, That no hypocrite might face Him.
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222 13Now
17.
hear out what I have to say, Yea, what I have to declare in your ears. See, I set out my case, I am sure that I am innocent. Who could sustain his contention against me? (If any could) I should hold my peace and (be content to) die.
18. 19. 20.
Only do two things for me, Then will I not hide myself from your face; Remove your hand from upon me, And let not terror of you overwhelm me; Then call and I will answer, Or let me make a statement, and do you answer.
21. 22. 23.
How many are my iniquities and faults? Inform me of my transgressions and sin. Why do you hide your face, And consider me as your enemy? Will you harry a driven leaf? Yea, will you14 chase dry chaff?
24. 25. 26.
Nay, but you debit me with things past And entail upon me the iniquities of my youth; And set my feet in the stocks, And keep watch on all my paths. You limit my roots,15 You have set their bounds16 that they may not pass.17
27.
14.5c.
Textual Notes to Chapter 13 1.
Reading with a certain minuscule of LXX, S, V and certain Heb. MSS. kol-’lleh for k¿l. Omitting we’ûlm metri causa as a dittograph of ’ûlm in v. 3. Reading tô¤aaÓ pî with LXX, as the parallel riaÓ eÓay demands. Reading rîaÓ with LXX, S, V and T for MT rîôÓ. Reading teaddû for MT teabberû. See Commentary ad loc. Reading penê šadday. Reading hattl in both instances. Reading pnyw for MT pnîm with Sym., S, T and V. Reading gê¤em for MT gabbê¤em. See Commentary ad loc. Reading gubbê for gabbê. See Commentary ad loc. Omitting MT ‘al-mh as a marginal correction of ‘lay mh at the end of v. 13, which has crept into the text at the beginning of 14. Reading hî’ with LXX for MT hû’. This verse is probably a secondary interpolation. See Commentary ad loc. Reading we’im (interrogative) for MT we’eÓ. Omitting ralay, inserted after the displacement of 14.5c. See Commentary ad loc. Reading uqqm for MT uqqô (Qere), Reading ya‘a¿rû for MT ya‘a¿r. MT
2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.
1
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Commentary on Chapter 13 1. ‘Seeing’ and ‘hearing’ refer to personal experience, which may both substantiate or modify accepted doctrine, supplemented by ‘understanding’ implying discrimination of what one hears. On the reading kol-’lleh for MT k¿l see textual note. This may refer to the friends’ statement of current doctrine or, we prefer, the theme of the Hymn of Praise just cited (12.13-25). 3. On hô¤a, here ‘to argue’, see above on 9.33. The verb aÑ, usually meaning ‘to take pleasure’, ‘be willing’, has here rather the nuance of the Syr. cognate ‘to be eager, zealous’, hence our rendering ‘I am determined’. 4. Ó¿elê šqer, lit. ‘plasterers of falsehood’, recalls the same verb and object in Ps. 119.69a, and is compared by Dhorme to the Ass. expression tašqirtu Óapiltu (‘a false imputation’, or ‘smear’); cf. Arab. Óala (‘to be soiled by dirt’). This is the sense of Ps. 119.69a, but in the present passage the parallel r¿e’ê ’elil (‘quack doctors’) indicates not deliberate malice, but patching up or disguising unpalatable truth, as we should say, ‘whitewashing’, covering defects of building by plaster. Job’s interlocutors are blinking awkward truths by reiterating orthodox statements uncritically. This interpretation is borne out by Job’s imputation of partiality to God (vv. 8, 10), their acquiescence in justice in the theodicy (v. 7), and, in fact, their triing with God (v. 10). 6. tô¤aaÓ, as the parallel rîaÓ epÓay, ‘contention of my mouth’ (see textual note) indicates ‘argument’. See on 9.33. 7. In v. 7b LXX varies the verb ‘to declare’ (MT teabberû), rendering phthengesthe (‘you speak out loud and clear’). As an emendation with the minimal disturbance of MT we may suggest teaddû with its double meaning of ‘talk wildly’, ‘babble’, or ‘sing out; cf. bdd in the Ras Shamra text, Gordon UT ‘nt I.19, where ybd is parallel to yšr (‘he sang’). Though the double entendre of the verb cannot be so neatly expressed in English, a not unapt translation might be ‘chant’, which might be supported by LXX. hale’l in v. 7a is by position emphatic, with emphasis on God. 8. The metre demands an extra beat in v. 8a, which suggests that for MT hanyw we should read haenê šadday. 9. In v. 9b the Piel of hÓal (‘to trie with’) should be read in both instances, as in 1 Kgs 18.24. 10. hô¤îa has the sense both of ‘to argue’ and ‘chastise’ (see on 9.33), which we may express by ‘remonstrate severely’. 1
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bassÓer (lit. ‘in secret’) means here ‘dishonestly’, i.e. willfully glossing over unpleasant truths and entrenching oneself in a false position, disguising conviction under the façade of orthodox declarations. n’ nîm (read nyw, see textual note), lit. ‘lift the face’, is a familiar phrase in the OT meaning ‘to pardon’, hence ‘to show partiality’, of which pros¿pon lambanein in the LXX and the NT is a literal rendering, meaning ‘to show partiality’. The phrase refers originally to the gesture of a potentate stretching forth his sceptre and raising the face of the prostrate suppliant, e.g. Est. 8.33ff. 11. e’Óô (‘his elevation’, so ‘his majesty’), the innitive construct, or verbal noun of ns’ with the pronominal sufx, is deliberate word-play on the verb after n’ nyw in v. 10b. On b‘aÓ (‘to come suddenly upon’, so ‘to overwhelm’) see above on 3.5; cf. 2 Sam. 22.5 = Ps. 18.5, where the physical sense of the verb is indicated by the parallel ’aûnî (‘whirled me’, ‘caught me up in their maelstrom’); cf. Arab. baata (‘to fall suddenly upon’). The verb, whether in this sense or meaning ‘to terrify’, is more common in Job than elsewhere in the OT, e.g. 3.5; 7.14; 9.34; 13.11, 21; 15.24; 18.11; 33.7. Here the parallel colon indicates the meaning is ‘appal’. 12. zi¤r¿nê¤em means ‘your memorabilia’, here either sayings worthy of record, i.e. maxims, or, as Rowley suggests, ‘your memorized sayings, which you repeat parrot-like’. In mišelê ’er we would see a double entendre (‘proverb of ashes’ and ‘ashes raked out’, lit. ‘extractions of ashes’), from a verb šlh, admittedly not certainly attested in the OT, but a possible cognate of Syr. šel’ with this sense. The gure would then be of dead embers extracted from the baking oven after their heat was gone, no unapt gure for the spent force of the arguments of orthodoxy which had outlived their usefulness and were irrelevant to Job’s actual experience. In v. 12b gabbê (lit. ‘backs’, or ‘bosses for shields’, cf. 15.26), is taken as synecdoche for ‘shields’, which, of clay, would be useless (so Duhm, Budde, G.B. Gray, Fohrer). The view which was rst propounded by Beer is that gê¤em should be read for MT gabbê¤em, the word being cognate with Syr. and Arab. jbatu(n), plur. jawb ‘answers’ (so Dhorme, Hölscher, Mowinckel, Larcher [JB], Horst, Lévêque). Seeing a word-play, we take MT gabbê-¿mer as gubbê-¿mer (‘silted-up cisterns’, lit. ‘wells of mud’); cf. Aram. gubb’ and Arab. jubbu(n) (‘a well’). The enclitic le introducing the predicate of a nominal sentence, as in Ugaritic and Arab, may be noted. 13. The indenite mh (‘whatsoever’) with the ellipse of a second verb, in the sense here of ‘come upon me whatsoever may’, is paralleled in 2 Sam. 18.22f. 1
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14. LXX omits ‘al-mh, which is probably a dittograph of the last two words ‘lay mh in v. 13. Dahood’s proposal to retain it as ‘ôlmh (‘for ever’) (1965b: 16) is to be rejected. Horst and Fohrer propose more feasibly that ‘almh should be taken with v. 13, reading mh ‘al-mh. The meaning of the gure of taking one’s esh in one’s teeth, not elsewhere attested in the OT, is clear from the parallel ‘taking one’s life in one’s hand’ (lit. ‘setting one’s life in the palm of one’s hand’), which has passed into English idiom; cf. Judg. 12.3; 1 Sam. 19.5; 28.21; Ps. 119.109). For the expression ‘taking one’s life in one’s teeth’ Buttenwieser has adduced an Arab. parallel from Hudheil an-nafu minhu bišidkihi (‘his life is in his jaws’), meaning ‘he is in deadly jeopardy’. The general conception of the couplet is that confrontation with God endangers one’s life (cf. Exod. 3.6; 33.20; Judg. 6.22; 13.22; Isa. 6.5). The signicance of taking one’s esh in one’s teeth may indicate that the subject is prepared for the ultimate emergency, as in the rigours of a siege, when people might resort to cannibalism (Deut. 28.56ff.; 2 Kgs 6.28ff.; Lam. 2.20; Ezek. 5.10; etc.; Josephus, War 4.3-4). 15. For MT l¿’ in v. 15a lô is read by the Masoretes (Qere), LXX, Aq., S, T and V, which is the basis of the familiar, though inaccurate, ‘Though he slay me yet will I trust him’ (AV). But MT may be retained, meaning ‘(in any case) I am without hope’; cf. Graetz’s proposal ‘I shall not be afraid’ (l¿’ ’îl); cf. îl (lit. ‘writhe, sometimes in anguish’) // yr’ in Jer. 5.22 (so Ehrlich, Dhorme). Formally yal is ambiguous, meaning ‘to wait’ (Gen. 8.12; 1 Sam. 13.8; etc.) or ‘to hope’ (6.11; 29.21, 23; Ps. 71.14; etc.), which seems to us best to suit the context. The verb qÓal is rare, poetic and late in Heb., occurring only here, in 24.14 and Ps. 138.19, but it is regular in Aram. The regular verb ‘to kill’ in Arab. is qatala, where the dialectal variant in the second radical is to be noted. Since the recognition of the signicance of the root drk in Ugaritic and Heb. as ‘rule, ordered regimen’ (see on 24.4), der¤ay here and in other passages relating to conduct or way of life may be derived not from dere¤ (‘road’) but from a homonym cognate with Ugaritic drkt and Arab. darakatu(n). 16. yešû‘h is not to be confused with tûšiyyh (‘success’), but means ‘deliverance’, ‘relief’, from a root cognate with Arab. wai‘a (‘to be wide’). Here the sense is rather ‘hope of deliverance’. We take n here as in Aram. and Late Heb. to mean ‘hypocrite’, Job’s animadversion or the ‘dishonest partiality’ of his friends to God (v. 10b). 17. millh (‘word’) is Aram. and is a regular element in Job. ’aawÓî (‘my explanation’; cf. 15.17) recalls ’aawyaÓ ’aîn (‘explanation of riddles’) in Dan. 5.12, where it is denitely Aram. The verbal root occurs in the OT only at Job 15.17; 32.6, 10, 17; 36.2 and at Ps. 19.3 and regularly in the Aram. parts of Daniel. 1
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18. The language is forensic. ‘ra¤ means ‘to set out, arrange’, e.g. a table (Ps. 23.5), a battle-line (Judg. 20.22, 1 Sam. 17.8; etc.) or, as here, a case. 19. The rhetorical question in v. 19a suggests ‘If any could’ as the protasis of a conditional sentence of which v. 19b is the apodosis. 20. ’al taken as a negative particle contradicts the sense of the passage. It must be recognized as a positive particle also, as in Ugaritic, cf. Gordon UT 51.VIII.1, ’al ttn pnm (‘set your face’, sc. ‘direct yourself’). 22. In hašînî, the Hiphil šû (‘to return’), ‘word’ is understood, so that it is tantamount to ‘answer’, and so takes a direct object. 25. ‘raÑ is cognate with Arab. ‘araÑa (‘to be restless’, of a beast). ’eÓ could possibly be (GKC, §117c) the nota accusativa before an indeterminative noun, where something particular is envisaged, but ’eÓ is not used even with denite objects in Job, so the emendation of ’eÓ to ’im must be made. qaš is used regularly for light brushwood or chaff, meaning ‘that which is scaled off’, and is gurative of that which is at the mercy of the wind or is of light account (cf. 41.20ff.). 26. kÓa indicates either a recorded decision or charge or is a gure from commerce, as so often in the Qur’an. kÓa ‘al means ‘to debit’, as in an administrative text from the palace of Ras Shamra (PRU II, p. 212), (m) šm ksp ‘l gd (‘50 pieces of silver debited to God’), cited by Dahood (1965: 60). The parallel with ‘the iniquities of my youth’ (‘aw¿nôÓ ne‘ûry) supports Guillaume’s suggestion that mer¿rôt, generally taken as ‘bitter things’, means rather ‘things past’; cf. Arab. marra (‘to pass by’). 27. sa here and at 33.11, which closely re-echoes the present passage, is for the connement of the feet; cf. Acts 16.24, where S translates se’, indicating a block of wood for this purpose. The connement of the hands in wooden blocks is known an ancient Egypt (cf. ANET, pl. 326). Noting that the sequel envisages Job at liberty, ibn Ezra took sa as a corruption of sî (‘chalk, gypsum’), taking the meaning to be the marking of the feet with chalk to have traces of where the subject had been. Fohrer follows this interpretation, taking MT weÓm to mean ‘and you marked’ from a root mam, which he would recognize in Jezebel’s painting her eyes with kul (2 Kgs 9.30). No such root is attested elsewhere in the OT, but a cognate might be Syr. samsam (‘to treat medically’). Taking sa to mean ‘stocks’ or the like, it has been suggested that the reference to close observance of Job’s straying feet in v. 27bc indicates that sa was not an immobile block but an encumbrance to the free movement of the feet, as the wooden blocks on the teams of men in the Egyptian 1
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sculpture already mentioned. Alternatively v. 27a may envisage a slave detained in an immobile block while v. 27bc might refer to him released for work when he is under observation. In v. 27c ‘al-šorešê raelay tiÓaqqeh has been taken variously. qh, a byform of the more regular qaq (‘to inscribe’), is taken by Dhorme to mean engraving on the mind, which is not attested in the OT and is therefore doubtful. šorešê, meaning ‘roots’ and taken by Dhorme to mean ‘where a man plants his feet’, is also doubtful. Alternatively tiÓaqqeh is taken to signify ‘prescribe bounds’, which is well attested, but šorešê raelay (‘the soles of my feet’) is very doubtful. Just at this point there is some disturbance of text, 13.28 being displaced from its original position after 14.2 (see below ad loc.). Tricola in the predominant arrangement of bicola in Job, while often intentional, must always be considered on their merits and are occasionally indications of disturbed text. Accordingly Duhm attached v. 27c to one of the cola in the next tricolon, viz. 14.5c, restoring: 13.27c 14.5c
‘al-šorešay tiÓaqqeh uqqm ‘iÓ l¿’ ya‘a¿rû You have imposed limits on (or ‘made incisions’) on my roots, You have set their bounds that they may not surpass.
The gure is thus that of root-pruning, raelay being added after šorešay after the displacement according to the general sense of v. 27ab. Chapter 14 This continues Job’s direct address to God in 13.20-27, perhaps combined with a wisdom poem on the evanescence of humans (vv. 1f., 7-12, 15-22) in contrast to the revival of a tree when pruned or severely cut back (vv. 1f., 710) and like land-slides, water-worn stones and soil-erosion (vv. 18f.). The theme is the brief life of humans, full of trouble, his hard service (v. 14bc, cf. 7.1f.) and his ultimate death with no further prospect (vv. 1, 18-22, cf. 7.9bf.). The mortality of man entitles the sufferer to hope that God would condone man’s limitations and grant him some relief (vv. 5f.). Here v. 14a, ‘if a man die shall he live again?’, is not a gleam of hope of the survival of death, of Sheol as a temporary refuge (v. 13a). Like ‘Sheol’ in v. 13a, it is probably a secondary insertion, but, whatever the belief of the late scribe who may have been responsible, in its context it has all the appearance of a rhetorical question which invites a negation, of which the chapter leaves us in no doubt. Chapter 14 Job’s Argument (Continued) 1. 1
‘Man born of woman Is brief of days with ll of trouble.
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228 2. 13.28. 3. 4. 5.
6. 7.
8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
13.
14
15. 16. 17. 18. 19.
14a.
1
Like a ower he comes forth and wilts, Fleeing and unstable as a shadow. He wears out as a water-skin,1 Like a moth-eaten garment. Is it then on such as this that you open your eyes, Bringing him2 into judgment with you? 3(Who
can separate the clean from the unclean? None can.) Since his days are determined, And you control the number of his months, 4(His bounds you have set which he may not overstep), Look away from him and forbear5 Until he discharges as a hireling his term. For a tree has still hope Though cut down; it may yet renew itself, And its young shoots not cease. Though its roots grow old in the ground, And its stump is dying in the dust. At the scent of water it will sprout, And will develop shoots like a sapling, But man dies and departs,6 Yea, mankind perishes and where is he? Water from the sea may be exhausted, And the river may be dried up and drained. But man once he has lain down shall never arise, Until the heavens wear out7 he shall not awake,8 Nor be roused9 from his sleep.10 Would that you would hide me (in Sheol),11 Conceal me till your anger abated, Set a limit and remember me. […]12 All the days of my service would I hold out Until my relief should come. You would call and I should answer you; You would care for the work of your hands. But as it is you number my steps, You keep watch13 over my transgression;14 My sin is sealed up in a bundle, And you put sealing clay on my iniquity. A mountain falls in ruin,15 And a rock shifts from its place; Water reduces stone to dust; The ood16 sweeps away the soil of the earth. And you destroy the hope of man; If a man die shall he live?
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You overpower him utterly and he passes away, You change his appearance and send him away. His sons attain honour, but he never knows; They are reduced, but he does not perceive it. But on his own account is his body pained, And on his own account his life-breath laments.’
Textual Notes to Chapter 14 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
Reading r¿qe with LXX for MT rq. Reading we’¿Óô with LXX, S and V for MT we’¿î. This passage, which is omitted in one Heb. MS, is probably a secondary interpolation. Taking v. 5c (emended) as the second colon parallel to 13.27c (see above). Reading waaal with one Heb. MS for MT weyedl (pausal form). Reading weyahal¿¤ after LXX for MT wayyeelš (pausal form). See Commentary ad loc. Reading bel¿Ó with Aq., Theod., Sym. and V for MT biltî. Reading yqîÑ for MT yqîÑû with LXXA and V. Reading y‘¿r with LXXA and V for MT y‘¿rû. Reading miššenÓô with LXXA and V for MT miššenÓm. Probably a gloss as the metre indicates. Omitting v. 14a as a gloss and displaced from after v. 19c (so Dhorme) or after v. 10 (so Fohrer). Reading leÓišmôr (with le enclitic) for MT l¿’-Óišmôr. See Commentary ad loc. The parallelism with Ñe‘ay (‘my footsteps’) suggests MT aÓÓ’Óî might be a wordplay with Arab. ¨uÓwatu(n), plur. ¨uÓÓn (‘footstep’). Reading n¿l yippôl with Theod. and S for MT nôl yibbôl. The verb tišÓ¿ demands the sing. subject, either seîh or seîh, the latter of which, suggested by Budde, we prefer on the evidence of Prov. 28.3. See Commentary.
Commentary on Chapter 14 1. On r¿ez (‘agitation, trouble’), here in the passive sense, see above on 3.17. The phrase ea‘-r¿ez (‘with his ll of trouble’) is probably a conscious parody of the description of a happy life achieved as ea‘ ymîm (‘full of days’, in 42.17; Gen. 25.8). 2. On the gure of humans as ephemeral as a ower (ÑîÑ); cf. Isa. 40.6-8; Ps. 103.15; and as a shadow; cf. 8.9; Pss. 102.12 (EVV 11); 109.23; 144.4. yÑ’ (‘to come forth’) naturally expresses the emergence of owers or vegetation (Ñe’eÑ’; cf. Gen. 1.12; 1 Kgs 5.1; etc.), and requires no emendation; cf. Beer’s suggestion yiÑma (‘sprouts’). mlal may mean ‘wilt’ (so Hölscher, Weiser, Gordis); cf. 18.16 and probably also 24.24 and Ps. 37.2, where it is parallel to nal (‘to wither’), and 1
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Ps. 90.6. Alternatively it is suggested that it is a byform of mûl (‘to be cut, circumcised’), as in Gen. 17.10; Josh. 5.2 (so G.B. Gray, Fohrer, Pope). bra means ‘to ee’ in Hebrew but this is a secondary meaning. The primary meaning is rather ‘to shift’ from one position to another; cf. the bolt (brîa), and Arab. ’al-bri (‘yesterday’), and so also in Ugaritic of ‘the primaeval serpent’ (bÓn br) of Chaos with its Hebrew counterpart nš brîa (26.13; Isa. 27.l). 13.28. After 13.27 in the rst person sing. the pronoun hû’ has been an embarrassment to commentators in its position in MT. Displacement is therefore suggested, after 14.1 according to Stevenson and Peters; after 14.2 according to Siegfried, Dhorme, Steinmann and Pope; or after 14.5 according to Bickell, Beer, Wright and Lévêque. The gure of wearing out as a wine-skin (r¿qe, MT rq) or moth-eaten garment certainly demands ephemeral humanity as its antecedent and so must be transposed (pace Fohrer) to ch. 14, probably after the gures of the ower or shadow in 14.2. r¿qe for rq (‘rottenness’) is suggested by LXX and S and is to be preferred as the concrete gure, like its parallel, the moth-eaten garment (bee ’a¤lô ‘š). 3. On the reading ’¿Óô for MT ’¿Óî see textual note. 4. The meaning of mî yittn here is literal, ‘Who can produce?’ or perhaps ‘separate?’, and does not, as often, introduce a wish. The defective metre indicates a gloss (so Bickell, Beer, Dhorme, G.B. Gray, Hölscher, Horst). The preposition min does not necessarily denote derivation here, implying, as Rowley suggests, the ritual impurity of childbirth (cf. ‘man born of woman’) or the doctrine of original sin. The statement may rather indicate the impossibility of separating the clean from the unclean, humans being the victim of their environment rather than hereditary sinners. But the subject of the context, the natural limitations of humans, suggests that they are therefore excusable as the victims of their heredity. Dhorme, who retains the verse as original (so also Fohrer), explains the short colon v. 4b as deliberate for the sake of emphasis. The verse, however, may well be a theological gloss suggested by the conception of ‘man born of woman’ (yelû ’iššh) in v. 1, who was rst tempted and brought about the fall of humankind and who in childbirth is subject to ritual impurity. 5. arûÑîm, means literally ‘cut sharp’, e.g. the sharp-edged studs of the threshing sledge in Amos 1.3. Here it means ‘dened’ or ‘decreed’; cf. 1 Kgs 20.40; Isa. 10.22. On v. 5c, displaced here from after 13.27c, see on 13.27. 6. On the reading waaal see textual note. š‘h (‘to look’) in the sense of ‘look away from’ is paralleled in 7.19. rÑh, meaning regularly in Classical 1
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Hebrew ‘to be pleased’, means here ‘to discharge an obligation’; cf. the keeping of the Sabbath in Lev. 26.34, 41, 43 (P). Conned to late passages in the OT, it is regularly used in this sense in Aramaic. In Job’s unremitted suffering it could hardly be said that he could ‘enjoy his day’ (RSV) any more than a hard-worked hireling. The reference is rather to discharging his term and what is involved to the satisfaction of the one who imposed it; cf. Isa. 40.2 (nirÑh ‘aw¿nh). On ¤îr (‘mercenary, hired worker’) see on 7.1f. 7. This is obviously not a regular bicolon, which is expected in the context, hence it has been suggested that the original text may have contained two bicola, a colon having dropped out after tiqwh in v. 7a (Tur-Sinai), or between yikkrÓ and we‘ô, or between we and ‘ô (Duhm, Bell, Hölscher). Stevenson regarded v. 7c as a gloss, but this colon agrees with the sequel, which emphasizes the survival of the tree in its shoots (y¿naqtô) and goes on to explode the popular fallacy of a man’s survival in his sons (v. 21f.). Bicola, however, may be relieved by an occasional tricolon in Hebrew and Ugaritic poetry, and so we should retain the text as it stands. Wetzstein reports such a means of renewing old fruit trees in Syria (cf. Dalman 1942: VII, 174f.). Cf. the branch from the stump (geza‘) of Jesse (Isa. 11.1). For the Hiphil of la (‘to renew’) cf. 29.20 and possibly Isa. 9.9; 40.31; Ben Sira 46.12. 8. Note ‘r (lit. ‘dust’) as parallel to ’ereÑ, ‘the ground’, in view of the doctrinal implications which have been assumed by some commentators for ‘r as reecting the ‘dust’ of the grave; cf. on 19.25. 9. mrêa mayim (lit. ‘from the scent of the water’) recalls baharîô ’š, ‘when it has a touch of re’ (Judg. 16.9). yarîa is to be retained in the Hiphil; cf. yazkîn, denominational Hiphil. qÑîr is a collective sing. (‘branches’); cf. 18.16; 29.19. 10. laš describes the reduction of the oppressor in Isa. 14.12 and Exod. 17.13 (probably to be emended to Hiphil). The meaning ‘to be weak’ is hardly strong enough for the present passage, and the parallel with ’ayyô, ‘where is he?’, or as has been suggested, ’ayin or ’ênennû (‘he is not’), indicates that LXX ‘and he departed’ (wayyahal¿¤) represents the original verb. 11. If the reference is to the natural drying up of waters ym would mean ‘lake’ or extensive rain-pond rather than ‘sea’ (G.B. Gray), there being practically no tide in the Near East. While this is possible, however, the reference to the river drying up is not. nhr is a perennial river, not a seasonal wadi (naal), so that this is a case of proverbial exaggeration. Earlier Jewish commentators referred it to drink-offerings, thought in Near Eastern popular religion partially to revive the dead. Such offerings are attested in the Assyrian 1
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records of Ashurbanipal and in grave installations at Ras Shamra (Schaeffer 1939: pl. XXIX, g. 3.1) and actually at Samaria in the Israelite monarchy (Sukenik 1945: 42-58) and from a Jewish community in the Hellenistic age in Tob. 4.17; cf. Lk. 16.19-24 (Parrot 1937). On this explanation the sense would be ‘you may exhaust all the water in sea and rivers but you will not revive the dead’. Dhorme interprets the passage as ‘the sea and rivers will dry up sooner than a dead man will rise’ (so also Horst, Larcher, Terrien, Lévêque). 12. The more graphic bel¿Ó is to be preferred to the negative biltî of MT as in the same gure in Isa. 51.6 and Ps. 102.27 (EVV 26). For support from ancient versions see textual note. The sky, as God’s seat, and the heavenly bodies are proverbial for permanence (Pss. 72.7; 89.36f.), the implication in the divine oath on the permanence of his favour. For sleep as a gure of death, cf. Isa. 26.19; Dan. 12.2. 13. God’s provision of a temporary refuge (histîr) till the passing of a crisis recalls the language of Pss. 27.5 and 32.7. Those suggest that biše’ôl may be a late addition and indeed it is superuous to the metre. Throughout the OT Sheol is regularly represented as beyond the inuence of God himself (e.g. Ps. 88.6, 11f. [EVV 5, 10f.]; Isa. 33.18), and as a place from which there is no return (7.9). Verses 13-17 have the character of an interjection with direct address to God intervening between the strophes vv. 10-12 and 18-19 on the evanescence of humanity with their vivid imagery. 14. In view of the unequivocal assertion throughout the chapter on human mortality without survival it is extremely questionable if the doctrine of personal survival after death had emerged at all in Judaism at the time of the denitive edition of the Book of Job. Hence 14a has been taken as a gloss; so Hölscher, Stevenson, Baumgärtel, Lindblom, Horst, and Fohrer, who regards it a misplaced from after v. 10a. Verse 14a possibly owes its present position to a revision of the Book, when the doctrine of resurrection was emerging in Judaism, but was contested, and may reect the notion of compensation after death for the trials (Ñb’) of life (cf. Lk. 17.17-25), as in Daniel (12.2) and 2 Maccabees (7.9, 14; 112.43-45). Ñ’, however, need not refer to the whole of life, but simply to the long period of misery within life, nor need ‘relief’ refer to the absolute relief from life in death, which was small comfort to the sufferer, pace Job’s sentiment in 3.11-22. The question in v. 14a, whatever its actual provenance, does not open a ray of hope, which at one stroke would deprive the Book of its problem; it is a rhetorical question tantamount to a negation, and may well emphasize the negation in v. 19c, after which Dhorme would read it. In v. 14, while disposed to admit occasional tricola in the general structure of bicola in Job, we must consider each tricolon on its own merits, with the constant possibility of displaced cola, and here we agree with Dhorme. On the military metaphor of service (Ñ’) and relief (lî), see 1
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above on 7.1, where, however, Ñ’ refers to the service of a day-labourer, and 10.17, where both words refer to relays of troops. 15. God’s care for ‘the work of (His) own hands’ in temporary relief of Job’s sufferings until a fair hearing is granted reects the language of 10.8ff., where the suffering which God permits is out of accord with what humans might expect as the handiwork of the Creator. The verb ksa, from which the noun kese (silver) is derived, means primarily ‘to be pale’, as with anxiety, hence the meaning here ‘to yearn’, or ‘care for’. 16. kî-‘atth has been taken as stating the fact after the hypothesis implied in the wish in v. 13 and continued in vv. 14bcf. and rendered ‘For then you would number my steps, you would not keep watch over my sin’, so preserving MT l¿’-Óišmôr if indicative would contradict the sense of the context. This is the view expressed in RSV after Budde, Hölscher, Weiser, Horst. In agreement with Job’s general complaint, however, and particularly with what we understand as the keeping account of Job’s sins in v. 17, we consider this doubtful. We would take kî in the adversative sense, rendering kî-‘atth, ‘but as it is’. In this case MT l¿’-Óišmôr would seem to contradict the sense of the context unless it is taken as a question (so G.R. Driver, Fohrer). We suggest that the phrase is afrmative, MT l¿’ being a scribal misunderstanding of the asseverative enclitic le as in Ugaritic and Arab. (cf. vv. 29, 24a). In view of the parallelism with Ñe‘ay (‘my steps’) there may be a word-play between aÓÓ’Óî (‘my sin’) and a possible Heb. homonym of Arab. ¨aÓwtu(n), ‘footsteps’, which might, at least in some degree, be reproduced in English by ‘transgression’. 17. The reference here may be to the recording of charges on a papyrus document, which was then folded and sealed, instances of which have been found at Elephantine (ANEP, pl. 265). Pope envisages sins stored up with tokens in bags as commercial tallies mentioned in the Nuzu texts (Oppenheim 1959). wattiÓp¿l, from Óal (‘to smear with clay or plaster’), parallel to Óûm and particularly Ñerôr, suggests the sealing up of a bag of money or goods with wax or some such substance. In this connection it is interesting that a clay sealing in South Arabian characters was found in ninth-century debris at Bethel (Van Beek and Jamme 1958), doubtless a relic of the trade in incense, a precious commodity, which would demand sealing. 16ff. The general sentiment is that humans and their hopes are no more permanent than inanimate nature, even ‘the eternal hills’ (Gen. 49.26; Deut. 33.15), which are subject to landslide, detritus and soil-erosion. 18. MT nôl yibbôl (lit. ‘falling, withers’), if correct, may imply the various modes of ruin sudden and gradual (so Lévêque). But Theod. and S suggest the 1
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reading n¿l yippôl, accepted by Lagarde, Graetz, Siegfried, Beer, Budde, Dhorme, Larcher, Hölscher, Horst, Fohrer and Lévêque. On ‘Óaq (‘to be removed’) see on 9.5, also referring to the removal of mountains. 19. šaq usually means ‘to pulverize’; cf. šaaq, the ne dust on the scales in Isa. 40.15. The poet infers the action of water on rock in the ne detritus in the bed of the wadi. MT seîeyh, for which the verb tišÓ¿ demands the singular, suggests a common root with sîa, grain accidentally ‘spilled’ in harvesting (Lev. 25.5) and what grows from it (Lev. 25.11; 2 Kgs 19.29; Isa. 37.30) and mis (‘bloodshed’) in Isa. 5.7. Thus it is possible that the word means here ‘outpouring’. But seîh has also been proposed by Budde, citing mÓr s¿ in Prov. 28.3 (‘a driving rain’), so here ‘ood’. Fohrer suggests that v. 19c is the rst colon of a bicolon, of which the second has been lost; cf. Dhorme’s suggestion that v. 14a is the required colon, which we have accepted. 20. tq here means obviously ‘overpower’. It is found in late sources; cf. 15.24; Eccl. 4.12 and t¿q in Est. 9.29; 10.2; Dan. 11.17. Hence it is probably Aram.; cf. tqp (‘authority’) in Nabataean inscriptions; it is well attested in Aram. lneÑa, usually meaning ‘for ever’, may here, as occasionally, indicate the superlative ‘utterly’ (Thomas 1956). yahal¿¤ might mean ‘to go one’s way’, i.e. ‘to die’; cf. Ps. 39.14 (EVV 13) and Akk. ana šimtu alâku (‘he went to his fate’), cited by Horst; Duhm cites the Nabataean usage of the same verb. In the present passage, however, the form yahal¿¤ instead of the normal Classical Heb. yl¤, usually taken as late poetic, may possibly be a homonym, cognate with Arab. halaka (‘to perish, pass away’). 21. The adjective Ñ‘îr in the sense both of ‘young’ and ‘little’ (cf. Arab. sar, ‘young, small, insignicant’) is well attested in Classical Heb. The verbal root is found only in comparatively late sources (e.g. Jer. 30.19; Zech. 13.7) and here in Job. 22. ‘His esh upon him’ (berô ‘lyw) is intelligible; ‘his life upon him’ (našô ‘lyw) unusual. Obviously ‘lyw, repeated, must be emphasized, and that in contrast to the feeling one cannot have for the vicissitudes of one’s family after one’s death. Thus ‘al with the prepositional sufx emphasizes the intimate and personal nature of the experience. The experience and interest of the subject is concentrated in his present life, indicated by the conjunction of his esh (berô) and his animation (našô), and does not extend beyond it.
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Job 15 ELIPHAZ’S SECOND REPLY: A REMONSTRATION TO JOB’S OBSTINACY IN QUESTIONING THE THEODICY
The address falls into two parts, vv. 2-16 in four strophes (vv. 2-6, 7-10, 1113, 14-16), where Eliphaz remonstrates with Job, and six strophes (vv. 17-19, 20-22, 23-25, 26-28, 29-32 and 32-35), where God’s providence in the moral order in the retribution of the wicked is asserted. The literary afnity of the rst half is with the controversial pieces in Wisdom literature where an opponent’s personal authority and his doctrine is challenged, often by a succession of questions, but also by direct statements. The second part is cast in the form of the instruction of the sage (‘I shall declare to you. Hear me…’, vv. 15-17), the substance of his instruction being the traditional view borne out by personal experience that sin brought its own retribution. From this point the debate sharpens, and Job turns progressively from his friends to God, while they no longer temper their admonitions with encouragement, except, briey, the more mature Eliphaz (22.21-30). If the friends do not ‘keep silence’ as Job suggests (13.5), their statements are less direct arguments related to Job’s case than sharp invective motivated by professional pique (15.9-10; 18.3; 20.3) at Job’s critical attitude to traditional Wisdom to which they served themselves heirs (15.2-13; 18.1-4), and seek to overwhelm him with the weight of garnered wisdom that ‘has been handed down by wise men’ (15.18-19) on the theme of sin and retribution in the colourful, indeed often lurid, language of Proverbs (15.20-35; 18.5-21; 20.4-29), many aphorisms of which are cited. Besides, Eliphaz but reiterates the argument that God is beyond the imputation of injustice by frail humans in a passage (15.11-16) which, from its allusion to a word spoken in consolation (15.11), obviously refers to his statement in 4.15-21. In their introductory invective Eliphaz and Bildad both charge Job with arrogating to himself special knowledge of the mind of God (15.8), as though he was the rst of humankind (15.7), whose case transcended Cosmic Order (18.4).
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Chapter 15 1.
And Eliphaz the Temanite answered and said:
2.
‘Does a wise man answer with knowledge that is mere wind, And ll his belly with the hot blast, Argue with unprotable argument, And with words which are useless? You annul reverence for God, You detract from serious thought vis-à-vis God, For your sin prompts your speech, And you choose a crafty tongue. Your own mouth condemns you and not I, And your (own) lips testify against you.
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
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Were you born the rst of men, Or were you brought forth in travail before the hills? Are you admitted to listen in on the intimate counsel of God? And do you assert a monopoly of wisdom? What do you know that we do not know, Or perceive that is unfamiliar to us? The grey-haired and the aged are among us, Older than your father. Are the consolations of God too little for you, (Our) word spoken1 in gentleness to you? How your heart prompts you to behave shamelessly,2 And how haughty3 are your eyes, That you let your anger recoil on4 God And spout words from your mouth! What is man that he may be pure, One born of woman that he may be innocent? Lo, even his holy ones5 he does not trust, And the heavens are not pure in his sight, How much less one who is abhorrent and corrupt, A man who drinks up wrong like water! I will enlighten you, listen to me, And of what I have seen I will tell6 you, What the sages declare, And their fathers did not conceal,7 To whom alone the land was given, No stranger having come in to settle among them. The wicked man is anxious all his days, The years laid up for the wicked are few.8 The sound of ocks is in his ears; Even when he is secure the spoiler shall come upon him. He cannot rely on getting free of darkness And he is marked off9 for destruction.10
The Book of Job 23. 24.
25. 26. 27. 28.
29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.
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He is apportioned11 as food12 for the vultures,13 He knows that his collapse14 is certain. The dark day overwhelms him,15 Distress and anguish overpower him Like the striding warrior16 ready to attack, Because he lifted his hand against God,17 Deed18 the Almighty. He charges him19 with a horde, With the mass of his shield-bosses; Yea, he covered his face with fat,20 And put fat on his loins; And he occupied ruined cities, Houses which are uninhabited, Which threaten to fall into ruin-heaps. He will not be rich, nor will his wealth endure, Nor will his possessions21 reach the underworld. ( )22 His shoot the ame shall parch, And his blossom23 shall be blasted24 by the wind. Let one not trust in its generosity25 For its dates shall come to naught; It will wilt26 before its maturity, And its frond will not grow green. His unripe grapes will remain sour27 on the vine;28 And cast its blossom like an olive tree. For the company of the godless is barren, And re will devour the tents of corruption. He is pregnant with trouble and gives birth to evil, His belly29 gestates delusion.’
Textual Notes to Chapter 15 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 1
Reading with T the verbal noun dabbr for MT dr, which is nevertheless intelligible. Reading mah-yy¿¤îa¤ libbe¤ for MT mah-yyiqaa¤ libbek. See Commentary ad loc. Reading terûmeyn for MT yizremûn. See Commentary ad loc. Reading ‘al for MT ’el. Reading qeôšyw with Qere for MT (Kethib) qdšw. Reading ’asapprh (pausal) after LXX, S and V for MT wa’asapprh. Reading wel¿’ kiaûm ’aôÓm for MT wel¿’ kiaû m’aôÓm. Another possibility is wel¿’ ni¤aû m’aôÓm (‘which were not concealed from their fathers’), assuming omission of n before k in the Old Heb. script. Reading mispr for MT mispar. See Commentary ad loc. Reading weÑûy for MT wesû, with omission of y before h in the Old Heb. script. Reading ¿re for MT re (pausal). Reading nû for MT n¿. See Commentary ad loc. Reading leleem for MT lalleem. Reading ’ayyh for ’ayyh (‘where’?) with LXX.
238 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.
Job 15. Eliphaz’s Second Reply Reading pîô for MT beyô. Reading yea‘aÓhû for MT yea‘aÓuhû. Reading mehakl¤ for MT mele¤. See Commentary ad loc. Reading ‘al for MT ’el. Reading ‘al for MT ’el. Reading ‘lyw for MT ’lyw. Reading le for MT elbô, assuming a dittograph of nal w before the following w in the Old Heb. script. Reading men¿lô for MT minlm. See Commentary ad loc. Omitting l¿’-ysûr minnî-¿še¤ as a gloss on v. 22a displaced to its present position. See Commentary ad loc. Reading pirô with LXX for MT pîw. Reading wîs¿‘ar for MT weysûr; cf. Hos. 13.3. Reading bešû‘Óô for MT bešw niÓ‘h. See Commentary ad loc. Reading timm¿l for MT timml’. See Commentary ad loc. Reading yam¿Ñ for MT yam¿s, assuming corruption of Ñ to s in the Old Heb. script. Reading baggeen for MT kaggeen, assuming scribal corruption of b to k in the square script. Reading biÓnô for biÓnm, with corruption of w to m in the Old Heb. script.
Commentary on Chapter 15 2. In da‘aÓ-rûa there is a double entendre. The word rûa, as in 7.7 and 16.3, and, as the parallel with qîm (the east wind or sirocco) suggests, indicates ‘wind’ in the sense here of emptiness. It might also mean ‘inspiration’. In Job’s reply to Eliphaz in 16.3 the word-play is more pronounced. 3. On hô¤a (‘to argue, criticize’) see above on 5.17. s¤an (‘to be helpful’) is peculiar to Job; cf. 22.2 and 35.3, where, as here, it is parallel to hô‘îl. This implies the allegation of inanity in Job’s ‘windy words’. 4. tr, from prar, means ‘to break’, literally as in 16.12 (wayearpernî, ‘and he has shattered me’), or ‘to violate’ (e.g. a covenant), or ‘to frustrate’ (e.g. ordered government or judgment, 40.8), or, as here, ‘to annul’; cf. Ps. 89.34, asdî l¿’ ’îr m‘immô (‘I shall not annul my covenant love with him’). yire’h, here used absolutely, means ‘fear’ or ‘reverence’ of God, expressed in practical piety; cf. Arab. taqw (‘fear of God, piety’). It is the comprehensive Heb. term for ‘religion’. gra‘ means ‘to withdraw’, either in the sense of ‘subtract’, hence ‘diminish’ as in the tally of bricks in Exod. 5.8, 19, or ‘remove’, as at 36.7. It may denote removing to oneself, as, for example, in 36.27 (drawing drops of water), or monopolizing (15.8). îa or îh is ‘meditation’ or ‘serious thought’; cf. Ps. 119.97, 99. Job is here criticized for his extreme humanist approach to the problems of life and the divine involvement, having of his own initiative and insight ‘chosen’ the language of the worldly ‘astute’ (‘arûmîm, v. 5). NEB renders v. 4b ‘usurping 1
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the sole right to speak in the divine presence’. But îa, though meaning ‘to talk about’ in Judg. 5.10 (possibly), and Prov. 6.22, with direct object, means more often ‘to meditate, think seriously’ (Pss. 77.7, 13; 119.15, 23, 27, 48, 78, 97, 99); cf. Amos 4.13: maggî l’m mah-îô (‘who declared to humanity what are its thoughts’). We take lienê to mean ‘about’ or ‘vis-à-vis’. 5. ‘Your sin prompts your speech’ (lit. ‘your sin teaches your mouth’) is an accusation of casuistic self-exculpation. 6. ‘nh be (lit. ‘to answer against’) is a common expression for ‘to testify against’, attested, as here, with ‘mouth’ or ‘speech’ as subject in 2 Sam. 1.16. 7. Whether or not this passage presupposes the conception of God’s wisdom as the agent of his creation, the theme of Proverbs 8, esp. vv. 22-31, as Dhorme supposes (1926: 191), the language recalls that passage (cf. Ps. 90.2). Insofar as this verse signies anything beyond the mere age of humans, it may animadvert upon the plan of God in creation (‘before the hills’) as a manifestation of his wisdom, to which humanity as the last stage of his creation was not admitted. This emphasis on the transcendent nature of God’s wisdom recurs in the address of Zophar in 11.7-9 and particularity in the speeches of Elihu (36.24ff.; 37.24), and in the Divine Declaration in 38.2ff. On the other hand it may reect the myth of the primaeval man to which Ezekiel refers (28.1-2, 12ff.), which has a counterpart in Mesopotamian mythology in the myth of the primaeval humans created not only before the animals but before plants and physical features after the earth. 8. sô denotes either the intimate counsel of God, as in Amos 3.7, or intimate company, as in Job 19.19; Pss. 55.15 (EVV 14); 64.3 (EVV 2); Ezek. 13.9. It also denotes God’s privy council (Jer. 23.18). Job 15.8 could refer to God’s counsel or council, but the passage recalls Jer. 23.18 in his taunting question regarding the false prophets, which Eliphaz may consciously re-echo. 10. yšîš means ‘aged’ without the sense of decrepitude as in 12.12. kabbîr in the sense of ‘old’ is regular in the Arab. cognate. The verbal and adjectival forms of the root are practically conned to Job in the OT, where Aramaism is likely. The word occurs in Phoenician inscriptions meaning ‘great’, but is more common in Aram. inscriptions from the eighth century BCE and later literary sources. 11. tanumôÓ ’l (‘the consolations of God’) means the consolations of Job’s friends in their rst addresses, which they considered inspired by God and were designed to turn Job in faith to God for assurance, like the milder tone of Eliphaz’s rst address with his counsel of supplication and hope of rehabilitation (5.8ff.). There may also be a reference to the inspired words of Eliphaz in 1
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4.12ff. dabbr l’aÓ (MT dr) (‘our word spoken in gentleness’) refers particularly to Eliphaz’s rst address to Job. 12. MT yiqqa¤ is pointed as if from lqa (‘to take’), which is generally accepted. G.R. Driver (1948: 235) associated the word with Arab. waqia (‘to behave shamelessly, be bold’), which suggests a reading mah-yy¿qîak, lit. ‘what has made you shameless?’, being the regular form of exclamation in Arab., ‘how shameless you are!’ rzm is generally taken as a metathetic cognate of remaz found in Aram., Syr. and Late Heb., meaning ‘to make signs, wink’. This is not very apt in the present context. In view of Driver’s interpretation of the parallel verb we may seriously consider the variant in one Heb. MS— yerûmû, cf. ‘haughty eyes’. In the localization of moral qualities or propensities in parts of the body, arrogance is specically associated with the eyes; cf. Prov. 6.17; 30.13. See further textual note. 13. rûa here may mean rather ‘anger’ as in Judg. 8.3 and Prov. 16.32 (so LXX). Dhorme emphasizes ‘from your mouth’, i.e. hasty words instead of considered utterance from the heart. ‘Words’ (millîn again with the Aram. ending if the text is sound) may have the same emphasis. Here Pope translates ‘Spouting words from your mouth’, which with slight modication we have adopted. Duhm proposed merî (‘rebellion’), which would be a much more colourful expression, but the ancient versions are unanimous in support of MT. 14. The synonyms ’enôš and yelû ’iššh recall ’m and yelû ’iššh in 14.1, emphasizing the frailty of humanity. 15. The transcendence of God and his plans even beyond the angels, here ‘holy ones’ as in 5.1, is expressed already in 4.18, where ‘his servants’ is parallel to ‘his angels’. šmayim is not a circumlocution for ‘angels’ (T and Rashi), but denotes the sky in its purity; cf. Exod. 24.10 (Driver and Gray 1921: 135). So ‘pure’ (zakkû) is used in its physical sense. The sentiment recalls the formula of emancipation in administrative tablets from the palace of Ras Shamra which declares an emancipated slave ‘clear (br) as the sun is clear (brt)’. 16. On ’a kî (‘how much less’) as a formula of a fortiori reasoning, see on 4.19. ne’el is a rare word, found only here and in Pss. 14.3 and 53.4. It is a moral term in the OT without any trace of physical connotation, but the Arab. cognate ’alaa in the VIIIth form is used of milk turning sour. ‘A man who drinks up wrong like water’, i.e. lives by it as a daily necessity, or with the same natural ease, recalls Elihu’s charge that Job ‘drinks up scofng like water’ (34.7). 1
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17. On the verb iwwh (‘to explain, reveal’) see on 13.17. On the reading ’asappr (pausal form), see textual note. zeh is the relative particle, Ugaritic and Aram. de; cf. Arab. maa; and see 19.19 and Ps. 68.9. In citing the insights of the older sages he does not exclude his personal experience (‘what I have seen’, 4.7). In our reading kiaû-m ’aôÓm for MT kiadû m’aôÓm the enclitic m with the verb is to be noted as in Ugaritic (N.M. Sarna, ‘Some Instances of the Enclitic m in Job’, JSS 6 [1955], p. 110). 19. This relative clause with the relative particle omitted, as often in poetry. The Jewish author momentarily forgets the origin of Eliphaz beyond Israel. The golden age of tradition from the viewpoint of the writer of Job after the Exile was the days of the settlement in Palestine before the traditional faith were corrupted by extraneous humanistic philosophy. The passage recalls Joel’s conception of Jerusalem and the Temple uncontaminated by foreign inuences as the repository of the heritage of Israel (Joel 3.17; cf. Isa. 52.1). In support of the meaning ‘to settle’ for ‘ar Fohrer cites as a cognate Arab. abara with this meaning. 20. It is characteristic of the more mature Eliphaz that in contrast to the others he does not elaborate on the temporary success of the wicked before their downfall (cf. Pss. 10.2-11; 73.4-12), but assumes their success, haunted by constant fear, under ‘the sword of Damocles’, and their inevitable end. Where he does expatiate on the career of the arrogant tyrant in the ush of his power (Job 15.26-28) he is probably animadverting on Job’s challenge to God, though in justice to Job his challenge is for a fair hearing and not aggressive deance. miÓôll means ‘to be tormented’, the Hithpolel of ûl or îl (‘to writhe in pain or anxiety’) as here; cf. hiÓalal (Est. 4.4). This suits the context better than the reading miÓhôll, ‘shows his folly’ (so Theod., Margolis) or ‘boasts’ (so S, V, Beer). MT mispar šnîm may mean ‘a certain number of years’, which in Heb. idiom would rather be šenê mispr. niÑpenû indicates a plur. subject. While mispar šnîm might be taken as a plural, we should take the verb in a relative clause of which šnîm is the antecedent, and mispar, read as mispr, being the predicate, and as being emphasized by its position. 21. We should notice a conscious word-play here between the homonyms paa (‘terror’) and a cognate of Arab. fa¨ad(u) (‘ock’); cf. Gordon UT Aqht V.17, 22f. ’imr bp¨d (‘a lamb from the ock’), and Akk. pu¨âdu (Gordon UT 1628). The picture of the rich man in apparent security (baššlôm) is particularized by his hearing the bleating of his ocks, soon to be the prey of the spoiler (šô). 22. MT l¿’ ya’amîn šû minni-oše¤ (‘he does not believe that he will come back from darkness’), though the anxiety of the wicked man is emphasized in 1
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the passage, does not accord with the general emphasis on the condence of such. Hence we should render the verb as ‘rely’ rather than ‘believe’. For šû NEB renders ‘escape’; cf. Fohrer entkommt. This is obviously the sense, and we suggest that the verb is cognate with Arab. ba, imperf. yabu, which is used of beasts let free on the range. This would also be most apt at 33.30, lehšîb našô minnî-šaaÓ (‘to deliver his life from the pit’) and Ps. 35.17. MT Ñû emended to Ñpûy (Qere) is preferable. G.R. Driver (1955: 78) takes the verb Ñh in the sense of ‘to mark down’, after Ps. 37.32, where the verb is parallel to biqqš; he cites the Ass. Ñipû (‘to surround, enclose, delimit, mark off, survey’). Alternatively, the verb might be Ñh, familiar in the Talmud, meaning ‘to choose’ (so Tur-Sinai); cf. Arab. Ñafa(y) with this meaning in the VIII form. We take the verb as Ñh (‘to spy out’). The passage may reect the continual dread of the inhabitants of the border lands of being spied upon and marked down for a raid by Bedouin. 23-24. MT may be arranged as follows: n¿ hû’ lalleem ’ayyeh ya‘ kî-n¤ôn beyô yôm-¿še¤ yeba‘aÓuhû Ñar ûmeÑûqh tiÓqephû kemele¤ ‘Óî lakkîôr
In this passage LXX reads ‘He has been appointed as food for the vultures’, suggesting the reading nû hû’ leleem ’ayyh. The LXX rendering ‘he is appointed’ has suggested the emendation nô‘ (so Duhm, Buttenwieser, Hölscher, Kissane), mû‘ (Beer), nô‘, ‘is known’ (Dhorme). Fohrer and Pope retain MT nô (‘wandering’), reading leleem ’ayyh (‘as food for vultures’), envisaging one who has lost his way and perished in the desert. MT is retained by G.B. Gray, Weiser and Horst meaning ‘he wanders about for bread (saying), “Where is it?” ’ We would read nû for MT n¿, taking the verb as cognate with Ugaritic ndd (‘to apportion’); cf. Gordon UT ‘nt I.8: qÑ mr’i ndd (‘he apportioned slices of fatlings’), which accords with the rendering of LXX. Horst’s objection that ’o¤lh and not leem would have been used for ‘food’ is invalid in view of the general meaning ‘food’ in the Ras Shamra texts and often in poetry in the OT and of the verb lm (‘to eat’) in the Ras Shamra texts; cf. Arab. lamu(n) (‘meat’). ’ayyh is mentioned as a keensighted bird in 28.7 and listed among the unclean birds in Lev. 11.14 and Deut. 14.13. Hence ‘vulture’ would be most apt. In the second colon LXX reads ‘he knows in himself that he is ready for a fall’. A ‘fall’ has suggested the emendation of MT beyô, e.g. to le’ (‘he is ready [n¤ôn] for calamity’), or pîô (‘his collapse’, so Wright, Ball, Dhorme, Hölscher, Tur-Sinai, Stevenson, Kissane, Horst, Fohrer, Pope). In the third colon in the above arrangement the verb should be singular in agreement with the subject yôm ¿Îe¤. 1
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24. On tqa in the sense ‘to overpower’, see on 14.20. In v. 24a the agreement of the singular verb is with the nearer subject meÑûqh. The necessary connection between the ‘king’ (mele¤) and ‘ready to attack’ (‘Óî lakkîôr) is most unlikely in this context, and Hoffman’s conjecture (1931: 144), mehall¤ for MT mele¤, is feasible, especially in the light of Prov. 6.11: û’-kimehall¤ r’Îe¤ ûmas¿re¤ ke’îÎ mn
Here mehall¤ is taken variously as ‘highwayman’ and ‘vagabond’. On the evidence of the Ras Shamra texts mn could mean either ‘shield’ or ‘petition’. The more striking gure would be that of a warrior, probably reecting the all too familiar experience of soldiers living off the country through which they passed. On the other hand, the ‘man with the shield’ would describe the gurine of Reshef, the god who slew men in mass in war or plague, who was conventionally depicted as an armed warrior striding out (mehall¤) in a short kilt with a shield (ke’îÎ mn) in bronzes from Palestine and Syria in the Late Bronze Age and Egyptian sculpture from the same period. Alternatively the word may mean ‘destroyer’, cognate with Arab. halaka (‘to destroy’). This may be envisaged in Job 15.24. kîôr is not attested elsewhere in the OT, but in the context it is obviously cognate with Arab. kedara (VIIIth form), meaning ‘to dart upon’ (as a hawk on its prey); cf. Syr. qadr’ (‘hawk’). 25. hiÓgabbr is used in a good sense of God in Isa. 42.13 (‘to show himself mighty’), or, as here, ‘to act deantly’. The latter is the nuance of the Arab. cognate jabbru(n) (‘bully, giant’). 26. MT beÑaww’r has suggested the literal translation ‘with a neck’. This, in view of the English slang ‘hard neck’ and German Hartnäckigkeit, is deceptively intelligible; cf. NEB ‘with the head down’ and V ‘with neck erect’. Tur-Sinai’s ‘hauberk’, i.e. ‘neck-armour’, German Halsberge, is not attested in Heb. The ancient versions do not help. Aq., Sym. and Theod. attest MT, but ‘arrogantly’ in LXX and Jerome’s commentary, if they indicate MT, seems a paraphrase. If Dhorme is right in taking MT gabbê minnyw (‘bosses of his shields’) as interlocked shields like like the Roman testudo (‘tortoise’), which the plural would seem to suggest, then Ñaww’r may be cognate with Arab. Ñawru(n) (‘a herd of oxen’), hence ‘horde’. This, rather than the reference to the neck of a single warrior, is suggested by the plural gabbê minnyw. 27. The fat of the prosperous wicked and oppressor was proverbial in the OT; cf. Jer. 5.28; Ps. 73.7. Fat characterizes the materialist, clogging humanity, spiritual susceptibility and intelligence (Ps. 119.70).
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28. The Niphal of ka in the sense of ‘to be effaced’ or ‘to be deserted’ (of land, probably signifying the effacing of landmarks) is attested in Zech. 11.9, 16, and in the Hiphil meaning ‘to wipe out, destroy’ in Exod. 23.23 (of the Amorites in Canaan) and 1 Kgs 13.34 (of the House of Jeroboam). MT lmô, which it is proposed to emend, may be retained as an ethic dative. hiÓ‘atteû is attested only here, the Piel being attested in Prov. 24.27 in the sense of ‘to prepare’; cf. ‘Óî in v. 23 and 3.8, ‘ready, prepared to’. It expresses what is urgent or imminent, hence in reference to houses ‘which threaten to fall into ruin-heaps’ (gallîm); cf. Jer. 9.10; 51.37; 2 Kgs 19.25 = Isa. 37.26. The colon is suspected as a gloss (so Fohrer). 29. yqûm means here ‘to be established’. minlm is the problem in v. 29b. LXX renders the Heb. original at this point as ‘shadow’, which has suggested the emendation Ñillm (‘their shadow’), perhaps Ñillô (‘his shadow’), not a drastic emendation in the Old Heb. script. The conception may be that he will not live till sunset. Alternatively, the gure might be that of a wide-spreading tree or the spreading vine in Ps. 80.9-11 (EVV 8-10), cited by Dhorme. V, in rendering ‘their root’, indicates the reading ’eÑlm, of which MT minlm is a feasible corruption in the Old Heb. script. T reads min lm (‘of that which belongs to them’, their possessions), which the parallelism suggests. Dahood is probably right in seeing what was probably originally mn¿l from a root nûl cognate with Arab. nla, yanl (‘to give’), hence ‘that which is given’, ‘possessions’. The nal m of minlm is probably a scribal corruption of w in the Old Heb. script, and we propose menôlô in scriptio defectiva. We propose that ’ereÑ here as often in the OT and the Ras Shamra texts denotes the underworld. The gure envisages the burial of a king or notable with his wealth or goods, as in the tombs of pharaohs in what was for the writer of the Book of Job the vain hope of their use in the afterlife. This meaning of menôlô is supported by ye‘eÎar (‘be rich’) and ylô (‘his wealth’). 30. In v. 30a, l¿’-ysûr minnî-¿Îek, which does not have any obvious connection with the context, is probably a gloss on v. 22a on the assumption that Îû means ‘to return’ (see on v. 22a) (so Bickell, Budde, Siegfried, Duhm, G.B. Gray, Dhorme, Hölscher, Holst, Fohrer). This eliminates an odd colon from the prevailing arrangement in bicola. ÎalheeÓ (‘ame’, or the scorching sirocco), is found in the OT only here and at Ezek. 21.3. It is one of the rare instances of the formation of a noun from a verbal root with preformative Î, which is known as the preformative of the causative variation of the root in Akk., Ugaritic and vestigially in Aram.; cf. Îabblûl (‘snail’, ‘that which makes wet’) in Ps. 58.9. For weysûr, which is unintelligible in the context, the emendation weyiss‘r (‘and it will be blasted’) has been proposed by Beer, Budde et al.; cf. Perles, Duhm, Oort, Fohrer, who propose wîsô‘ar (Pual). This sustains the gure, and suggests the emendation of MT pîw to pirô (‘its 1
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blossom’), which is read by Beer, Budde, Ball, Dhorme, Hölscher, Stevenson and Fohrer. 31. MT ’al-ya’amn baÎÎw niÓ‘h is a notorious crux. LXX paraphrases and ignores the main difculty. S ‘he does not believe in the falsehood which leads astray’, and T ‘he does not believe in a son of man who errs in falsehood’, conrm MT without translating it accurately, and the ancient versions are also vague and confused about v. 30c, nor is there any more agreement among commentators. G.B. Gray accepts MT, rendering: Let him trust not in emptiness, deceiving himself, For emptiness will be his return for what he does.
While this is a feasible rendering of MT, it interrupts the gure in the passage, and so the verse has been taken as a gloss (so Hölscher, Horst, Fohrer). Alternatively, accepting the original of the passage, it is proposed to nd a reference to the unreliability of the wealth of the wicked (reading ‘aÎîrÓô, ‘wealth’, for MT Îw niÓ‘h), ‘and what it might buy them’ (temûrÓô), lit. ‘his exchanging’, i.e. trade; cf. Ruth 4.7; Job 20.18; so T. In view of the gure of a fruit-tree in what precedes and follows, however, this is unlikely. The complex Îw niÓ‘h may be a corruption of Îû‘Óô, the feminine form of a verbal noun either from the root yÎa‘ cognate with Arab. waa‘a (‘to enrich’, used of God’s favours) or from a verb Αh unattested in the OT, but cognate with Ugaritic Ó‘y, ‘to give’ (Gordon UT 62.56; 127.59), or perhaps a byform Îûa‘. In this assumption we offer the suggestion ‘al-ya’amn beÎû‘Óô (‘let one not trust in its generosity’). Houbigant suggested the reading temôrÓô (‘his palmtree’) for MT temûrÓô. Certainly kippÓô in v. 32b indicates a palm-tree, meaning generally ‘branch’, but specically ‘palm-frond’ in Ass.; cf. Isa. 9.13 and 19.15, where in contrast to the reed it may denote the frond of the lofty palm. The reference to ‘shoot’ (y¿naqtô) and ‘blossom’ (pirô) is to the fruit of the palm-tree, dates (Arab. tamru[n]) rather than to the tree, to which the pronominal sufx may rather refer. tmr is well-attested in Heb. but not tamar or tamrh meaning ‘date’, though such a word is not unlikely. Hence we propose that MT temûrh is a corruption of tamrh with dittography of w after m in the Old Heb. script. We propose the reading: ’al-ya’amn beÎû‘Óô kî Îw’ tihyeh tamrÓô.
Alternatively, for MT Îw niÓ‘h, we might suggest Îô‘Ó¿h (‘its nobility [of stature]’); cf. the palm-tree (tmr) with the cedar as a symbol of stature and ourishing in Ps. 92.12 (EVV 11). 32. Continuing the gure of the fruit-tree or date-palm we read after LXX, V, S and Graetz, Hoffmann, Perles, Budde, G.B. Gray, Dhorme, Beer, Hölscher, Stevenson and Fohrer: 1
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bel¿’-yômô timm¿l we¤ippÓô l¿’ ra‘annh It will wilt before its time, And its palm-frond will not grow green.
33. The vine, it has been observed (Friedrich Delitzsch), does not cast its grapes before they are ripe (MT bisrô), but they may remain on the vine without ripening. In this case the vine that in apparently failing to supply the necessary nutriment to the fruit might be said to ‘do it violence’ (yam¿s), but this is not a natural expression. We would suggest that the original text read yam¿Ñ baggeen bosrô (‘his unripe grapes shall remain sour on the vine’), assuming scribal corruption of Ñ to s in the Old Heb. script. The vocalization b¿ser and not bser, as assumed in MT, is attested in Isa. 18.5 and in the popular proverb in Jer. 31.29f. and Ezek. 18.2. The olive tree on the other hand does shed its blossom not only in its fruitful years, after pollination, but without fruition every year (Dalman 1928: I, 381; 1935: IV, 165, 300). 34. ‘aaÓ n (‘the company of the godless’) recalls ‘aaÓ Ñaddîqîm in Ps. 1.5 and ‘aaÓ reΑîm in Ps. 22.17, etc. The noun should not be pressed to mean an ideological society in view of the use of the word in ‘aaÓ deôrîm (‘swarm of bees’) in Judg. 14.8, though it does denote specically the community at Qumran. On n see above on 8.15. 35. On galmû (‘barren’) see on 3.7. The innitives absolute hr¿h and yl¿ emphasize the verbs and make them more graphic; cf. GKC, §113ff. On the general sentiment with slight variation, see on 5.6f. In v. 35b LXX and S read t¤îl (‘contain’) for MT t¤în, which Dhorme would retain, seeing a reference to the ‘preparation’ of the embryo in the womb. This is now conrmed by the Ras Shamra texts, for example in Gordon UT 51 IV.48, ‘nt V.44: r ’il ’abh ’il mlk dyknnh
The Bull El her father, El the King who begot her.
Cf. the title of the mother-goddess AÓirat in the Ras Shamra texts knyt ’ilm (‘Procreatrix of the gods’).
1
Job 16 and 17 JOB’S REJOINDER TO ELIPHAZ
The advance of the argument beyond the mere rebuttal of orthodox objections to Job’s questioning of the situation of righteous sufferers in God’s economy is marked by the summary reply of Job to his friends in the rst part of his statement (16.2-4b, 4c-6) as compared with the more lengthy statement of his grievances against God (16.7-9b, 12-14, 15-17, 18-22) and the statement of his sufferings (17.1-4, 5-7, 11-13, 14-16). In the rst part of Job’s reply (16.2-4b, 4c-6) the literary form is the sapiential controversy. The second part (vv. 7-9b, 12-14, 15-17, 18-22) is cast in the form of an appeal against an adversary in the law-court, including a protestation of innocence and appeal for vindication (vv. 18-22).This has much in common with the psalm of the type the Plaint of the Sufferer from which it borrows gures and phraseology, particularly in 13, 15-16. Job’s statement of his cumulative griefs and his hopeless prospect follows this pattern. Job 16.9c-11, where the sufferings of Job are at the hands of the wicked and not, as in the context, of God, are probably a secondary expansion cited from a plaint of the sufferer, v. 11 (‘God delivers me up to wrong-doers’) being possibly an adaptation of the insertion to the context, another sapiential gloss in the interests of orthodoxy in 17.8-10: The righteous are shocked at this, And the innocent is indignant at the impious; But let the righteous man hold to his way, And the pure of heart will gain strength. But come on again, all of you, I shall not nd a wise man among you.
The incongruity of v. 8 with Job’s attitude and argument has been noted, and the interruption of Job’s lament between vv. 7 and 11. The passage has therefore been taken either as a gloss (so Hölscher, Fohrer; cf. Duhm, who takes it as a gloss on Bildad’s statement at 18.3) or displaced. Stevenson suggested it followed 18.21 in Bildad’s speech (cf. Kissane, who regards v. 10 in place, but reads v. 8 after 18.20 and v. 9 after 18.21). Thus in his reply to Eliphaz’s statement in ch. 15 Job indicates that he is as familiar with the inherent disability and jeopardy of the wicked and his 1
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miserable end as Eliphaz or any other sage (2.4a). He animadverts on ‘troublesome comforters’, referring, argumentum ad hominem, to their ‘windy words’ (16.3; cf. 15.2). Job seems to hint that sympathy rather than argument and indictment might have been more apt to this situation (3-5). His reply to Bildad is also summary and in the same vein (19.2-5, 21f.), while in his reply to Zophar he claims a patient and sympathetic hearing (21.2-6). The switch to Job’s main theme of his plea to God for justice, prefaced by his statement of false accusation in the language of the Plaint of the Sufferer in such a case is indicated by ’a¤-‘atth (v. 7). This occupies the bulk of Job’s reply to Eliphaz and a similar proportion of his reply to Bildad (19.6-20). Chapter 16 1.
Then Job answered and said:
2.
‘I have heard many things like these; Troublesome comforters are you all. Is there a limit to windy words? And1 how aggravating is your retort! I too could talk like you. Would that you yourselves were in my place!
3. 4a.
5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
10.
11. 12.
13.
14. 1
Then2 I could elaborate (the case) against you with words And wag my head at you, Or I could strengthen you3 with what I had to say, And sympathy would move my lips unceasingly.4 My sorrow, if spoken, would not be checked, And if I would keep silent, how freely would it ow out! But now malice5 has worn me out; Every one of my associates [8a] seized upon me.6 7One has testied against me and risen up in enmity against me, A false accuser of me8, testifying against me to my face. His anger has made me a prey and persecuted me, He has gnashed his teeth at me. My enemies look daggers9 at me. They have gaped at me with their mouths, They have buffeted my cheeks in insult, Together they gang up against me. God delivers me up to wrong-doers, And throws me into the power of the wicked.7 I was at ease and he worried me, He took me by the neck and shook me limb from limb. Yea, he set me up as a target, His archers10 surrounded me; He gashes my kidneys without pity Pouring out my gall on the ground. He breaks in on me breach upon breach, He charges me like a warrior.
The Book of Job 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
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Sack-cloth have I sewn on my skin, And I have abased my horn in the dust; My face is reddened with weeping, And on my eyes is darkness, Though there is no violence on my hands, And I may pray in all innocence. O earth, cover not my blood, Neither let there be a place for my owing blood.11 Lo, I have a witness in heaven, And one who will testify for me on high, One who will interpret for me12 my cry13 to God, One for whom14 my eye is ever wakeful, That he might argue with God for a man As a man argues for another; For a few years shall come And I shall go on a road where I shall not return.
Textual Notes to Chapter 16 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.
Reading ûmah-yyamrîÑe¤ for MT ’ô mah-yyamrîÑe¤. See Commentary ad loc. ‘Then’ is not expressed in MT, but is inserted to introduce the apodosis after the hypothesis implied in the exclamation in b. Reading ’ô ’a’ammîÑe¤, assuming haplography of ’. Reading l¿’ ya¿¤; cf. LXX and S l¿’ ’e¿¤. Conjecturing ÎimmûÓ for MT haÎimmôÓ. See Commentary ad loc. Reading tiqmeÓnî for MT wattiqmeÓnî constructed with v. 7b. Vv. 8-10 are taken as a secondary expansion, with v. 11 as an introduction to vv. 12ff. Reading keÎî for MT kaaÎî. See Commentary ad loc. Reading plur. throughout for MT sing. after S and Sym., which agrees with the plur. in the sequel. Readinq rôyw for MT rabbyw. Reading leze‘Óî for MT leza‘aqÓî. See Commentary ad loc. Reading melîÑ for MT melîÑay. Reading r‘î after LXX for MT r‘y (pausal). Reading ’lyw, assuming its omission by haplography after ’el-’elôah, with confusion of y in the Old Heb. script.
Commentary to Chapter 16.1-21 2. menaamê ‘ml may be a case of double entendre, ‘troublesome comforters’ according to the regular meaning of niam in the OT, and possibly a hitherto unrecognized cognate of Arab. naama (‘to pant’), hence ‘breathers out of trouble’, as suggested by D.W. Thomas (1932–33: 192), which would accord with dierê-rûa in the following colon. 3. dierê-rûa (‘windy words’) is Job’s pointed reply to the same allegation of Eliphaz (15.2) and Bildad (8.2). mah-yyamrîÑe¤ (lit. ‘what makes you sick?’) 1
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might signify that Eliphaz’s urge to enter into altercation with Job was a disease. T renders ‘what amuses you?’, which suggests a reading yamlîÑe¤, which might mean ‘what makes you so agreeable?’ (cf. Ps. 119.102). While this would be an apt ironic retort, it is not graphically a feasible original for corruption to yamrîÑek, and would seem to be inuenced by Ps. 119.103, mah-nnimleÑû…’imerôÓey¤ (‘how pleasant are your words!’; MT ’imerÓe¤). We would see in the expression in MT correspondence with the Arab. idiom used in interjection with ma with the causative and the direct object, hence our rendering ‘How aggravating you are…’ 4. lû might mean ‘if’ introducing the protasis, signifying remote possibility in a conditional sentence. We would regard the sequel in vv. 4c-6 as the apodosis, but take the alternative signicance of lû introducing the optative, which nevertheless still implies a protasis. taaÓ naÎî (lit. ‘in the place of me myself’) is paralleled in the account of the succession of kings taat ’aîw (‘in place of his father’) in Kings. In v. 4c the verb in MT ’abîrh is found in the sense of ‘making (binding) spells’ (Deut. 18.11; Ps. 58.6 [EVV 5]). It might signify ‘to associate’, that is, compose words or arguments (so Renan). Finkelstein (1956) proposes that the verb means ‘to make a noise’ as in the ‘brawling household’ (bêÓ eer) with the nagging wife (Prov. 21.9; 25.24); so also O. Loretz (1961), who cites the Akk. verb uburu (‘to make a din’). The word might be a denominative Hiphil from r (‘friend, associate’), but ‘alê¤em (‘against you’) is against this interpretation, as also nûa‘ (‘to shake the head’), this not being, like nû, an expression of sympathy, as in 2.11, but a gesture of mockery or gratication that the suffering of another conrms the conventional view of the theodicy (e.g. 2 Kgs 19.21 = Isa. 37.22; Pss. 22.8; 109.25; Lam. 2.15). It is suggested that the verb here is cognate with Arab. abara (‘to embellish’, especially rhetoric [so Fohrer]), which we accept. In vv. 4-6, Job declares that if roles were reversed he could, rather than would, be as eloquent and censorious as his friends or (reading ’ô before ’a’ammiÑe¤em) encourage and console (nû) them. 5. The positive sense of 5a seems to support the negative with the verb yaa¿¤ (‘would not restrain’, i.e. ‘move unceasingly’), nû or nî (‘nodding of the head’, i.e. consolation, sympathy), being the subject and ‘lips’ (eÓay), i.e. speech, the object. This we accept, though admitting that MT might still be retained in the sense that sympathy (nû) would restrain (yaa¿¤) or temper what Job had to say (eÓay) (so Ehrlich, citing Prov. 10.19). 6. ’im ’aabberh is a case of the cohortative in a hypothesis or contingent intention, as in Ps. 139.8-9, and, without ’im, in Job 19.18 (GKC, §108e). Dhorme suggests that mah in mah-mminnî yahal¿¤ is negative (so V, also Hölscher), as in Arab. This is unnecessary as mah-mminnî yahal¿¤ may be an exclamation, describing Job’s reaction to his friends’ suffering if the occasion arose. ke’î therefore is his sympathetic grief. 1
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7. ’a¤-‘atth signals the return to the actual case after the hypothesis. The verb hel’nî requires a subject, which Dhorme nds in the otherwise awkward haÎimmôÓ pointed haÎÎimmôÓ, which he takes as cognate with Arab. Îamita (‘to rejoice in another’s misfortune’) and renders ‘the malicious one’. We would accept the association with the Arab. verb, but would take ÎimmôÓ as an abstract noun Îimmût analogous in form to ÎiqqûÑ, omitting h as a dittograph of preceding y in the Old Heb. script, and rendering ‘malice’, taking it as belonging to v. 7a, and attaching wattiqmeÓnî of v. 8a to v. 7b. kol-‘aÓî may be retained as meaning ‘all my associates’, the fem. sing. abstract having the force of a collective noun as in Heb. yôÎeeÓ (‘inhabitants’), gôlh, (‘exiles’), ’ôyeeÓ (‘enemies’), and in Ugaritic, for example, t‘dt ÓpÓ nhr (‘the witnesses of River the Ruler’, Gordon UT 137.26) and ÑrÓ (‘enemies’, Gordon UT 68.9). 8. The verb qmaÓ occurs in the OT only here and at 22.16, but it is well known in Aram. and Syr. meaning ‘to seize, compress’, with an Arab. cognate qamaÓa (‘to bind together’). be is used, as regularly, to express hostility, and the present passage suggests qmû-î ‘ê-Îeqer (‘false witnesses have risen against me’) in Ps. 27.12. The verb kaaÎ in Ps. 109.24 means ‘to fall away’ (subject ‘esh’), which suggests to Hölscher, Fohrer and Lévêque the rendering ‘leanness’ (so Rowley and RSV). But the root is better attested in Hos. 7.3; 10.13; 12.1; Nah. 3.1; Isa. 30.9, and possibly Ps. 59.12 (EVV 11) meaning ‘falsehood’. So after Isa. 30.9, bnîm keÎîm, we would read keÎî (‘my false accuser’; so Delitzsch, Dhorme, Peters, Kissane and Stevenson). ‘nh be (lit. ‘to answer against’, ‘to testify against’) is a regular usage in the OT. beny could mean simply ‘against me’, but pnay should probably be emphasized, meaning ‘to my face’. 9. For ’appô Óra (‘his wrath made [me] a prey’), cf. Amos 1.11, which is, however, generally emended after Jer. 3.5, S and V to yiÓÓ¿r …’appô. Óam, and particularly the MT of the present passage, is supported by be’ yiÓemûnî (‘they persecute me in anger’) in Ps. 55.4. raq is well known, ‘to gnash the teeth’ in the Plaint of the Sufferer in the Psalms (e.g. Pss. 35.16; 37.12), a gesture of mocking, anger (Acts 7.54) or of misery and regret (Mt. 8.12). For yilÓ¿Î ‘ênyw lî (‘he sharpens his eyes at me’; cf. whetting a sword in Ps. 7.13 [MT 12]), is a daring, but not unintelligible, gure (cf. English ‘looking daggers’). 9c, 10. The change to the plur. is abrupt, the subjects being indenite, and the sufferings of Job elaborated in the convention, style and language of the Plaint of the Sufferer in the Psalms, as in vv. 8-9 as distinct from vv. 11ff., where the subject is God, suggesting that vv. 8-10, and certainly vv. 9c-10, is a secondary insertion (so G.B. Gray, Hölscher, Fohrer, Lévêque). pa‘arû beîhem (‘they gape…with their mouths’) is repeated in 29.23, indicating a conventional gure from the Plaint of the Sufferer, like the buffeting of the cheeks in 1
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insult (beerph hikkû leyy [pausal]); cf. Lam. 3.30; Isa. 50.6; Mic. 4.14; Mt. 28.67f., where it was the supreme insult. yiÓmalle’û ‘lay may mean ‘they mass against me’; cf. the band (mel¿’) of shepherds who mass together when a lion attacks a herd (Isa. 31.4). Alternatively it might mean ‘they support one another’; cf. Arab tamla’u ‘alaya (‘they supported one another against me’). The phrase may be a military gure, referring to general mobilization, millô’ (Thomas 1952: 47ff.). 11. For ‘wîl, ‘awwl is read in one Heb. MS, indicating a habitually bad man, which should probably be preferred. In MT yirÓnî, the initial y should be taken as a radical, suggesting the emendation to the Piel perfect yreÓanî from a root cognate with Arab. waraÓa (‘to throw’)—so an apt parallel to wayyasgîrnî (‘and he has delivered me up’). 12. wayyearpernî is the Pilpel of prar, used in the Hithpalel in Isa. 24.19 of an earthquake and in the Polel in Ps. 74.13 of God’s rough handling of the sea in parallelism with Îibbr. G.R. Driver (1955: 78) cites Arab. farfara (‘shook’), as of a sheep mangled by a beast of prey, hence our translation ‘worried’. In the parallel colon he took the verb wayyeaÑpeÑnî as cognate with Arab. faÑfaÑa (‘to be dismembered’). The conception of the sufferer as a butt for God recalls 7.20, where miga‘ (‘something to be hit when aimed at’) is used for maÓÓrh in the present passage, meaning literally ‘something to be aimed at’. More specically the whole passage recalls Lam. 3.12: dra¤ qaÎtô wayyaÑÑînî kammaÓÓrh lhÑ he bent his bow and set me up as a target for his arrow.
13. MT rabbyw, where the context demands the meaning ‘his archers’, would be derived from the verb ra (‘to be numerous’), and so should be emended to rôîm, from rh (‘to shoot arrows’); cf. Gen. 21.20, r¿eh qeÎeÓ (‘archer’). The verb pla (Piel) is used in Prov. 7.23 of an arrow piercing the liver of an adulterer. ‘Pouring out my gall (merrÓî, lit. “my bitterness”) on the ground’ recalls Lam. 2.11, where keî (‘my liver’) is the object of the same verb Îpa¤. This passage may have suggested v. 13c of the present passage as a secondary expansion. 14. The gure is now that of an assault upon a fortied city. praÑ is used of the breaching of a city wall in 2 Kgs 14.13; Isa. 5.5; Ps. 80.13; etc.; cf. Ass. parâÑu. ‘al-penê means ‘over and above’. In the charge of the warrior (gibbôr), Job may be alluding to Eliphaz’s gure of the wicked charging God in deance (15.26).
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15. The verb tar (‘to sew’) is rare in the OT, occurring only here, and in Gen. 3.7 (J), Eccl. 3.7, and in the Piel in Ezek. 13.18. It probably does not mean here that the coarse, black cloth (aq) was sewn on to the skin, but that it was stitched for permanent wear and worn next to the skin (gele). This word is a hapax legomenon in the OT, where ‘ôr is regular, but it is the regular word for ‘skin’ in Ass., Aram. and Arab. ‘¿laltî e‘r qarnî (‘and I must lower my horn in the dust’), where the verb is a hapax legomenon in the OT, is now attested in the Ras Shamra text Gordon UT 137.23, where the gods in shame and humiliation ‘lower their heads upon their knees’ (tly ’ilm r’iÎthm lzr brktm). The horn symbolizes strength as regularly in the OT. 16. omarmerû means ‘are reddened’ (so Koehler–Baumgartner). The root is not attested in this sense in the OT, but is regular in Arab. (’amaru, ‘red’). amarmar (‘to be in a ferment’) in Lam. 1.20; 2.11 (subject m‘ay, ‘my bowels’) is evidently a homonym. On ‘a‘appayim (‘eyes’ rather than ‘eyelids’), see on 3.9. 17. ‘al here signies ‘though’, the phrase recalling Isa. 53.9, ‘al l¿’-ms ‘h (‘though he had done no violence’). 18-21. Here the writer develops the accepted belief in the automatic claim of blood shed violently for vengeance, which was only allayed when covered with soil. This is well illustrated in Ezek. 24.8, ‘to rouse up wrath to take vengeance I have set her blood on the bare surface of the rock so that it may not be covered’; cf. Isa. 26.21, ‘and the earth will uncover the blood which is in it and will not cover any more those who are slain on it’. The conception of blood crying for vengeance from the ground after Cain’s murder of Abel (Gen. 4.10f.) is another graphic illustration of that principle. The verbs kissh (‘cover’) and z‘aq (‘cry’) here re-echo those passages, and, we believe, occasioned the corruption of z‘Óî (‘my owing blood’) to za‘aqÓî (‘my cry’) in v. 18b. The same conception might underlie 31.38a. See below ad loc. 18. ‘al-yehî mqôm leza‘aqÓî (‘let there be no place for my cry’) raises the difculty of the interpretation of mqôm, which is taken variously as a place where the cry stops (so G.B. Gray, Hölscher, Horst, Guillaume, Fohrer, Lévêque) or where it is hidden (Dhorme) or stied (Stevenson). Taking za‘aqÓî as a corruption of z‘Óî (‘my owing blood’), cognate of Arab. waa‘a, we should have the required parallel to dmî (‘my blood’) with a more natural association with mqôm in its normal sense of ‘place’, or as meaning ‘grave’ or resting place, as in the Phoenician inscription of Eshmunazar (Cooke 1903: 159ff. ll. 3-4); cf. Ezek. 39.11, where mqôm is a synonym of qeer (‘grave’), cited by Dahood (1962: 61f.). The theme is resumed in 19.25. 1
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19. gam-‘atth introduces a new, and here most signicant proposition, that of a superhuman witness for Job. bammerômîm is formally ambiguous, meaning possibly ‘among the exalted ones’, a meaning attested only twice in the OT in the late passages Isa. 24.4 and Eccl. 10.6, and ‘in the high places’, the usual meaning in the OT, which is supported here by the parallel beÎÎmayim. The Aram. haî, the synonymous parallel of ‘î (‘my witness’), is a regular feature in the language of the Book of Job; cf. ahaûÓ’ in Gen. 31.47, where the Aram. is attested by the form and by the fact that a Heb. equivalent is given. 20. MT melîÑay r‘y means either ‘my friends are those who mock me’ (from lîÑ) or, reading mimmelîÑ r‘y (‘from the scofng of my friends’), which might possibly connect with v. 20b, if we include ’el-’elôah, ’el-’eloah daleh ’ênî (‘I look to God with wakeful eye’). But this breaks the sequence of thought between vv. 19 and 21, and might be suspected as a secondary intrusion, which the defective metre might suggest. The function of an intermediary between God and humans in vv. 19 and 21, however, suggests a mediator, the mlîÑ in fact of 33.23f. In this case MT melîÑay r‘y would require emendations such as melîÑ r‘î (‘one who may interpret my cry’), which would better accord with v. 21. If v. 20 is to be retained as part of the original text, the regularity of the metre might be restored by reading ’el-’elôah (so Pope), reading the verse melîÑ r‘î ’el-’elôah ’lyw daleh ‘ênî (‘one who will interpret my cry to God; to such a one my eye is ever wakeful’). LXX, however, reads ‘May my prayer come unto the Lord’, thus supporting the reading r‘î, which is attested in Mic. 4.9 and Ps. 139.2. This suggested to Dhorme the reading lemÑ’ r‘î ’el-’elôah (‘May my cry reach God!’) taking the verb as optative perfect, regular in Arab. and occurring in Ugaritic, introduced by the enclitic le. mÑ’, in this sense, as possibly in 11.7, is to be recognized as cognate of Aram. meÓ’. On this view the asseverative enclitic le and mÑ’ would have been displaced to give the reading melîÑî (nal y of MT being a dittograph of ’ in the Old Heb. script), perhaps under the inuence of 33.23f. But mlîÑ is well established with the nuance of ‘intercessor’ in the Elihu addendum, which was not much later than the main part of the Book of Job, so that there is nothing strange in the idea being familiar to the author of the Book. The word signies an ‘interpreter’ of the language in Gen. 42.33 and in two Phoenician inscriptions (CIS, I, 44, 88), and the object r‘î indicates that this is the sense of mlîÑ if this reading is original in v. 20a. On the reading we have adopted an extra beat is required in v. 20b. Dhorme inserts lenyw after dleh, after which he assumes that it has been omitted by haplography. But we nd Pope’s suggestion more acceptable, that ’lyw, occurring before dleh, was omitted by haplography after ’el-’elôah. The verb dla is problematic. It occurs in Eccl. 10.16 referring to the collapse of a house, having an Ugaritic cognate. This is evidently the sense of the verb in Ps. 119.28, dleh naÎî, as suggested by the antithetic parallel qayyemnî. In 1
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Prov. 19.13; 27.15, dele denotes the dripping of rain, which has suggested the translation of v. 20b as ‘my eye drops (tears)’; but this rendering breaks the sequence of thought in the context. The phrase in v. 20b recalls Isa. 38.14f. from the Plaint of the Sufferer in Hezekiah’s lamentation, where the verb is dlal, possibly a corruption of dla, which would suit the context better, since the sufferer is orientated ‘to on high’, like Job in v. 19, and calls on God to stand surety for him (‘orenî, Isa. 38.14b; cf. Job 17.3a). A fresh approach is opened by Fohrer, who adduces Akk. dalâpu (‘to be sleepless’) as a possible cognate of a homonym of Heb. dla in its two known senses, which gives more meaning in the context of vv. 19 and 20. 21. The sing. weyô¤a (‘that he might argue’) would indicate that the ‘witness’ and the ‘interpreter’ were one and the same, and ‘im-’elôah would seem to preclude the notion of God as the heavenly witness testifying against himself, as Dhorme suggests (so G.B. Gray, Fohrer, Lévêque). In ûen-’m, w is probably a corruption of k in the Old Heb. script, as T and V indicate, hence our reading keen-’m ler‘hû. Here we would take ben-’m as ‘a human being’ and r‘hû not as ‘his friend’, but as ‘another’; cf.’îÎ ler‘hû (‘one to another’), a regular phrase in the Old ‘Testament. We should further stress the meaning of le, ‘in the interest of’, supporting the role of Job’s witness and interpreter in contention with (‘im) God in the rôle of accuser. 22. Job, as the psalmist cited in the lament of Hezekiah in Isa. 38.14f., alleges the brevity of his life and the negative prospect of death and decline on the journey of no return, ’¿ra l¿’-’Îû (cf. Akk. uru¨u la taru, cited by Dhorme). mispr qualifying a noun means ‘few’, that is, so few that may be counted; cf. meÓê mispr (Gen. 34.30; Ps. 105.12; etc.) and Arab. darhimu ma‘ddatu(n), the few dirhams for which Joseph was sold. ’at’ (‘to come’) is the regular Aram. and Arab. verb ‘to come’, which is also used in Classical Heb., though less extensively. In this part of Job’s reply to Eliphaz he signicantly passes from mourning in sackcloth (vv. 15-16) to the condent assertion of his innocence. Indeed, he makes a dramatic appeal for justice in the gure of the well-known convention of vengeance for blood spilt (v. 18) which cries for vengeance and the vindication of the victim, like the blood of innocent Abel shed by Cain (Gen. 4.11). The implication of Job’s appeal could not be plainer. God must admit justice. The question is: Who should call him to account? Orthodox theology, regarding God as nal authority and as the nal cause of suffering as retribution for sin, could not admit investigation of Job’s case beyond the temporal experience. But condent of his innocence and of God’s moral order, Job raises his case to a new dimension in referring it to a heavenly court, reminiscent of the court in the Prologue, a member of which, unlike the Ón, would be a natural upholder of the Order of the Divine Sovereign. Such a one might testify on his behalf and present his case intelligibly and 1
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sympathetically to God. Job further invites, one might almost say challenges, God to assume a pledge or guarantee for him (17.3). This declaration signies Job’s absolute condence in his innocence and in the ultimate recognition of it by God, who would not be asked, nor would he be expected, to risk his credit by going bail in a dubious case. It is at once a daring challenge by Job and an expression of his condence in God’s justice. If we were disposed, like Dhorme and others, to see in Job’s appeal to God to confront Himself in the sufferer’s interest, we might admit the proposition to the extent that it is an appeal in condence to the living God to vindicate His nature and economy against what orthodox theology in its inherent limitation had systematized. Chapter 17 Job’s Rejoinder to Eliphaz (continued) Job’s lamentation for his suffering (7, 11f.) permitted, if not actually inicted, by God (6) and his hopeless prospect of a short remaining life and the oblivion of death (12-16) is the theme of this chapter. The gloom, however, is relieved by Job’s reference of his case to God in calling on him to undertake the responsibility of bail in complete condence of his innocence. 1.
2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
1
‘My spirit is broken! My days are extinguished! Only burial for me! Surely I am the butt of mockers,1 And my eye is weary2 with their contention. Lay down a pledge3 for me, (For) who will take it upon himself to give surety for me? Since you have closed their minds to understanding, You will not let them prevail.4 “One who makes a lavish party5 for others While his own children faint.” But you have set me up6 as a byword7 to the peoples. One in whose face men spit; And my eye has grown dim through vexation, And my limbs are spent8 like a shadow. 9The
righteous are shocked by this, And the innocent is indignant at the impious. But let the righteous man hold to his way And the pure of hands will gain strength. But come on again, all of you,10 I shall not nd a wise man among you.9 My days have passed away without (the realization of) my plans,11 My heart’s desires12 are torn away; Night is appointed13 for a day, And light14 is near to darkness.
The Book of Job 13.
Surely I have no hope! Sheol is my home! I spread15 my bed in darkness.
14.
I call the Pit my father, Worms my mother and sister. Where then is my hope, And as for my piety, who will observe it? Will they go down to Sheol with me?16 Shall we all together go down17 to the dust?’
15. 16.
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Textual Notes to Chapter 17 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.
Reading hôÓelîm for the hapax legomenon haÓ¿lîm as the personal antecedent to the pronominal sufx in hamrôtm (see also Commentary). Reading til’enn (energic form of the imperfect), assuming corruption of ’ to y in the Old Heb. script. Reading ‘erb¿nî with S and T for MT ‘orebnî. Reading ter¿memm or terîmm for MT ter¿mm. Conjecturing yî for MT yaggî. See Commentary ad loc. Reading wattaÑÑinî for MT wehiÑÑianî. Reading limeÎal with LXX, Aq., Theod., T, Sym., and V for MT limeοl. Reading klû for MT kullm, assuming corruption of w to m in the Old Hebrew script. Probably a secondary expansion. See Introduction to Chapters 16–17. Reading wekulle¤em with S, V and certain Heb. MSS for MT kullm and omitting we’ûlm as a dittograph before kullam. Reading mizzimôÓay for MT zimmôÓay, prepositional m (privative) being omitted by haplography after w in the Old Hebrew script. Reading ma’areÎê for MT m¿rÎê. See Commentary ad loc. Reading hûm for MT yîmû, reading nal w of yîmû with the following word, y being a corruption of h in the Old Heb. script. Reading we’ôr for MT ’ôr. See textual note 13. Reading raatî or ribbatî for MT rippatî. Reading beyî (perhaps spelt beî, as in Phoenician inscriptions) as suggested by LXX (ha‘immî), for MT baddê. Reading naÓ as suggested by Sh for MT nhat.
Commentary on Chapter 17 1. Proposed emendations of MT ymay and niz’¤û are designed to secure a 3:3 rhythm, for example rûî hubblh ‘immî ne‘ezeû qerîm lî (‘My spirit is destroyed within me, the grave remains for me’; so Fohrer after Duhm). For this meaning of ‘za, Duhm cited Isa. 18.6, where, however the sense is ‘abandoned’. If those proposals were accepted we should prefer the sense ‘prepared’, taking the verb as cognate with Ugaritic ‘db. In Job’s anguish, however, the 2:2:2 metre is not unapt, and we nd no reason to emend MT. al is cognate with Ass. abâlu, Aram. and Syr. abbl and Arab. ¨abala (‘to ruin, destroy’). za’a¤, a hapax legomenon in the OT, is possibly a byform 1
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of the more familiar d‘a¤ (‘to be extinguished’), which would be quite appropriate to ‘my day’, sc. ‘daylight’. The plural qerîm may be abstract ‘burial’ or a case of pluralis excellentiae for emphasis. 2. ’im here, as in 30.25 and 31.36, may be interrogative, but, with the negative, we prefer to take it as the introduction to a strong asseverative with ellipse of an oath. After the ancient versions, later commentators have taken haÓulîm as an abstract plural (‘mockery’) from the known verbal root hÓal, and have emended MT hammerôÓm to tamrûrîm (‘bitterness’); so Duhm and Dhorme after V and S. We would read the participle h¿Óelîm as antecedent to the pronominal sufx in hamrôÓm (for MT hammerôÓm), the Hiphil innitive construct of a root mrh cognate with Syr. mr’ and Arab. mara(y) (‘to dispute’). Here we may note Dahood’s ingenious suggestion that the couplet reects Canaanite mythology, where Baal sends his emissaries to Mt (Death) in his city Hmry (‘Ruin’), on the way to which they come to ‘the two mounts which hem in the earth’ (‘im tlm Ñr ’arÑ), on the basis of which Dahood suggests the reading of Job 17.2: ’im l¿’ hattillayim ‘immdî ûahamîrôÓayim tlîn ‘ênî Surely the twin mounts are before me, and in the two miry depths my eyes will sleep.
While this would amplify v. 1c, it does not accord with the sequel, with the reference to the third parties in v. 4, which demands an antecedent, which we would nd in h¿Óelîm. 3. imh requires an object, which suggests the emendation of MT ‘orenî to the noun ‘erbônî (‘my pledge’, i.e. ‘a pledge for me’). Dhorme regards the pledge as given by Job, consisting of his sufferings. But the pledge was given by another, a guarantor that one under disability would not default, hence, as there is no other who may ‘strike hands’ with Job, that is, go bail for hire (cf. Prov. 6.1; 17.18; 22.26), God is appealed to deposit a pledge with himself. Horst avoids, or evades, the difculty of God entering a pledge with himself by taking îmh, as is possible, as ‘set’ or ‘x’, but the reexive yittqa‘ in the parallel colon (‘take upon himself to strike hands’) indicates that it is God himself who is asked to go bail as in Hezekiah’s prayer (Isa. 38.14). 4. Ñan, as well as meaning ‘to hide’, means ‘to take into storage’, that is, into safe keeping, hence the sense here ‘to close up’, the preposition in mi¤el being privative. 5. We propose that MT leq here is a cognate of Arab. alqu(n) (‘circle’), so ‘a party’ (cf. Arab. alaqa in the II form (‘to meet round a table’) and that yaggî is a corruption of an original yaî cognate with Arab. jda, yajdu (‘to be excellent’) (cf. jaudu[n], ‘generosity’, and the verb in the V form, ‘to vie in generosity’). The couplet is probably a popular proverb meaning 1
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‘Charity begins at home’. Fohrer takes it to apply to God, whose benecence, frequently instanced in Hymns of Praise, contrasts with his treatment of Job. But in view of Job’s animadversions on the alienation of his friends (v. 2) we regard the proverb as referring to the prodigality of their admonitions and perhaps the lavish scattering of their pearls of wisdom and their disproportionate sympathy for their worthy friend in his spiritual need. We would take r‘îm, without the pronominal sufx, not as ‘friends’ but as ‘others’, in contrast to bnyw in v. 5b (cf. 16.21 and the phrase ’îš ler‘hû, ‘one among others’). For the ‘wasting’ of the eyes, that is, fainting, cf. 11.20; Lam. 2.11; 4.17; Ps. 69.4 (EVV 3). 6. hiÑÑî, from yÑa, is used of setting up rmly and deliberately, for example, a cult-object on its base, like Gideon’s ephod at Ophrah (Judg. 8.27), or the Ark in the temple of Dagan (1 Sam. 5.2) and at Jerusalem (2 Sam. 6.17). Thus it is aptly used of setting up as an example (mÎl) or warning. The phrase limeÎal ‘ammîm recalls wehyîÓ…lemÎl… le¤ol h‘ammîm in the context of indelity to the Covenant obligations in Deut. 28.37; cf. Ps. 44.15 (EVV 14). For MT t¿eÓ lenîm V reads lienêhem and Perles proposed to read m¿Ó (‘a portent’) (so Beer, Budde, Klostermann, Ball, Stevenson). But MT may be retained and translated ‘one in whose face men spit’ (so Gray, Hölscher, Horst, Lévêque, Fohrer); cf. 30.9, where spitting is expressed by rîq, as in Isa. 50.6. t¿eÓ, found only here in the OT, is derived from tû (‘to spit’). 7. kh (‘to be dim, extinguished’) is used of the eyes in Gen. 27.1 and 1 Sam. 3.2 and of the wick of a lamp in Isa. 42.3. Vexation (ka‘as) is said to impair the sight, as after weeping, in Ps. 6.8 (EVV 7). yeÑurîm (lit. ‘the things that are fashioned’) is taken by Rashi after T to mean ‘limbs’ which are ‘spent’ (klû for MT kullm); so Houbigant, Reiske, Ehrlich, Duhm, Hölscher, Fohrer. ‘Like a shadow’ may denote either emaciation or rapid failing like a passing shadow. 9-10. Possibly a secondary expansion. See Introduction to Chapters 16–17. 8. yiÓ‘¿rr (pausal) means ‘grows excited’, here in indignation. Indignation (hiÓhrh) against the wicked, ourishing with apparent impunity, is the theme of Ps. 37.1, 7, 8. On n, see above on 8.15. 10. Omitting ’ûlm metri causa, we of itself in the context having adversative force. In view of the second person plur. of the verbs, kulle¤em should probably with read with some Heb. MSS, S and V (so Dhorme, G.B. Gray and others). 11. zimmh, from zmam, means ‘plan, device’, usually in a sinister sense, but it is also used of God’s gracious ‘purpose’ for Jerusalem in Zech. 8.15 and in a 1
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neutral sense in Prov. 2.11; 3.21; 5.2. ma’areÎê (‘wish, desire’), which we read for MT m¿rÎê (see Textual Note), supplies the parallel to zimmh. It is known in the form ’areÎeÓ in Ps. 21.3, and in the verbal form in Ugartic ’arÎ and Akk. ereÎu. 12. If MT yîmû, with the subject indenite, is read in its usual sense ‘they make (night day)’, the verse would contradict the general sense of the passage. The versions give no help, nor are the interpretations of later commentators unanimous or convincing. Hence we suggest the reading: layelh leyôm hûm we’ôr qrô minnî-¿Îe¤ Night is appointed for day, And light is near to darkness.
The verse now agrees with the context. 13. On the emendation ribbatî, lit. ‘I have laid down the blankets (marbaddîm)’ for MT rippatî see Textual Note. The perfect here and in v. 14 may be understood as a declaratory perfect. The making of one’s bed in Sheol recalls Ps. 139.8, where the verb is yÑa‘ (cf. yeÑûa‘ ‘bed’). 14. The personication of ‘the Pit’ (haÎÎaaÓ) as ‘my father’ and ‘Corruption’ or ‘the worm’ (rimmh) as ‘my sister’ recalls the personication of Wisdom as ‘my sister’ in Prov. 7.4 and is an old literary gure in Canaanite poetry, as for example the Ras Shamra Legend of Krt, Gordon UT 127.35f.: km ’a¨t ‘rÎ mdw ’anÎt ‘rÎ zbln (‘Sickness is thy bedfellow, inrmity thy concubine’). 15. The apparent repetition of tiqwÓî in the couplet is almost inconceivable in a work with the range of vocabulary of Job, hence the second incidence of the word has been emended to tôbÓî (‘my prosperity’) after LXX by Merx, Bickell, Siegfried, Duhm, Hölscher, Stevenson, Horst). Guillaume (Promise and Fullment, ed. F.F. Bruce, 1963, p. 113) proposed to see in the second tiqwÓî Arab. taqway (‘piety, fear of God’), reecting his view of the provenance of the Book of Job in the Hejaz. See Introduction, pp. 35-36. 16. MT baddê (‘bars’, cf. 18.3; 41.4, lit. ‘limbs’; cf. the ‘staves’ on which the ark was carried, Exod. 25.13, 14, 15 etc.) is doubtful. LXX renders the colon ‘or with me will they go down?’, which may suggest haeyî (so Dhorme, citing Ass. ina idi, lit. ‘by my hand’, i.e. ‘beside me’). This is supported by the parallel yaa. MT, pointed in scriptio defectiva bîî, as regularly in Phoenician inscriptions, may be preferred. naÓ must be pointed naÓ (‘shall we descend?’); so LXX, as the parallel tran indicates. The verb is Aram. neaÓ, but has a Ugaritic cognate. 1
Job 18 THE REPLY OF BILDAD
Like Eliphaz, Bildad abandons the attempt to bring Job to confess sin and seek God’s grace. In an introductory strophe (18.2-4) he upbraids Job for presuming that he was wiser than his friends and for adducing his case to call the theodicy in question. From this point he goes on in six strophes of three bicola each, except the last, which is of two bicola (18.5-7, 8-10, 11-13, 14-16, 1719, 20-21), to assert the theodicy in stating the fate of the wicked, whose sin brings its own nemesis, in a series of vivid gures. The literary afnity of the opening strophe is with the contention at law and the sapiential controversy, and that of the sequel is the sapiential discourse or the subject of sin and retribution. The statement begins with what is probably the citation of a proverb, ‘the light of the wicked is put out’ (cf. Prov. 13.9, with ‘lamp’ for ‘light’), which is cited again in 21.17, to be exploded by Job. The theme is then sustained in gures familiar in the assertion of faith in providence or the imprecation of the sufferer in poems of the type of the Plaint of the Sufferer, many of which reect the empiric observations of the sage. 1.
And Bildad the Shuhite answered and said:
2.
‘How long until you stop speaking?1 Consider2 and we3 shall speak. Why are we considered as beasts, Accounted dull4 in your sight? You, who are one who rends himself in his anger, Shall the earth be foresaken for your sake, And the rock be shifted from its place?
3. 4.
5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 1
Yea, the light of the wicked5 is quenched, And the ame of his re does not shine. The light in his tent is darkened, And his lamp above him goes out. His mighty strides are restricted,6 And his own plan makes him stumble.7 For he goes unrestrained into the net with his own feet And he walks on to the hurdle; The trap catches hold of his heel, The noose closes tight on him;
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10.
The snare for him is hidden in the ground, Yea, his trap on the path.
11.
All around terrors overwhelm him And they surround8 him right to his feet. His strength will become cowardice, With disaster ready by his side. 9His skin is eaten away by disease,9 The rst-born of Death devours his limbs.
12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.
He is torn from his secure tent10 And marched11 before the king of terrors; Flame12 settles on his tent, 13 Brimstone is scattered13 on his homestead. His roots dry up below And his branch withers above. His memory perishes from the earth, And he has no name abroad. He is thrust out from the light into darkness; He is chased from the world, Without kith and kin among his own people, And without survival where he has lived in asylum. At his fate folk of the West are appalled, And folk in the East are seized14 with horror. Surely these are the dwellings of the wrong-doer, And this is the place of the man who would not acknowledge God.’
Textual Notes to Chapter 18 1.
2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.
1
Reading sing. teîmenn (energic) for MT teîmûn and qÑ for MT qinÑê after 11QtargJob and LXX, and taking y of qinÑê as a corruption of ’ in the Old Heb. script and reading ’el-millîn for MT lemillîn. Reading the singular teînenn (energic) for MT tînû. Reading ’ananû for MT ’aar after LXX. Reading neÓamm¿nû for MT niÓmînû. Reading rš‘ for MT reš‘îm, agreeing with the sing. pronom. sufx in v. 5b. Reading yÑrû for MT yÑerû. Reading weÓa¤šîlhû with LXX for MT wetašlî¤hû. Reading wehiqqîuhû for MT weheîÑuhû. Reading y’¤l bieway ‘ôrô for MT y¿’¤l baddê ‘ôrô. Reading m’ ¿hel mitaô for MT m’oholô mitaô. Reading weyaÑ‘ihû for MT weÓaÑ‘ihû. Reading mabbl for MT mibbelî (lô yez¿reh). Reading lîzôrah (Pual with enclitic le introducing imperfect) for MT lô yez¿reh. See Commentary ad loc. Reading ’az for MT ’azû, nal w being a dittograph after z in the last development of the Heb. script. Alternatively the passive ’uazû may be read, taking š‘ar (MT ‘ar) adverbially, as proposed by Dahood (1962: 63).
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Commentary on Chapter 18 2. In view of Bildad’s address to Job in vv. 4ff., the singular of the verbs in vv. 2f. should be read, with energic ending and corruption of nal w of the verbs from energic n. On our proposed reading, teîmenn qÑ ’l-millîn, based on 11QtargJob and LXX, see above, p. 80. 3. An original be‘ênek was probably corrupted to MT be‘enêkem after the corruption of the verbs in v. 2 to the plural following the failure to recognize the energic ending of the imperfect sing. On the corruption of an original neÓamm¿nû (‘we are dull’) from Ómam with a Syr. cognate, see above, p. 81. 4. Bildad, having accused Job of treating his interlocutors as brute beasts, accuses Job of intensifying his sufferings by agonizing over the moral problem and scorning the comfort of orthodoxy, thus preying upon himself. He also animadverts on Job’s accusation of God as rending him like a wild beast (16.9). In v. 4a Bildad objects that Job’s claim to exception from the consequences of sin that he and his friends had accepted as the moral order of suffering is tantamount to his questioning God’s Order in Creation (cf. Pss. 90.2; 93.2). In the sequel he cites instances of the moral order he assumes, while pressing his indictment of Job. Ó¿r našô be’appô, though the participle is in the vocative and the two following nouns are with the 3rd sing. pronom. sufx, is no problem, since the reference is to a category; cf. 2 Kgs 9.31, cited by G.B. Gray (zimrî h¿r ’aônyw, ‘Thou Zimri who slew his master’). 5. šeî (‘ame’), attested in MT only here and in the Aram. part of Dan. (3.22; 7.9), is found in Ben Sira 8.10; 45.19. It is not to be taken forthwith as an Aramaism, being possibly attested in Ugaritic as Þbb in Gordon UT ‘nt III.43. The statement of the light of the wicked being quenched (vv. 5f.) possibly cites a regular proverb, and is explicitly contradicted by Job in 21.17. 7. MT yÑerû should be emended to yÑrû from Ñrar, a stative verb meaning ‘to be restricted’. ’ôn is parallel to k¿a (‘strength’) at 40.16. The restriction of the strong footsteps is characteristic of age or weakness; the length of the steps expresses strength, condence and prosperity; see, for example, Ps. 18.37 (EVV 36): ‘You lengthen (tarî) my steps (Ña‘aay) under me, and my ankles do not totter’, and cf. in the Mesopotamian myth of Atra¨asis, ‘their long legs have become quite short’ (Labat 1970: 133). On the reading wea¤šîlhu, see Textual Note. In ‘aÑô and in beralyw (v. 8a) we suggest that the pronominal sufxes should be emphasized: ‘his own counsel’ and ‘with his own feet’. 8. The passive (Pu‘al) šulla is found again in Judg. 5.15, where the emphasis is on free and spontaneous, and indeed, impetuous movement; cf. Prov. 29.15, 1
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na‘ar mešull mîš ’immô (‘an unrestrained boy brings shame to his mother’). The gure of the wicked caught in a trap probably reects the theme of the wicked caught in his own trap in the Plaint of the Sufferer in Pss. 9.11; 35.7; 140.6 (EVV 5). e¤h means ‘lattice-work’, such as is on the top of the pillars Yakin and Boaz in the Temple (1 Kgs 7.17ff.) and in the window of a palace (2 Kgs 1.2). The conception of walking on lattice-work is found again in Ben Sira, where the word is reše (usually a ‘net’). What is envisaged is obviously a light hurdle concealed by grass and earth covering a pit. 9. pa is a spring trap such as closes up and takes hold (y¿’z) of its victim, like that which springs up from the ground and grips (l¤a) its victim (Isa. 24.18; Jer. 48.44; Eccl. 7.26). Ñammîm, derived from Ñmam, cognate either with Arab. amma (‘to draw tight’) or with Arab. Ñamma (‘to enwrap’, as with a bandage) probably denotes the noose of a snare. 10. alô (‘his line’), if it does not denote a snare, may mean a rope stretched over a path to trip the unwary; cf. Ps. 140.6 (EVV 5), which refers to alîm. mal¤utô, derived from l¤a (cf. Amos 3.5), is indeterminate. The various kinds of trap, reše, pa and eel are mentioned in the Plaint of the Sufferer in Ps. 140.6. 11. MT weheîÑhû (‘and they scatter him’) is suspect. Ezekiel 34.21, cited by Dhorme in support of MT, is doubtful evidence. G.R. Driver (1953b: 256ff.) proposes that the verb is cognate of Arab. fÑa, which in the IV form means ‘to micturate’, hence the consequence of extreme fear, which would suit the context. But in view of sî in v. 11a, wehiqqîuhû seems a more likely reading, assuming the scribal error of metathesis of p and q with corruption of q to Ñ in the Old Heb. script. 12. MT r‘ in its usual sense of ‘hungry’ has been accepted by most commentators (so Duhm, Dhorme, Szczygiel, Ball, Kissane, Pope, Fohrer), though there has been difference of opinion as to the precise meaning of the colon. The matter is complicated by the meaning ’ôn in the context, which in Heb. means variously ‘strength’ (Job 18.7; cf. Gen. 49.3; Deut. 21.17; Isa. 40.26; Hos. 12.4; Ps. 105.36; Job 40.16) and ‘wealth’ (Job 20.16; Hos. 12.9). Thus r‘ must have some natural relation to ’ôn, probably in the sense of ‘strength’. G.R. Driver (1953b: 259f.) suggests that the verb (here a participle) is cognate of Arab. ra‘iba (‘to fear, be cowardly’), which does suit the context, especially v. 11a, which mentions the terrors which overwhelm the sinner. Dhorme takes leÑal‘ô (lit. ‘to his rib, side’) to mean ‘by his side’, citing the Ass. use of Ñêlu with the same force, but taking n¤ôn as ‘standing up’. We prefer the translation ‘disaster (’ê) is ready by his side’; cf. n¤ôn in this sense in 12.5 expressing the imminence of disaster. 1
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13. The apparent repetition of baddê/baddyw in MT is suspect, as usual in such cases. Wright, Budde, G.B. Gray, Tur-Sinai, Dhorme, Perles, Kissane, Hölscher, Fohrer and Pope read y’¤l bieway ‘ôrô (‘his skin’, sc. body, ‘is eaten away by disease’). Stevenson’s objection that deway (‘disease’) is doubtful is hypercritical in view of the phrase ‘ere deway in Ps. 41.4 (EVV 3) and the occurrence of deway with this meaning in 6.7 and the incidence in Aram., Syr. and Arab., cf. mdw in Ugaritic. ‘Skin’ (‘ôr) here, as parallel to baddw (‘his limbs’), if it does not mean simply ‘body’, may denote the skin as the part of the body where the disease makes its rst visible ravages. Death is personied on the precedent of the highly anthropomorphic Canaanite mythology in the Ras Shamra texts. On ‘the rst-born of Death’ (be¤ôr mweÓ), Dhorme aptly cites the Mesopotamian conception that the plague-god Namtaru is termed ‘the Grand Vizier of the Queen of the Underworld’, an ofce which is also expressed in the idiom of Mesopotamian mythology by the designation of this gure as ‘the rst-born’, as Mummu was ‘the rst-born of Apsu’ (the Lower Deep) in the myth of the conquest of Chaos by Cosmos in the Babylonian New Year festival. For the Heb. usage of ‘rst-born’ to express ‘conspicuous’ or ‘foremost’, cf. Isa. 14.30, ‘the rst-born of the poor’, that is, the poorest, and Exod. 4.22, Israel as ‘the rst-born among the nations’, that is, the foremost. 14. nÓaq (‘to tear away’) is already attested at 15.11 and Jer. 6.20, and at Josh. 8.16, where it means ‘withdraw’. 15. In MT tiškôn be’oholô mibbelî-lô, tišk¿n requires a suitable subject. Just possible, but, we think, unlikely, is mibbelî-lô, ‘none of what belongs to him’, taking min as partitive. A noun feasibly suggested is the feminine lîlîÓ, ‘the Night-hag’, read by Voigt, Beer, Ball, Houtsma and Fohrer. Those suggestions, however, ignore the parallelism demanded by the reference to sulphur (gorîÓ) in v. 15b. Dhorme has suggested that sulphur may be used as a disinfectant or in a rite of separation, sc. from previous ownership or occupation, in which case the former suggestion is of itself just possible. But sulphur was also a means of destruction, as in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, where it is associated with re. Thus in v. 15a mibbelî may be a corruption of ‘re’. Here Dahood (1957: 312ff.) happily adduces the Ugaritic noun nbl (‘ame’); cf. Akk. nablu, as the original of which mibbelî is the corruption. Thus he proposes to read mabbl and to take MT lô as the corruption of emphatic enclitic le before the imperfect as in Ugaritic and Arab., thus restoring the couplet as: tiškôn he’oholhû mabbl lîz¿rh ‘al-nwhû gorîÓ Flame settles on his tent, brimstone is scattered on his homestead.
nweh is the abode of shepherds (Jer. 33.12), and is used of a house (Prov. 3.33) and even of the city of Jerusalem (Isa. 27.10; Ps. 79.7) and of the Temple (Exod. 15.13). In 5.24, as in the present passage, it is parallel to ’¿hel, with its original pastoral nuance. 1
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16. Here the fate of the wicked is described again in the gure of the tree, with its roots drying up and its branches wilting; cf. 15.30. 17. zi¤rô means ‘mention of him’ or ‘his reputation’, which preserves a man in some semblance of existence even after death according to popular belief in ancient Israel. šm (lit. ‘name’) indicates also ‘reputation’ and also a man’s actual name, which is perpetuated in his sons. ûÑ (‘outside’) is found in plural parallelism with ’ereÑ in 5.10 as here. Dhorme assumes that it means ‘desert’ in contrast to the cultivated and inhabited land ’ereÑ. This may be so in Prov. 8.26 and Ps. 144.13; cf. the Aram. rendering bar, which means both ‘outside’ and, as in the Arab. cognate, ‘desert’, but in Job the two terms may be synonymous. 18. In yehdeuhû (‘they thrust him out’) and yenidduhû, from na (‘to ee’), the 3rd plur. expresses the indenite subject, which is tantamount to the passive of the sing. na found in the Hophal in 20.8. 19. nîn and n¤e are used together in Gen. 21.23, Isa. 14.22 and Ben Sira 47.22 to denote a comprehensive number of one’s people. nîn is not attested except here and in the passages cited. It may be connected with a verb nûn, which is possibly, but doubtfully, attested at Ps. 72.17. Since n¤e is not attested beyond these passages its derivation and precise signicance are uncertain. The meaning may be rendered with similar alliteration in English ‘kith and kin’. rî means ‘survivor’ of a great danger or calamity (cf. 20.21; 27.15). Note the contrast between ‘ammô (‘his own people’), basically kinsmen, who derived their origin, like an Arab tribe, from a common ancestor ‘amm, and meûryw, to the place where he lives only as a sojourner or protected alien (gr). 20. yômô in the sense of ‘the day of his destiny’ is attested in 1 Sam. 26.10 (’im) yômô yô’ wmÓ (‘[if] his day come that he die’). Here, therefore, it signies ‘his fate’. The antithetic parallelism of ‘the folk of the West’ (’aar¿nîm) and ‘the folk of the East’ (qam¿nîm) to give a comprehensive picture recalls the passage in the Ugaritic Baal myth (Gordon UT ‘nt II.7-8) where the goddess Smites the princes by the sea-shore (sc. West), Annihilates the folk in the direction of the sunrise.
ša‘ar (‘horror’) is attested in the reduplicated forms in Jer. 5.30; 18.13 and Hos. 6.10. See Textual Note. 21. ya‘-’l is not limited to knowledge about God, but here denotes knowledge of God involving personal reaction to Him, acknowledgment rather than knowledge. 1
Job 19 JOB’S REJOINDER TO BILDAD
This speech is constructed of eight strophes (19.2-4, 5-8, 9-12, 13-16, 17-20, 21-24, 25-27, 28-29), each of three or four bicola, except the last, which consists of a bicolon and a tricolon. It is introduced by the rst strophe (vv. 24) in the convention of a legal controversy. In the address proper, Job complains in the rst two strophes (vv. 5-8, 9-12) in the convention of a plea at law, holding that God wronged him (esp. v. 6), and he elaborates on his sufferings at the hand of God in the hyperbolic and gurative language of the Plaint of the Sufferer, where the sufferer describes the alienation of his friends and associates who see his sufferings as a token of his sin and alienation from God. This serves Job to describe his own sufferings and to animadvert on the popular view of suffering as the consequence of sin as evidenced in the reaction of his friends. In the highly individualistic character of the Book of Job, it is not possible to limit the passages strictly to one literary type or another. Thus there is often a mixture of the characteristic motifs, phraseology and gures of the Plaint of the Sufferer and the legal controversy, while the conventional language and sequence of ideas in the legal controversy are often used in sapiential dispute. Thus the sixth strophe (vv. 21-24) opens with a plea for mercy in a legal context (vv. 21-22) and continues with the wish that the evidence for the accused were recorded for future reference, and in the seventh strophe (vv. 25-27) Job resumes the theme of his ultimate appeal before God, supported by a celestial witness and interpreter and possibly advocate, before his death (cf. 16.18-22). Now he declares his conviction (ya‘tî, v. 25) that he will live to see his vindication (vv. 25f.) despite his physical extremity (v. 26) and, the nal contingency, before God himself (v. 26). Chapter 19 1.
Then Job answered and said:
2.
‘How long will you torment me And crush me with words? These ten times now you approach me, You are not ashamed to seem shocked at me. And if indeed I have gone astray, My error remains my own.
3. 4. 1
268 5. 6. 7. 8.
9. 10. 11. 12.
13. 14. 15 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.
26.
1
Job 19. Job’s Rejoinder to Bildad Would you indeed assume superiority to me, And make reproach of me an argument? Then know that it is God who has wronged me, And cast his net about me. If I cry out “Violence!” I am not answered, If I cry for help there is no justice. He has walled up my path and I may not pass, He has set thorns on my path. He has stripped me of my prestige, And has taken away the crown from my head. He breaks me down utterly and I am gone, And he has uprooted my hope like a tree; And he has kindled His anger against me, And has counted me as His enemy.1 His troops come massed against me, Yea, they raise up2 their ramp against me, They camp3 around my tent. My brothers have held aloof,4 My acquaintances are mere strangers to me; My kinsmen and close friends have failed me. The sojourners in my house have forgotten me, Yea, my slave-girls treat me as an outsider, I am a stranger in their eyes. I have called to my slave and he does not answer me, I have to entreat him with my own mouth. My breath is repugnant to my wife, And I am putrid to my own children. Even children spurn me, If I rise they turn their back on me. All my intimates abhor me, And those whom I loved have turned against me. 5 My bones cleave to my skin,5 And I have escaped on the forfeiture of my esh.6 But you, my friends, pity me, pity me, For it is the hand of God that has touched me! Why do you pursue me like God, Never sated with my esh? Would that my words were written down, Would that they were engraved in an inscription7 With an iron pen and leaded, Were inscribed on the rock forever. But I myself am sure: the One who will vindicate me is vital, And the One who is the nal authority will prove himself effective on this earth, 8And though my skin is stripped from my esh Even after that I shall come face to face with God,
The Book of Job 27.
Whom I myself shall see, Whom I shall see with my own eyes,9 himself and no stranger. My reins grow faint within me…
28.
If you say “How shall we prosecute him, And nd in him a pretext for a case?”, Fear the sword for yourselves, For excessive zeal in wrong courses spells ruin.10 That you may know that there is a judge.’11
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Textual Notes to Chapter 19 Reading Ñrô with LXX, S and T for MT Ñryw. Reading weys¿llû for MT wayys¿llû. Reading weyaanû for MT wayyaanû. Reading hirîqû with LXX, Aq, Sym and S and one Heb. MS for MT hirîq, which is supported by 11QtargJob. 5. Reading be‘ôrî deqh ‘aÑmî, omitting ûierî in v. 20a. See n. 6. 6. Reading berî for MT šinny, assuming displacement from 20a. See Commentary ad loc. 7. Reading beser for MT basser. 8. Reading we‘ôrî niqqeû mibberî // we’aar z¿’ ’eezeh ’elôah. See Commentary ad loc. 9. Reading ‘ênay r’¿h for MT ‘ênay r’û. See Commentary ad loc. 10. Reading ¿re for MT ere. 11. Reading šeyyš dayyn for MT šaddîn. 1. 2. 3. 4.
Commentary on Chapter 19 2. tôyûn is the Hiphil imperfect retaining the original nal y of yh, cognate of Arab. wajiya (‘to have a pain’). It occurs in rather late passages in the OT, the earliest being Zeph. 3.18, where the text is doubtful. Otherwise the incidences are postexilic, for example, Lam. 1.4, 5, 12; 3.32, 35 and Isa. 51.23. LXX read tôî‘ûn (‘do you weary?’), but MT better suits the parallelism. Here neeš with the pronominal sufx has the force of the personal pronoun. 3. tahkerû is a hapax legomenon on which T and the early Jewish commentators show no unanimity. The verb may be a cognate of Arab. hakara (‘to be astonished’). On this assumption we would see a reference to Job’s annoyance at his friends’ affected astonishment at his protestation of innocence in the face of the conventional inference of sin from suffering. This describes the reaction of outraged orthodoxy to Job’s embarrassing questions. ‘Ten times’ means simply repeatedly. 4. As appreciated by S, we’a-’omnm means ‘and if indeed…’, the protasis of a conditional sentence without the conditional particle (GKC, §159b, h). 1
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mešûh means not deliberate or heinous sin, but rather error or sin of inadvertency (cf. Lev. 4.10; Num. 15.22) or ignorance (Ezek. 20.25); cf. Job’s admission of juvenile delinquency (13.26). 5. If, as Dhorme maintains, ’im-’omnm introduces a question expressing indignant astonishment, it is nevertheless tantamount to the protasis of a conditional sentence. This is supported by the enclitic ’ô with the imperative de‘û in v. 6a; cf. Arab. fa, which introduces the apodosis when the verb is imperative. tadîlû (lit. probably ‘affect greatness’) expresses the sense of moral superiority of the self-righteous in face of the suffering of Job believed to be retributory, an attitude which is described in similar language in Pss. 35.17 (EVV 16) and 55.13 (EVV 12). 6. meÑûô denotes a hunting implement, from the verb Ñû (‘to hunt’), which we may conjecture from the preposition ‘al to be a net. The noun is found complementary to erem (‘net’) in Eccl. 7.26 and of a net for sh in Eccl. 9.12. From this point Job desists from his address to his friends and pointedly ascribes his afictions to the inveterate enmity of God in striking gures and tone familiar in the fast-liturgy in Lam. 3.1-18. 8. The parallel with ‘he has walled up my way’ (’orî gar)—cf. Lam. 3.8— leads us to question the meaning ‘darkness’ for ¿še¤ in v. 8b, and supports Guillaume’s suggestion (1963: 114) that the word, perhaps differently pointed as š¤, is cognate with Arab. aaku(n) (‘thorns’), which are used for an obstruction to cattle. 9. keôî, here, especially in parallelism with ‘aÓere (‘crown’), might be rendered ‘glory’, though understood guratively. This, however, is a secondary development of the primary sense ‘weight, substance’, hence ‘honour’, the opposite of qellh (‘lightness’), the result of the curse, or of rîq (‘emptiness’) of natural signicance. Again, this may be the gure and motif of the Plaint of the Sufferer; cf. Lam. 5.16, ‘Fallen is the crown of our head’. The conception of humanity as the acme of God’s creation, crowned with glory and honour (Ps. 8.6 [EVV 5]), is suggested here, but the language may derive generally from the Plaint of the Sufferer, and perhaps specically from the liturgy of the fast relating to the king as the representative of the community. 10. Note the use of hla¤ (‘to pass away, be gone’); cf. 14.20. The gure of a building ruined, if this is indeed the meaning of yitteÑnî, as it normally would be in Heb., is not quite what is expected with a personal object, though it is not unintelligible (e.g. Ps. 52.7 [EVV 6]), and the military gure of the assault of a person as the breach of a besieged city. Here, as in 10.8 and 18.11, sî tips the adverbial sense of ‘utterly’. nsa‘ is used for the transplanting (after ‘uprooting’) of a vine in Ps. 80.9 (EVV 8). 1
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11. For wayyaar ‘lay ’appô S and V read ‘and His anger was kindled’ (wayyiar… ’appô), which is a familiar Heb. expression. Here, however, the Hiphil may be retained with respect to God who is not swayed by passion, but deliberately rouses his anger. In view of LXX, S and T, ‘his enemy’ (Ñrô) may be read for MT Ñryw (‘his enemies’). 12. If MT wey¿’û is read, weys¿llû must be read for MT wayys¿llu. The military metaphor of preparing a ramp or siege-mound for a battering-ram and camping round the besieged city recalls the gures in 15.25f. and 16.14; cf. God’s ‘bands’ (geûyw) in 25.3. The siege-ramp (s¿lelh) (cf. 2 Sam. 20.15; 2 Kgs 19.32 = Isa. 37.33; Jer. 6.6; Ezek. 4.2; 26.8; etc.) is well illustrated in the siege of Lachish in the reliefs from Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh (ANEP, pls. 372, 373). ‘My tent’ is hardly congruous with the gure of a siege with ramps (v. 12b), and may cast doubts on the originality of v. 12c. But the tricolon may mark the end of the strophe as occasionally in the poems from Ras Shamra. In this case ’¿hel may mean simply ‘seat’, reecting, as not infrequently in Heb., the desert origin of the Semitic penetration of the settled land, for example ‘to your tents, O Israel’. 13. The versions support the reading of MT ’a¤-zrû (‘they have simply been strangers’) as against the arrangement of the consonants in LXX, ’a¤zrû (‘they have been cruel’), which is attested as a verb in Aram. and as an adjective ’a¤zr in Heb. (cf. 30.21; 41.2; Deut. 32.23). But mimmenî (‘from me’) militates against this reading. The verb as in MT must denote conduct unnatural to brothers, relatives and friends; hence zru is a denominative verb ‘to behave as strangers’. This interpretation is supported by v. 15. 14-15. The text should be arranged: elû qerôy ûmeyudd‘ay še¤ûnî grê bêî (‘My kinsmen and close friends have failed me, the sojourners in my house have forgotten me’). The sojourner (gr) was one who had been admitted to the protection of the god of the community and to its social conventions. Such a person might be a travelling merchant, or one of those who came for seasonal grazing to a locality, a person staying abroad in a time of local famine or drought, for example, Naomi and her family in the plains of Moab (Ruth 1.1), or a refugee from blood-revenge who had been given the right of sanctuary and whom his hosts, for purposes of pride or policy, cared to maintain beyond a conventional limited period. Such a person among the Arab tribes, where there are many such, is called jru ’llhi (‘protected alien of God’). Their rights in the community of Israel were recognized, but they were exempted from the strict ritual taboo that applied to Israel (e.g. in food, Deut. 14.21), and, as recognizing the God of Israel and enjoying his protection, they were admitted to the Passover provided they were circumcised (Exod. 12.48). Such alienation of a sufferer’s friends and even relatives on the assumption that he lay under the Divine wrath is well known in the Plaint of the Sufferer, 1
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either in fact or gure, for example, in Pss. 27.10; 31; 31.12 (EVV 11); 38.12 (EVV 11); 88.9 (EVV 8); etc. The nadir of the sufferer’s afiction is the revulsion or contempt of his slaves and young people (vv. 15f.). 17. zrh is taken by Dhorme as derived from zûr (‘to be strange’), but he adduces also zûr (‘to be repugnant’), citing Haupt for this specic meaning of the Ass. zîru, of a wife feeling revulsion for her husband. rî (‘my smell’) would be as apt as MT rûî (‘my breath’). The MT pointing of weann¿î indicates nan, which is known in the Hithpael meaning ‘to entreat’, and is taken to mean this in the versions and most commentaries. But the Qal of this verb is not certainly attested, and in the context is certainly a homonym, with a Syr. cognate anînâ’ (‘putrid’). Commentators have not failed to notice that Job’s children according to the Prologue had all perished, and have explained ‘sons of my belly’ as uterine brothers, which is unlikely after the reference to brothers in v. 13 and in parallelism with ‘wife’ in v. 17. Others again (e.g. Wetzstein and W.R. Smith) take baÓnî as ‘my clan’ (cf. Arab. baÓnu[n]), but this is open to the same objection. The writer is simply using the language and imagery of the Plaint of the Sufferer to express the extremity of Job’s misery—total excommunication—without any literal application. 18. The contempt of the young boys (‘awîlîm, derived from ‘ûl, ‘to suck’, Gen. 33.13; 1 Sam. 6.7, 19; Isa. 40.11; Ps. 78.71) contrasts with the respect of the young and even the old in the presence of Job in public before his disaster (29.8). ’qûmh is the case of the cohortative introducing the protasis in a conditional sentence, without the conditional particle. The parallelism indicates that dibbr is a denominative verb ‘to turn the back’ (so Eitan 1924: 33; G.R. Driver 1934: 55f.). 19. meê sôî, ‘men who share my counsel’, that is, intimates; cf. 15.8. zeh is the relative particle (GKC, §138h), d in Aram. and Ugaritic and related to Arab. û (see above on 15.17). Here it refers to the plur. subject of the verb in the main clause; cf. Gordon UT 1024.7f.: ‘št ‘sr ršmmdtb‘ln b’ugrt (‘eleven artisans who work in Ugarit’). This passage incidentally attests features which we have noted throughout this work, the 3rd plur. masc. of the imperfect in t, the energic ending of the imperfect, the relative particle d and the phonetic variant b for p. 20. In v. 20a there is one word too many for the metre. LXX reads ‘In my skin my esh rots, my bones were ripped in my teeth’. This indicates the reading be‘ôrî berî rqa, which was read by Merx and Dhorme. In support of MT deqh, which Merx would emend to rqa, cf. Ps. 102.6: deqh ‘aÑmî lierî (‘my bones cleave to my esh’). The familiarity of the writer may account for the inclusion of ûerî in 20. Hence we would read be‘ôrî deqh ‘aÑmî (‘my bones cleave to my skin’), and suggest that the text has been upset 1
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by the failure to note a word-play in ‘ôr (‘skin’) in v. 20a, but ‘pledge’ in v. 20b; cf. Arab. ’i‘ratu(n) (‘loan’) from the root ‘ra, ya‘r, which may suggest the translation of Isa. 53.12, he‘erh lammwe našô (with slight emendation of the verb) as ‘he gave himself a pledge to death’. berî, superuous in v. 20a, seems to have been displaced from after v. 20b, where it was misunderstood after ‘ôr, taken as ‘skin’ and corrupted to šinnay. Hence in v. 20b we propose the reading w’emalleÓh be‘ôr berî (‘and I have escaped on the forfeiture of my esh’). This means that in his emaciated condition the sufferer has just survived, leaving his esh a pledge in the hands of death. 21. Job claims not censure but pity since his suffering is the touch of ‘the hand of God’, which was not to be assessed or judged by human reason; cf. the reference to ‘the hand of God’ in the plagues of Egypt, which left the local magicians incompetent (Exod. 8.15). The Arabs have a delicate reaction to illness or abnormality as ‘the touch of Allah’. 22. After the reference to ‘the hand of God’, which ought to have spared Job the censure of his friends, the MT reading ¤emô ’l would be readily intelligible, though Fohrer, presumably discriminating between ’l and ’elôah, takes ’l in the sense of ‘demon’. We might agree with Fohrer so far as to render ‘like a god’. In accordance with the inveterate opposition of Job’s adversaries in v. 22a, it is likely that the ‘eating of a person’s esh’ in v. 22b is the idiom familiar in Ass., Aram. and Syr. ‘to slander’; cf. Dan. 3.8; 6.26 and Syr. ’akalqarÑâ’ (‘the Devil’, lit. ‘slanderer’). Sexual abuse suggested by Tur-Sinai and adopted by Pope here and at 31.31 is, in our opinion, quite gratuitous. 23. LXX reads v. 24b immediately after v. 23b, v. 23a being inserted in LXX from Theodot., which would give the reading: 23a. 24a. 23b. 24b.
mî-yittn ’ô weyikkeû milly be’Ó-barzel we‘ôre mî-yittn basser weyuqû l‘a baÑÑûr yÑeûn
In v. 23b ser does not mean ‘book’, as the verb qaq (‘to engrave’) indicates, but ‘inscription’ (so Gehman 1944: 303ff., citing the word in Phoenician). An inscription on a copper plaque (Akk. siparru, Arab. sifru[n]) has been suggested (so Hölscher, Mowinckel, Terrien, Pope); cf. the copper scroll from Qumran. This, however, does not accord with the reference to lead. But there is a notable instance of an inscription engraved in rock with vestiges of lead lling possibly to preserve it against weather, but probably to make it more conspicuous and legible. This is the inscription of Darius I on the rock of Behistun (Weidner 1945–51: 146f.). This monument was doubtless well known through Jewish settlers in Persia after the Exile and to travelling merchants and other Jews with wide-spread business interests like Murashu Sons (Clay 1898). 1
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25. The passage contained in vv. 25-27 is to be understood in the context of vv. 23-24, Job’s wish that a memorial of his integrity should be inscribed on a rock as a permanent record of the justice of his case. In vv. 25ff. he goes further, declaring his certainty of actual vindication by a living vindicator (g¿’l ay). Therefore we should take kî in the adversative sense—‘But’. We agree with Fohrer that grammar demands that v. 25a should be rendered ‘I know the One who will vindicate me is vital’. No mere memorial would satisfy Job, but vindication by a living vindicator, we might fairly infer ‘the living God’. Besides the contrast to vv. 25-24, the adjective might signify the living God in contrast to the God of the orthodox dogma in the statements of Job’s friends. There may also be the nuance of ‘effective’, as Fohrer claims, cf. ’el¿hîm ay in Hezekiah’s prayer (Isa. 37.15-20 = 2 Kgs 18.29-33) with reference to the Assyrian’s questioning of the efcacy of Yahweh. This convinces us that Job’s g¿’l is God and not an intermediary, which seems to us to be corroborated by ’elôah in emphatic nal position in v. 26b in what we regard as a striking inclusio in vv. 25-26. The connotation of g¿’l in the OT, as distinct from p¿eh (one who redeems by paying the price of redemption), one who rehabilitates or vindicates, with social connotation, militates against the interpretation of the word here in the Christian sense of ‘Redeemer’ pace Handel and RV. Job’s longing throughout the Book is not for redemption from sin and its consequences, but for the vindication of his moral right, which he consistently avers until his great oath of purgation (ch. 31). Job’s vindication is cast in the gure of the g¿’l, the kinsman who has the duty of rehabilitating one of his family in his rightful possession, like Boaz in Ruth, or who avenged the blood of his kinsman (g¿’l haddm). It extended to Yahweh’s rehabilitation of his people, especially in Deutero-Isaiah; for example, in Isa. 44.6, where the Divine Vindicator is also entitled rî’šôn we’aarôn, which we consider to afford a clue to the signicance of ’aarôn in v. 25b. We seriously question whether ’aarôn here means ‘afterwards’ (T), ‘at the end’ (S), or ‘at the last day’ (V with Christian implications). The word is formally an adjective or noun. Mowinckel (1925: 211) after Siegfried (1893) took ’aarôn as the synonymous, or rather complementary, parallel of g¿’l, both referring to a celestial intermediary, and rendered ’aarôn as Bürger (‘Guarantor’ or ‘Sponsor’, so NEB). This sense of ’aarôn is not attested in the OT, but may be supported by ’aary’ in Aram. and Late Heb., and might refer to Job’s celestial supporter in 16.19. But we consider this doubtful, and on the grounds that we have already cited we are still more doubtful of Mowinckel’s view that g¿’l is an intermediary like Job’s ‘witness’ in 16.19 rather than God himself. It has been proposed that ’aarôn signies the party in a lawsuit who has the nal argument and therefore the advantage over his opponent (so G.R. Driver 1950a: 46); cf. Prov. 18.17: He who speaks in his case (seems) right; but his colleague comes forward and gives him a grilling. 1
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On the other hand, if ’aarôn has the same sense as in the Divine title rî’šôn we’aarôn (Isa. 44.6) it would refer to God as nal authority, who ultimately consummates what He has initiated, who disposes as He has proposed; hence our rendering ‘nal authority’. It has been held that Job declares his condence that he would be vindicated after death. This begs the question of the signicance of ‘r in v. 25b, which admittedly signies occasionally the ‘dust’ of the grave (17.16; 20.11; 21.26; Isa. 26.19; Ps. 22.30 [EVV 29]; Dan. 12.2), but may also mean ‘earth’, as in 5.4; 10.9; 14.1; 41.25 (EVV 33). Again Job’s appeal that his blood should remain where it has been shed, uncovered until it is avenged (16.18f.), might be cited in support of the vindication of his just cause after death. But this may be too literal an interpretation of a striking gure of speech. Any view of Job’s hope of vindication after death seems emphatically contradicted by the wholly negative prospect of death in 14.22 and elsewhere throughout the Book, for instance, in 3.13-19; 7.8-10, 21 and particularly 14.13-21, where any gleam of hope of justication after death (14.13-15) is categorically dismissed in the immediate sequel (14.14-21). We consider the question to be settled by Job’s declaration that he will see God (19.27) and, we suggest, be admitted to the confrontation (’eezeh, 19.26b) he so ardently desires. This suggests to us that the formally ambiguous ‘r means ‘(this) earth’. In this context we would note the pregnant sense of yqûm connoting the decisive and powerful intervention of God in human affairs (as in Num. 10.27; Isa. 2.19-21; Jer. 2.27; cf. Job 31.14) rather than physical stance. 26. In v. 26a MT bristles with problems. ’aar (‘after’) followed by the indicative of the verb MT niqqeû without the relative particle ’ašer is anomalous, and has suggested the reading Aram. ’ûr (‘I shall see’; cf. the critical apparatus of BH3), which might give a synonymous parallel to ’eezeh in v. 26b. On this reading ’ûr would require an object, which might be the original of MT ‘ôrî, such as ‘î (so BH3, apparatus criticus) or, nearer to MT ‘¿zerî (‘my helper’); cf. Job’s celestial supporter in 16.19, which might support Mowinckel’s understanding of ’aarôn as a celestial intermediary in chiastic parallelism. MT niqqeû z¿’ is attested in LXX, the verb being rendered variously ‘exhausted’ and ‘accomplished’, cf. V ‘enwrapped’, as from qû—the other ancient versions either ignore or offer a reading which does not reect MT or anything resembling it. The apparatus criticus in BH3 suggests the reading yizqô ’¿î, which we consider doubtful since ’e as nota accusativa in Job is practically limited to the prose Prologue and Epilogue. On this reading (‘who will raise me up?’), the verb would demand the original of MT ‘ôrî, for example ‘î, as suggested in BH3; cf. 16.19, or, we might suggest, ‘¿zerî (‘my helper’), and mešrî (‘my liberator’), both intermediaries. MT ‘ôrî and mibberî, however, are unanimously attested in the ancient versions. Thus we nd that the only viable alternative is the reading of the awkward MT after E.F. Sutcliffe (1950: 377), followed by R. Tournay (1962: 492ff.; 1967: 129) and Lévêque (1970: ad loc.): 1
276
Job 19. Job’s Rejoinder to Bildad we‘ôrî niqqa mibberî we’aar z¿’ ’eezeh ’elôah
which we would render And though my skin is stripped from my esh, Even after that I shall come face to face with God.
Taking the verb nqa in the sense it has in Isa. 10.34 (forests stripped by storm) and Isa. 24.13 (olive berries struck off), this reading has the merit of simplicity and retaining the elements of MT with rearrangement. Reecting the skin disease in the Prologue as evidence of the alienation of the sufferer from God, Job declares that though his sufferings are intensied to the ultimate degree he will be accorded the confrontation for which he longed with God as He really is (wel¿’ zr, v. 27b), sympathetic, who will vindicate the right of his faithful ‘servant’ (1.8). In vv. 26b and 27a ’eezeh is used twice, which is exceptional in Job. If in both cases the verb means ‘see’, as in v. 27ab, the reference may be to the intensity of the subject’s vision beyond the supercial, as in Amos 1.1f.; Isa. 1.1; 2.1; Mic. 1.1; Ezek. 24.4, 16; cf. the repetition of the verb in the innitive absolute and the indicative. But, according to the word-play favoured by the author of Job, ’eezeh in v. 26b might be a homonym of zh, ‘to see’, meaning ‘to confront’, the experience Job consistently desires; cf. zeh, ‘the breast’ of a sacricial animal (Exod. 29.6; Lev. 7.30; 8.29; Num. 6.20; 19.19—all P); cf. Arab. i(n), ‘opposite’, and the verb a meaning in the VIIth Form ‘to sit opposite one another’, which we prefer on stylistic grounds. 27. The last word in v. 27b, zr, is patient of various interpretations in the context. It may mean ‘strange’ in the sense of ‘other’ or ‘estranged’ and might refer to Job or to God. Baumgärtel, G.B. Gray, Weiser, Lindblom, Pope and G.R. Driver take it to refer to God as estranged from Job. Driver supports this interpretation by the assumption that lî after ’eezeh in the parallel colon means ‘on my side’. The hyphen in MT, however, indicates that lî is the ethic dative emphasizing the personal pronouns in ’anî and ‘ênay (so Terrien and Fohrer). This suggests that wel¿’-zr means ‘and no other’ (cf. Prov. 27.2; Ben Sira 40.29) referring to Job (so Dhorme, Ehrlich, Hölscher, Gordis, Fohrer after LXX). In view of Job’s complaint that he is treated by his own household as zr (v. 15), we should note the suggestion of L.A. Snijders (1954) that zr refers to Job as ‘estranged’. Whether the word refers to God or to Job, the phrase might form an apt inclusio with g¿’alî in v. 25a. We consider zr in its normal sense in the OT too strong a term for ‘other’, but in its normal sense of ‘stranger’ it is an excellent antithetic parallel to g¿’l, with the traditional implications of a kinsman as vindicator, in inclusio. An additional implication may be the contrast between ‘the living God’ as Job’s vindicator and that other ‘God’ of orthodox dogma represented by the three friends. 1
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In the context of the imperfect ’eezeh we would understand the imperfect sense of r’h in v. 27b, which consequently we read as the innitive absolute r’¿h for MT r’û. In vv. 25-27, in accordance with our view that the survival of death is alien to the thought of the Book of Job those verbs cannot be taken in the physical sense, but as meaning that Job will come to see his relationship with God as it truly is, as in his declaration in 42.5 and the experience of Isaiah in the moment of revelation (Isa. 6.5). By the same token, yqûm in v. 25b is, we consider, to be taken not in a literal sense, but of decisive Divine intervention in human affairs; see above on 25b. If v. 27c belongs with vv. 25-27b, it expresses the ardent desire of the sufferer for the deliverance expressed in that passage; cf. Ps. 119.123, ‘ênay klû lîšû‘e¤ (‘my eyes fail [looking] for Thy deliverance’). kily¿ay (lit. my kidneys’) is the seat of emotion for the ancient Hebrews. ‘Within my bosom’ (beqî) seems strange anatomy, but q means generally ‘inside’, and the phrase indicates ‘intimate being’; cf. našî in a similar context in Ps. 84.3. On the analogy of those passages in the Psalms, v. 27b is best taken as the rst colon of an incomplete bicolon. 28. l¿’ is best taken as the Aram. nota accusativa with the pronominal sufx, the object of the verb. We take mh as the interrogative pronoun, here signifying ‘How?’; cf. 9.2 mah-yyiÑdaq (‘how will he prove his innocence?’, ‘what will he cite to prove his innocence?’). English ‘the root of the matter is found in him’ is misleading. The language is forensic. In the context dr means ‘a case’ (cf. Exod. 8.16; 24.14). Hence š¿reš dr means ‘pretext for a case’ (so Dhorme). In the introduction kî may best be taken as ‘But’. 29. This verse has caused much perplexity among commentators, among whom there is no agreement nor, we believe, any satisfactory solution through the rendering of amh as ‘wrath’ and assenting that in both instances MT ore means ‘sword’. We propose that MT amh, an Aram. form, is cognate with Arab. amyatu(n) (‘excess of zeal’). Throughout Job the apparently identical word in parallel cola indicates a word-play. Thus we would take ere in v. 29a as ‘sword’, ‘the sword of God’, as in Ezekiel 21, as Fohrer has well noted, and propose that in v. 29b the abstract noun from ra (‘to destroy’) should be read ¿re (‘ruin, destruction’), v. 29b then meaning ‘excessive zeal in wrong courses spells ruin’. Thus, we believe Job passes judgment on the excessive zeal of his friends to represent him as a sinner meriting his afictions, and as defenders of the current doctrine of the theodicy despite the hard facts of experience. In MT šaddîn (‘[know] that there is a judgment’), the reading šeyyš dîn or possibly šeyyš dayyn (‘that there is a judge’) seems more suitable. The relative particle še—cf. Phoenician ’š and Akk. ša—though common in Late Heb., is attested as early as the Song of Deborah (Judg. 5.7). This would nevertheless be the only instance in the Book of Job, and the odd colon always 1
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leaves a doubt as to whether it is the member of an incomplete colon, where for want of a parallel the text is doubtful, or is a late gloss. It is alternatively suggested that MT šaddîn is a scribal error for šadday (‘the Almighty’) (so Fischer 1961: 342ff.) and Pope. In this case, if the text is complete, the verb would mean not ‘know’ in the intellectual sense but ‘acknowledge’.
1
Job 20 THE REPLY OF ZOPHAR
If Zophar’s reply to Job’s statement in ch. 19 is not simply a restatement of his former assertion of the theodicy with an accumulation of proverbs and gures from Wisdom literature in the manner of Oriental argument, it is still a direct reply to Job’s declaration that he knows for certain the One who will vindicate him (19.25). His reply is introduced by the rhetorical question ‘Do you not know?’ (20.4), which introduces the time-honoured dicta of the sages on the social Order, repeatedly borne out by experience ‘from the time that humans were put upon the earth’. In reply to the embarrassment to faith of the prosperity of the wicked so frequently felt and expressed in the Plaint of the Sufferer and in Wisdom poems (e.g. Ps. 73.3-11) as the prelude to their sure and often sudden fall (Pss. 73.18-20; 34.9-20), Zophar amplies this theme with very striking imagery redolent of life in Palestine and its natural environment. Besides the sudden downfall of the wicked (vv. 4-7), their temporary prosperity, eeting as a dream (vv. 8-9), the inherent weakness of wickedness is emphasized. Zophar adduces a series of gures, sickness through overindulgence in rich food (vv. 13-16), insatiable appetite (v. 17), anxiety (vv. 2022), the vain efforts to escape retribution (vv. 24-25; cf. Amos 5.19f.), and nal destruction by re ‘which needs no fanning’ and ood and ‘downpours on the day of (God’s) wrath’. Finally in conrmation of this assertion of Order in society, Zophar sets this in Cosmic dimension in citing the testimony of heaven and earth (v. 27). After a short introductory strophe of two bicola (vv. 2-3) in the style of sapiential controversy, Zophar’s reply takes the form of a wisdom poem on the fate of the wicked in support of the theodicy. This is divided according to aspects of the subject and gures of speech into seven strophes (vv. 4-7, 8-9 + 11, 12-16, 17-19 + 10, 20-23, 24-26, 27-29). These are composed of a number of gures emphasizing aphorisms on the general theme of the retribution of the wicked, whose sin is his own undoing, and on the evanescence of his illgotten advantages. Those gures related to this theme are reminiscent of the couplets in Proverbs, but are here treated at greater length, not in couplets, but in strophes of three or four couplets. The text is slightly disarranged. A double word-play indicates that v. 10 belonged originally after v. 19. 1
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Chapter 20 1.
Then Zophar the Naamathite answered and said:
2.
‘On this my racking thoughts prompt an answer On account of1 my own deep-felt shame, Hearing myself shamefully rebuked. So after full consideration the spirit (within me) replies:2
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 10. 20. 21. 22.
1
Do you not3 know this from of old, From the time that humanity was put on the earth, That the jubilation of the wicked is but for a short time, That the joy of the impious is but for a moment? Though his exaltation rises to the skies And his head touches the clouds, In proportion to his pre-eminence he perishes for ever; Those who saw him will say, “Where is he?” As a dream he ies away, and none will nd him, Dispelled like a vision of the night; The eye that noticed him will do so no more, And the place where he was will see him no longer. His bones are full of lustiness,4 But his prime5 shall lie in the dust, Though wickedness is sweet in his mouth And he lets it melt away under his tongue, Though he cherishes it and will not let it go, Holding it back on his palate, His food in his bowels will be changed To venom of asps within him. The wealth he gorges will be spewed up; God will expel it from his belly. 6He shall suck the poison of asps, The tongue of the viper shall slay him.6 He will not be satised with streams of olive-oil,7 Nor torrents running with honey and curds; The reward of his toil8 he will not swallow, None of the wealth9 gained from his trade will he enjoy. Since he has crushed the poor with force,10 Plundered a house that he has not built,11 His sons will make restitution to the poor, And his children12 pay back13 his wealth. Since he has never been at ease14 in his belly, Allowing none to escape his greed,15 None escaping from his devouring, Therefore his goods shall not abide. For all his full abundance he will be anxious, All the force of trouble16 shall come upon him.
The Book of Job 23.
his belly is full,17 (God) shall hurl the vehemence of his anger at him, And shall shower upon him the ame of his wrath.18
24.
He may ee from the iron weapon, The bronzed bow shall transx him; The shaft shall19 come clean through his body,20 And the gleaming blade go out from his liver. 21For him terrors are in store, Total darkness is reserved. A re that needs no fanning22 will consume him,23 He who survives in his tent shall be crushed.
25.
26.
27. 28. 29.
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17If
The heavens will reveal his guilt, And the earth shall rise up against him; A ood24 shall roll away25 his house, Downpours on the day of (God’s) wrath. This is the portion of the wicked26 from God, And the heritage of the rebel27 from God.’
Textual Notes to Chapter 20 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 1
Reading ba‘aûr for MT ûa‘aûr, assuming dittography of w after y in the script used as in the Qumran texts. Reading ta‘annî for MT ya‘annî in agreement with the fem. subject rua. Reading hal¿’ z¿’Ó with LXX and one Heb. MS. Reading ‘alûmîm for MT ‘alûmyw, assuming corruption of nal m to w in the Old Heb. script, perhaps after scriptio defective in ‘alûmîm. Reading ‘ammô for MT ‘immô. See Commentary ad loc. This verse is probably a gloss. Reading paleê yiÑhr for MT pelaô naharê, assuming corruption of y and t to Ñ and n in the Old Heb. script. Reading yeî‘ô l¿’ for MT y‘ wel¿’ after one Heb. MS. Reading mêl for MT keêl, m being corrupted to k in the Old Heb. script. Conjecturing adverbial ‘¿zm for MT ‘za. See Commentary ad loc. Reading bnhû for MT yienhû with V, and l¿’ for MT wel¿’, understanding a relative clause without the relative particle as often as in Hebrew and Ugaritic poetry. Reading wîlyw for MT yyw suggested by the parallelism. Reading yešîû-n’ for MT tšn, a corruption after the corruption of wîlyw to yyw. See Commentary ad loc. Omitting šlw as a gloss metri causa. See Commentary ad loc. Reading beomeô for MT baamûô. Reading ‘ml with LXX and V for MT ‘ml. This colon is probably to be omitted as a gloss, as indicated by the original LXX. Reading ‘lyw mabbl ummô for MT ‘lêmô bileûmô. See Commentary ad loc. Reading šela for MT šla as suggested by LXX. Reading miggw¿h for MT miggwh as suggested by LXX. Reading ‘lyw ’mîm liÑeûnîm / kol-¿še¤ Ómûn. See Commentary ad loc. Reading nupph for MT nupp in agreement with the gender of ’š. Reading t¿’¤elhû for MT te’¤elhû.
282 24. 25. 26. 27.
Job 20. The Reply of Zophar Reading yl for MT yeûl with one Heb. MS. See Commentary ad loc. Reading y¿l with LXX for MT yiel. ’m should probably be omitted. Reading m¿reh for MT ’imrô. See Commentary ad loc.
Commentary on Chapter 20 2. e‘ippîm here as in 4.13 denotes the movement this way and that of thoughts in the embarrassment to orthodoxy involved in Job’s attitude. The Hiphil of šû, with dr understood, means ‘answer’ with the direct object of the person. Here it may mean ‘make an answer’ without the direct object. LXX reads l¿’ ¤n for MT l¤n. Hence Stevenson reads ‘untrue are the thoughts you address to us’, reading e‘ippîm tešînû. The reading of LXX, ‘this is not the answer my thoughts suggest to me’, would be nearer MT. But the emendation of MT l¤n is in our opinion gratuitous. In MT ûa‘aûr ûšî î, for which V offers only a paraphrase which has no relevance to MT, various emendations have assumed that v. 2b is the direct parallel of v. 2a. We regard the parallelism as extending to the whole strophe. Verses 2-3 are chiastic, v. 2a being parallel to v. 3b and v. 2b to v. 3a. Thus we propose that ûšî î is parallel to mûsar kelimmî (‘my shameful rebuke’), and take ûšî as cognate of Arab. ša, Akk. yašu (‘to feel shame’). In ûšî î (lit. ‘my shame is in me’), î denotes the personal sense of shame; cf. ‘ly in Ps. 42.6, 12. In kelimmî the pronominal sufx is objective. In the middle members of the chiasmus Zophar declares that his orthodoxy, which Job has endeavoured to put to shame, prompts a reply. In v. 2a and v. 3b discriminating assessment (bînh) between (bên) this proposition and that (e‘ippîm) indicates that Job has succeeded in disturbing the conventional moral philosophy of the friends, which is now thrown sharply on the defensive. 3. In support of his rendering of MT mûsar kelimmî (‘lesson which outrages me’) after V, Dhorme cites mûsar šelômnû (‘the chastisement which is our wholeness’) in Isa. 53.5. The phrase rûa mibbînî in v. 3b may signify that, though roused and embarrassed by Job, he is nevertheless moved to retort by the spirit, here probably the special insight claimed by the sage but controlled by his intellect. If he goes on to cite what seems to be based on aphorisms of former sages, he emphasizes his own discrimination. 4. The condent expectation of an afrmative answer demands the reading hal¿’ either with or without z¿’. îm may either be perfect passive with ’m as subject or innitive construct with ‘God’ understood as subject; cf. ‘God set humanity upon the earth’ (Gen. 2.8f.) and ‘God created humanity on the earth’ (Dan. 4.32).
1
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5. rennh (cf. 3.7; Pss. 53.6; 100.2) derived from rnan (‘to give a ringing, exultant cry’, rinnh), means ‘jubilation’, both joy and the cry of joy. miqqr¿ (‘of short duration’) is a prepositional phrase usually spatial but here temporal, denoting a near objective. The parallel ‘aê-ra‘ (pausal) means ‘for the icker of an eyelid’, ad momentum. On n see on 8.13. 6. MT î’ô, in the sense ‘his elevation’, a verbal noun from n, for the more usual ’ô, is read by all versions but LXX, which translates ‘gift’, obviously wrongly. The sense ‘arrogance’ (Aq., Sym., Theod.; so Hölscher, Pope) is possible as in Ps. 89.10, where the form is ô’, but here the parallel ‘his head reaches the clouds’ indicates that the word means either ‘stature’ or ‘exaltation’. 7. MT keelalô has been taken by various commentators as ‘dung’; cf. Arab. jallatu(n) and Ezek. 4.12, 15 (so V and Le Hir, Loisy, Renan, G.B. Gray, Hölscher, Pope, thinking of dung to be swept up as refuse; cf. 1 Kgs 14.10). Duhm and Fohrer after Wetzstein propose ‘his dung-re’, sc. re of dried dung, as in the desert, where fuel is scarce. Dhorme proposes as translation ‘phantom’, citing Ass. gallu (‘evil demon’ or ‘ghost’). Cheyne proposed to emend to keôô (‘his glory’) which is supported by LXX. This may indicate that the word is cognate of Arab. jalla (‘to be illustrious’; e.g. jalllatuhu, ‘His Majesty’). This is the meaning accepted by Gordis. We propose that since there is nothing in the parallelism to suggest ‘dung’, the meaning is ‘preeminence’, though a word-play with ‘dung’ was possibly intended. ke may denote ‘in proportion to’, but, introducing the last couplet of the strophe, it may possibly be not a preposition but an enclitic clinching the argument as in Ugaritic, for example, in Gordon UT § 9.13; § 13.46; on k emphasizing the nal verb, cf. Deut. 32.9. The vanishing of the wicked without trace is a common theme of Wisdom poetry; cf. 14.10; Ps. 37.36. 8. MT yimÑ’ûhû may be retained, the subject being indenite and the form tantamount to a passive, which is read in LXX, S and V yudda (‘is put to ight’) may be retained (so Hitzig, Beer, Budde, Ball, G.B. Gray, Hölscher, Fohrer, Pope, Gordis). 9. šza (‘to notice’) occurs in the OT only here and at 28.7 and Song 1.6, where it is probably a corruption. It has been suggested that tešûrennû should be emended to yešûrennû in agreement with meqômô. mqôm, however, though generally masc., is occasionally fem., as for example in Gen. 18.24; 1 Sam. 17.12. The verb, meaning ‘to observe, notice, see’, is rather poetic, and is used more frequently in Job (e.g. 7.8; 17.15; 20.9; 24.15; 33.14, 27; 34.29; 35.14) than in the rest of the OT.
1
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10. The disappearance of the wicked having been noted, it is not unnatural to mention the fate of his sons. But, since v. 12 deals with the end of the wicked, v. 10 is either a gloss (so Duhm) or displaced from after v. 19 (so Dhorme), where it would be most apt. See below after note on v. 19. 11. Reading ‘alûmîm in scriptio defectiva for MT ‘alûmyw, the word being an abstract plur., cf. zeqûnîm (‘old age’), ne‘ûrîm (‘youth’). Thus ’alûmîm may mean youth; cf. Ugaritic lm, Arab. ulmu(n) (‘young man’), perhaps with the nuance of sexual maturity. Note Arab. alima (‘to be sexually excited’) and Heb. ‘almah (Isa. 7.14), where the word denotes not ‘virgin’, but a virgin bride, as in the Ras Shamra poems, hence a young woman sexually mature, bearing her rst child. tiška presents a problem of agreement if, as MT suggests, the subject is ‘alûmîm (MT ‘alûmyw). Dhorme’s citation of Ps. 103.5 tiaddš kannešer ne‘ûrye¤î may possibly warrant such an agreement, assuming that the abstract plur. is tantamount to a fem. abstract. But in the psalm tiaddš may be written defectively for tiaddešî as the predicate of the fem. našî, with ne‘ûray¤î as an accusative of respect. We suggest that the subject of the fem. singular tišk is ‘ammô (‘his prime’), cognate with Arab. ‘umumu(n) (‘completeness’), which we read for MT ‘immô, and propose as an excellent correspondent to ‘alûmîm (‘lustiness’). On ‘r (‘dust’) meaning either the earth, ground or true dust of the grave, see above on 19.25b. 12. ka means ‘to hide’, the Hiphil meaning ‘to make to disappear’, hence Fohrer’s proposal ‘to make melt away’, gradually to prolong the savour, as the context suggests. 13. mal ‘al means ‘to spare’, that is, ‘he cherishes’. ‘za means ‘to free’ or ‘let go’ as ‘to leave, abandon’; cf. 10.1, as in the legal phrase ‘Ñûr we‘zûb (‘restrained, left free’, cf. Exod. 23.5). The Ugaritic cognate ‘db is used of the release of a hunting falcon, Gordon UT 3 Aqht 7.33. 14. nepa¤ is the declaratory perfect. 15. hôrîš, lit. ‘to make to inherit’, or ‘possess’, means also ‘to dispossess’ as here and regularly in the accounts of occupation of the land which involved dispossession of the inhabitants. 16. r¿’š generally signies the bitter juice of a poisonous herb; cf. Amos 6.12; Jer. 8.14; 9.14; 23.15 (mê r¿’š). It is parallel to merôrh (cf. v. 14), in Deut. 32.32, which, as here, describes the venom of the serpent (peen; cf. btn in the Ras Shamra texts) in Deut. 32.33. 17. MT ’al-yre’ would be an optative usage of the jussive. But ’al is used as a negative particle with the indicative in the Ras Shamra texts, so that the verb 1
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may be emended to yir’eh in scriptio defectiva. We take the verb as a byform of the more familiar rwh (‘to be satised, drink one’s ll’) (so too TurSinai), which is attested in Prov. 23.31; Ben Sira 34.28 and probably Prov. 31.4, where ’w š¤r is probably a corruption of r’ô š¤r (Thomas 1962: 499-500). We nd the root also attested in Ugaritic, Gordon UT ‘nt I, 12-13, bk rb ‘m r’i (‘a large goblet mighty of draught’). The parallel with naalê deaš weem’h suggests the emendation of naharê to yiÑhr, as proposed by Klostermann; cf. Gordon UT 49 III, 6-7: šmm šmn tmÓrn n¨lm tlk nbtm (‘The skies rain [olive] oil, The wadis run with honey’), describing El’s vision of the revival of nature with the revival of Baal. 18. For MT y‘, yeî‘ô should probably be read with one Heb. MS, meaning lit. ‘that which he laboured for’, or ‘his toil’. For MT mšî LXX read laššw’ (‘for nothing’). The parallel êl temûrô (‘the wealth from his trade’) suggests that mšî is a noun cognate with Arab. awbu(u) (‘reward’) from the verb ba yabu. In wel¿’, in v. 18a and b, w should be attached respectively to yeî‘ and taken as a dittograph of w in temûrô. The verb ‘las in the sense ‘to enjoy’ is attested besides the present passage only once, in Prov. 7.18, of sexual enjoyment. 19, 10. By reading v. 10 after v. 19 the sense is restored in a more natural context and two cases of word-play are recovered: 19. 10.
kî rÑaÑ (for MT riÑÑaÑ)‘¿zm (for MT ‘za) dallîm bayi gzal l¿’ (for MT wel¿’) bnhû (for MT yibenhû) bnyw yeraÑÑû dallîm wîlyw (for MT weyyw) yšîû (for MT tšnh) ’ônô Since he has crushed the poor with force, Plundered a house that he had not built, His sons will make restitution to the poor, And his children pay back his wealth.
We assume the reading l¿’ nhû as a relative clause without the relative particle. The phrase recalls Mic. 2.2. The condemnation is of the oppressor who plunders a house or family (both bayi), which, in virtue of his status, he ought rather to have rehabilitated (bnh; cf. Ruth 4.10-12) as a social duty. Here the word-play must be noticed between rÑaÑ as in v. 10a (‘to crush’) and rÑh (Piel), ‘to make restitution’; cf. Lev. 26.34, 41, 43 and Isa. 40.2, where the Niphal is used, and between bnh and bnyw. 20. MT šlw is suspect for two reasons. It makes the metre in v. 20a too long, and, if it were admitted, the noun šalwh rather than the participle šlw is demanded if ya‘ means ‘he knew’. Both difculties are obviated if we admit the proposal of D.W. Thomas (1935: 409-12) that ya‘ here is cognate with Arab. wada‘a (‘to be at ease’), in which case šlw may be dismissed as a gloss on the ambiguous ya‘. For MT baamûô we read beomeô, the verbal 1
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noun for the passive participle. Here be means ‘from’ as the verb demands, which is regularly the use of the preposition in Ugaritic, which has no preposition min. 21. In le’o¤elô after rî (‘survivor’), le, here ‘from’, has a similar force to be, as also in Ugaritic. îl is used here as also in Ps. 10.5, if the text is sound, in the sense ‘to be strong, rm’. These are the only two incidences of the verb in this sense in the OT, which is probably Aram., being well known in the intensive meaning ‘to make rm’. 22. The sentiment recalls semper avarus eget (‘the miser is ever in want’ [Horace, Ep. 1.2.5b]). The plur. mel¿’ô is a case of fem. plur. with the force of an abstract noun, ‘abundance’; cf. teûnô, ‘understanding’ (Isa. 40.14), d‘ô, ‘knowledge’ (1 Sam. 2.3), hawwô, ‘fall’ (Ps. 5.10), menuô, ‘rest’ (Ps. 23.2), etc. (see GKC, §124e). eq is better known in the verbal root aq, meaning ‘plenty’; cf. 36.18. If v. 22a were considered in isolation, yÑer lô might mean ‘he is in want’, but the parallelism in v. 22b indicates the meaning ‘he is anxious’; cf. 15.21; 18.12. With LXX and V, ‘ml (‘trouble’) may be read for MT ‘ml (‘maker of trouble’), which is also possible. y on the reading we adopt means not literally ‘hand’ but ‘power’. 23. yehî is jussive introducing a protasis without the conditional particle in a hypothesis—cf. 22.28 (GKC, §109b)—but the whole phrase yehî lemall’ biÓnô is probably a later gloss on v. 22, as indicated by its omission in LXX. In view of the mention of missiles in the sequel, Dhorme suggests the reading weyamÓr ‘olmyw bileûmô (‘and he shall shower his shafts on his body’) for MT weyamÓr ‘lêmô bileûmô. This reading and rendering of ‘olmyw and leûmô is based respectively on Ass. ulmu (‘an arrow’ or ‘dart’) and leûmm parallel to dmm in Zeph. 1.17. The parallelism, however, with arôn ’appô supports the reading after Dahood (1957: 314ff.). weyamÓr ‘lyw mabbl ummô (‘and he shall shower upon him the ame of his wrath’). On mabbl, cf. Ugaritic nbl and see above on 18.15. The language recalls God’s shower of re and brimstone on Sodom and Gemorrah (Gen. 19.24; cf. Ps. 11.6). 24. nšeq is usually collective, meaning ‘arms’. la (‘to pass from one point of place or time to another’; cf. 9.11) is found in the sense ‘to pass through, pierce’ in Judg. 5.26. qeše neûšh—cf. Ps. 18.35 (EVV 34)—means not ‘bronze bow’ or ‘bronze arrow’ from the bow, but ‘bronzed bow’, that is, a composite bow of laminations of wood and strips of horn and animal sinew as described in the Ugaritic Legend of Aqht (Gordon UT 2 Aqht VI, 20-23), and probably bound at intervals, ‘whipped’ like a split cane shing rod, with bronze wire. 1
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25. For šla (‘to be unsheathed’), šela (‘shaft, dart’; cf. Joel 2.8) should probably be read with LXX, yÑ’ for MT wayyÑ’, and miggw¿h (‘from his back’) for MT miggwh with LXX, V and T. In v. 25b, ûrq mimmer¿rô yahal¿¤, mer¿rh, which means ‘venom’ or ‘gall’ in v. 14, means here the organ thought to secrete the gall, the liver. brq, lit. ‘lightning’, may denote ‘gleaming blade’; cf. Deut. 32.41; Hab. 3.11. LXX and V read yahal¿¤ in the plur., taking it as the predicate of ’mîm (‘terrors’) being Ñeûnîm (‘stored up’) in v. 26a (for MT Ñeûnyw), le being the asseverative enclitic before the predicate in a nominal sentence as in Arab. The rearranged text in vv. 25-26 reads: šela yÑ’ miggw¿h ûrq mimmer¿rô yahal¿¤ ‘lyw ’mîm liÑeûnîm kol-¿še¤ Ómûn
This arrangement obviates the metric irregularity in MT v. 26a. 26. For MT nuppa either nupph or neuh must be read in agreement with the fem. ’š. We have preferred the perfect Pual in a relative clause where the relative particle is omitted as often in poetry; cf. the relative in Arab. after an indenite antecedent. Note the further emendation of MT te’¤elhû to t¿’¤elhû after LXX, S, V and T. We take yra‘ as the Niphal imperf. of ra‘a‘, an Aramaism (Heb. rÑaÑ). 27. The general statement about heaven and earth revealing a person’s sin and earth rising up as an enemy against that person is more natural after the particular calamities, such as ood (v. 28) and re (v. 26). miqômm is found as parallel to ’¿y in 27.7. S apparently read minaqqemh (‘avenger’), which would reect more specically the earth calling for vengeance for blood shed (cf. the gure in 16.18f. and Gen. 4.10). If MT is read, however, the passage may reect the convention expressed in treaties of calling to witness the various gods of the parties and heaven and earth and other natural features, as illustrated in Hittite vassal-treaties from the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE; cf. Deut. 30.19. 28. For MT yiel, pointed as if from glh (‘to be deported’), read y¿l from glal (‘to roll’, transitive); cf. Gen. 29.3, 8 (to roll a stone from the wellmouth), which is suggested by LXX (‘drag away’) and T (‘be removed’). yeûl, which regularly means ‘produce’ or ‘increase’, may be a variation of yl; cf. yielê mayim, 30.25; 44.4, cognate with Arab. wablu(n) (‘heavy rain’); cf. also Akk. bubbulu (‘ood’), cited by Dhorme (so Beer, Ehrlich, Stevenson, Fohrer and Pope). Only T has appreciated the meaning of niggarô, rendering, though paraphrasing, ‘ow’. The root nar in the Niphal here is known from 2 Sam. 14.4, mayim niggrîm (‘owing water’), and Lam. 3.49, ‘ênî niggrh (‘my eye has owed’), and in the Hiphil in Ps. 75.9, of the pouring out of the Lord’s 1
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fury, and in the Hophal in Mic. 1.4, of water poured down a declivity; cf. ngr, ‘water-pourer’ in a rite of imitative magic in the Ras Shamra Legend of Krt, Gordon UH 126, III, 4, 7, 8, 11, 12. 29. The superuous ’m has crept into the text, being originally perhaps a scribal note, to indicate that the personal rš‘ should be read and not reša‘ (so Duhm). We expect a parallel to rš‘ in the position of MT ’imrô, and the simplest solution is to read m¿r’ (‘rebel’). Dhorme retains ’imrô, which he understands on the analogy of mêmrh (‘the word’) for the person of God in the Targum, as ‘himself’ (so T at 7.8; 19.18; 27.3). While this is far from deciding the case, it deserves consideration. Stevenson read ’amryw, translating ‘his appointed share’, sc. his ‘ordered’ share, associating the word with Arab. ’amara (‘to command’), but, while Heb. has occasionally this nuance, ’amryw (‘his appointed share’) is extremely unlikely. In accordance with his theory, that Job was the Heb. translation of an Aram. original, Tur-Sinai makes the interesting suggestion that an original mmrh, to be pointed memreh (‘rebel’), was mistaken by a Heb. translator for Aram. mmrh (‘his word’), which was then rendered into ’imrô, as in MT. In the case of translation, however, it is unlikely that a comparatively rare word like ’mer would have been preferred to the more usual dr. We consider that the original was m¿reh (‘rebel’).
1
Job 21 JOB’S REJOINDER TO ZOPHAR
This chapter falls into nine strophes (vv. 2-5, 6-9, 10-13, 14-16, 17-18, 19-21, 22-26, 27-30, 31-34), the last of which, we propose, has suffered disturbance reading originally vv. 31, 32a, 33a, 33b, 33c, 32b, 34; see Commentary ad loc. The literary afnity is with the sapiential disputation. In the rst strophe (vv. 2-5) Job states his claim to voice his complaint. The second strophe (vv. 6-9) poses the problem of the orthodox belief in the theodicy in face of the empiric fact of the prosperity of the wicked. The third (vv. 10-13), ending with the statement of the peaceful demise of the wicked, cites concrete and colourful instances of their prosperity. The fourth strophe (vv. 14-16) describes the deant attitude of the wicked to God in a series of bold statements. The fth strophe (vv. 17-18) questions the validity of certain aphorisms concerning the theodicy which are cited from proverb-collections such as the Book of Proverbs. The sixth strophe (vv. 19-22) cites from another of these ‘God stores up iniquity for their sons’ (v. 19a), to which the defenders of the conventional belief in the theodicy against the embarrassing facts cited by Job would resort, and states that this would not impress the sinner himself. The seventh strophe (vv. 22-25) opens with a statement concerning the transcendence of God and the inscrutability of his wisdom. This is a recurrent argument of the friends. Indeed it is the last resort of embarrassed orthodoxy, and it may be a citation on the part of Job, who cites as evidence of the aloofness and apparent moral indifference of God the common end of saint and sinner. In the eighth strophe (vv. 27-30) Job states that he knows the orthodox premises and arguments (v. 27), which so far he has been citing from the fourth strophe to the seventh, and which he continues to cite in v. 28. In confutation of the platitude of the inexorable end of the wicked Job cites the testimony of wayfarers, by which the writer may mean inscriptions or grafti where they thank their pagan gods for safe guiding and preservation in their hazardous journeys. The ninth and nal strophe (vv. 31, 32a, 33a, 33b, 33c, 32b, 34) in the conventional tradition of Hebrew wisdom, clinches the argument by the colourful description of the honourable burial of the wicked. Job’s reply in ch. 21 opens with an appeal for a hearing, animadverting on the consolation which his friends rst intended (2.21), and in the statement ‘you may mock’ (3b) addresses himself to Zophar and the others who, with a 1
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wealth of striking images, had mocked the delusions and discomture of the wicked after their prosperity. Job proceeds; he re-echoes the problem of the sage in the Wisdom Psalm 73.2-12 (Job 21.6-16, 23-26), but whereas the sage in the psalm, like Zophar, advances to a positive solution of the moral problem in the not uncommon experience of the rascal’s sudden downfall and the evanescence of his delusions (Ps. 73.18-20), Job uses the statement of the sage’s dilemma as a contradiction to Zophar’s statement of the theodicy (20.5ff.) and continues to elaborate his case by citing popular proverbs that support the Wisdom teaching on the theodicy (vv. 17, 18, 19a, 22, 28), which he immediately explodes (vv. 17, 18). To the proverb ‘The trouble he incurs God keeps in store for his sons’ (v. 19a), Job replies that this is not an adequate defence of the doctrine of the theodicy so long as the wicked live out their days in impunity (vv. 7-13). Job’s nal dismissal of Zophar’s case is to remark upon the common mortality of both wicked and righteous (vv. 23-26), with the added mockery of the splendid funeral of the ungodly (vv. 32-33). So much, Job concludes, for the consolation of his friends which would convince him of the justice of God despite the personal agony of the innocent sufferer, whom they encourage to patient endurance and hope (5.8-26; 11.13-19) on the strength of the doctrine of the theodicy which they support by citation of the teaching of the sages and proverbs, while, blinking off unwelcome facts, they simply deceive themselves and lead their friends into delusion (v. 34). By his realistic citation of the prosperity of the wicked and his explosion of wellknown proverbs in his trenchant criticism of the traditional doctrine of sin and retribution Job may well claim that his statement based on grim experience should induce shocked silence in his hearers (v. 5). It is Job’s embarrassing realism, which exhibits nothing of the faith under duress that Wisdom recommended, that provokes the extreme condemnation of Eliphaz in ch. 22. Chapter 21 1.
Then Job answered and said:
2.
‘Listen carefully to my words, And let this be your consolation of me. Bear with me and I will speak Then after I have spoken you may mock.1 Is my complaint such that I should keep silence2 Why then should I not be impatient? Turn to me and be appalled,3 And lay your hand on your mouth.
3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
1
When I think of it I am confounded, And shuddering seizes my esh. Why do the wicked live, Prosper and grow mighty in power?
The Book of Job 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.
1
Their seed is established in their presence, And their offspring stands fast4 before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear; No rod of God is upon them. Their bull5 engenders without fail, Their cow6 calves, and does not cast her calf. They send forth their little ones like a ock And their children skip about; They sing7 to the timbrel and the lyre, And make merry to the sound of the pipe. They nish8 their days in prosperity, And go down9 to Sheol in peace.10 Though they say to God, “Away from us! We care not to know your ways! What is the Almighty that we should serve him? And what is the good of praying to him?” 11See, their prosperity is not through their own power The purpose of the wicked is far removed from God’s.12 How often is “the lamp of the wicked put out”? How often does “their calamity come upon them”? (He destroys malefactors in his wrath.) (How often) are they “as straw before the wind”? Or “as chaff snatched away by a storm”? “The trouble one incurs God keeps in store for his sons.” Let him (I say) requite the man himself, that he may feel it; Let him himself13 drink his ll14 of his agon,15 Let him drink of the wrath of the Almighty! For what does he care for his house after him, Seeing that his own tale of months is allotted to him? Will anyone teach God knowledge, Seeing that he governs the exalted ones? One dies, having quite fullled himself, Quite at ease16 and in security, His thighs17 are full of fat,18 And the marrow of his bones fresh. Another dies embittered, With not a taste of good. In the dust they lie down together, And worms cover them both. Indeed I know your thoughts And the violence you do to reasoning to bear me down. For you say, “Where is the house of the notable?”, “Where is the tent in which the wicked dwelt?” Have you not asked those who travel the road? Do you not accept their evidence
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292 30.
That the wicked is kept in the day of disaster, Is guaranteed19 in the day of wrath?
31.
Who declares his way to his face, Or requites him for what he has done? 20But he is borne to the tombs, Having provided his own elegy, with ute and pipe,21 And after him all men will walk in long procession, And all who go before him are innumerable, And watch is kept over his tomb. How then will you offer me vain comfort? And your answers amount to nothing but deceit?’
32a. 33a. 33b. 33c. 32b. 34.
Textual Notes to Chapter 21 1.
2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.
20. 21.
1
sing. tal‘î, if correct, would indicate that Job turns from the friends who are addressed before and after the verb to Zophar, the last speaker; but after LXX, Sym., S and V the plural should probably be read. Conjecturing le’edd¿m for MT le’m. Reading Niphal hiššammû for the Hiphil MT hšammû. Reading ‘¿meîm for MT ‘immm, and taking it with 8b metri causa. Reading šôrm with LXX and V for MT šôrô in agreement with the plurals in the context, m being corrupted to w in the Old Heb. script. Reading prm with LXX and V for MT prô, assuming the same scribal error as in MT šôrô. Reading yšîrû for MT yie’û. As the parallel yimeû indicates, yîû (‘rejoice’) would also be apt, but the corruption of yšîrû to yie’û is graphically more natural. Reading ye¤allû with the versions and Qere for MT yeallû. Reading with Sym., S, T and V yû, from Aram. neha for MT yttû. Reading ûireôa‘ for MT ûerea‘. The couplet is possibly a later addendum. Reading mimmennû (‘from him’, sc. God) with LXX for MT mennî, assuming haplography of m and the corruption of nal w to y at the stage of development of the script represented by the Qumran MSS. Reading ‘ênô for MT ‘ênyw (conjecture). See Commentary ad loc. Conjecturing yir’eh (variant of yirweh) for MT yir’û. See Commentary ad loc. Conjecturing kaddô for MT kîô. See Commentary ad loc. Reading with one Heb. MS ša’ann for MT šal’anan, a scribal error, introducing l in anticipation of the following šlw. Reading ‘aÓmyw after S for MT ‘aÓînyw assuming corruption of m to n in the Old Heb. script. Reading le with LXX, S and V for MT l. Reading yû¤al for MT yûlû, nal w being perhaps a dittograph of following m in the Old Heb. script, or to be attached as conjunction to the following mî. See Commentary ad loc. On the arrangement of the text of vv. 32-33 see Commentary ad loc. Conjecturing miq¿nn-lô be‘û waalîl for MT meqû-lô rigeê nal. See Commentary ad loc. MT
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Commentary on Chapter 21 2. In tanûm¿Óê¤em the pronominal sufx is subjective. 3. MT tal‘î would refer specically to Job’s reply to Zophar’s speech in ch. 20. But his citation of instances of the downfall of the ungodly from their prosperity and power is also the theme of the categorical statements of Eliphaz (15.20ff.) and Bildad (18.5ff.). With reference to their facile dismissal of him as a windbag full of foolish notions (8.2; 11.3; 15.2), the plur. of the verb must have been the original reading (so LXX, Sym., S and V), in agreement with the verbs in the rest of the strophe. 4. ’n¿¤î is used proleptically with the pronominal sufx in îî (‘my complaint’) for emphasis (GKC, §143a). MT ’m, meaning that Job’s complaint is not to humans, implies that it is to God and is therefore beyond the scope of the limited wisdom of his friends, which is exposed in the sequel. But in the context of v. 4b MT le’m is probably a Masoretic misunderstanding of le’edd¿m from dmm (‘Am I to be silent in respect of my complaint?’), where le would be the asseverative enclitic, or it might rather introduce the imperfect after îî (‘is my complaint such that I may keep silence?’), which we prefer. In any case this reading best suits the context of v. 4b. tiqÑar rûî (lit. ‘my spirit is short’) expresses impatience; cf. wattiqÑar neeš h‘m, of Israel in the wilderness (Num. 21.4) and of Samson nagged by Delilah (Judg. 16.6). The phrase describes destitution in the Ugaritic Legend of Keret (Gordon UT 127, 34, 47), where it denotes persons at the limit of their endurance. 5. In MT hašammû the Hiphil of šmam might denote the entering into a certain condition (GKC, §53d). But we prefer to read the Niphal reexive (so Hölscher, Fohrer). The laying of the hand on the mouth symbolized silence (cf. 29.9; 40.4; Judg. 18.19; Mic. 7.16; Prov. 30.32), or deference. In Egyptian legal convention it signied that a litigant desisted from his case; cf. Ball on 29.9. Dahood (1962: 64) suggests that the gesture may express astonishment, citing the seal with one marvelling at the ight of Etana on the eagle (ANEP, pl. 695). 7. ‘eqû has an Arab. cognate meaning, as in Heb. ‘to grow old’, but a homonym means ‘to thrive’. The verb is probably used here in the latter sense but with a double entendre, the former being suggested by yiyû in v. 7a and the latter in the complementary gerû ayil in v. 7b. 8. Our reading ‘¿meîm for MT ‘immm (‘with them’) is supported by the parallel n¤ôn (‘established’) in v. 8a (so Ball, Dhorme). 1
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9. In battêhem šlôm, šlôm may be used adverbially as in 5.24, šlôm ’ohole¤. LXX and V render it as a verb, and S as a participle, which might indicate a reading šlemû (so Siegfried, Duhm) or perhaps šelwîm (from šlw), ‘secure’ (so Houbigant). 10. In MT šôrô ‘ibbar wel¿ y‘îl, T, Rashi and Qimchi understand ‘ibbar to refer to the passing of the semen properly without mishap (‘soiling’, y‘îl, in the sense the verb has in Aram.). Alternatively, with this sense of ibbar in view, the word may be translated more broadly as ‘engender, impregnate’, as in Aram. and Late Heb. and g‘al may mean, as generally in Heb., ‘to show aversion’. Perhaps ‘ar should be read and gu‘al meaning respectively ‘mount’ and ‘be rejected’. In the sense of ‘giving birth’ pillÓ is used in the OT only here and at 39.3, where it is used in the Aram. Targum from Qumran. In 23.7b it means ‘to bring off a case’. For the Piel of š¤¿l (‘to be bereaved’ or ‘barren’) meaning ‘to abort’, cf. Gen. 31.18; Exod. 23.26. 11. On ‘wîl (‘child’) and its possible derivation, see on 19.18. The comparison of the skipping children to lambs, using the same verb rqa, recalls Ps. 29.6, where the quaking of mountains is compared to the skipping of calves. The same verb describes the motion of locusts in Joel 2.5, presumably when the young insects hop on the ground before taking ight. 12. On the reading yšîrû (‘they sing’) for MT yie’û (‘they raise’), see Textual Note. If MT is correct, ‘voice’ must be understood, which is actually possible (cf. Isa. 42.11), but somewhat colourless in the context. For ke¿, LXX, V, S and T seem to have read be¿, but MT may be retained in the sense of ‘according to’, that is ‘to the accompaniment of’. The mention of the timbrel (t¿) and the stringed lyre (kinnôr) indicates that ‘û denotes a wind instrument, a kind of ute according to T. 13. On the reading ye¤allû (Qere), yû and ûireôa‘ (‘and in peace’), see Textual Notes. The verb ra‘ is found in the Niphal of a sword returned to its sheath (Jer. 47.6) and in the Hiphil meaning ‘to give rest’ (Jer. 31.2; 50.34; Isa. 51.4; Deut. 28.15; etc.); cf. Arab. raja‘a, ‘to return’, sc. to rest after action. Again the Book of Job is emphatic. Death closes all accounts, without reward or punishment. 14. In l¿’ Ñnû, the verb, which means usually in Heb. ‘to take pleasure in’, means rather ‘to care about’; cf. Sym. îÓ (‘zealous’) and Arab. aa meaning in the IIIrd Form ‘to observe carefully’. 15. mah-ššadday kî-na‘aeennû recalls the passage in the Ugaritic text Gordon UT Krt, 39: m’at krt kybky (‘Who is Krt that he weeps?’), cited by Dahood (1963c: 60). 1
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16-19. This passage in MT, asserting the traditional doctrine of the theodicy, has been taken, either wholly or partly, as an orthodox gloss. Siegfried so regarded vv. 16-18; cf. Budde, Hölscher, Stevenson. Stevenson suggested that v. 16 may continue the deant words of the wicked in 15 and proposed the emendation hal¿’ eynû Óûnû. 16. reš‘îm supports the 3rd person pronominal sufxes in MT. Stevenson proposed to omit reš‘îm and read ‘aÑnû, giving the meshing of v. 16b ‘our purpose is far beyond him’. reš‘îm may in this case have been a dittograph of the same word in v. 17a, but we would retain MT as an orthodox gloss, introduced by hn (‘See’). Verses 17-19 then follow as Job’s questioning of the conventional belief in retribution, if not of the sinner (vv. 17-18), then of his sons (v. 19). 17. Job’s indignant question, ‘How often is the lamp of the wicked put out?’, is a citation of Bildad’s assertion in 18.5, which in turn recalls the gurative statement in Prov. 13.9; 24.20. In v. 17c, alîm yeallq be’appô (LXX ‘pains shall seize them because of his anger’) suggests a reading yaazîqûm for MT yeallq. LXX probably misunderstood alîm, which, Friedrich Delitzsch suggested, was a cognate of Akk. abâlu (‘to destroy’) with cognates in Aram., Syr. and Late Hebrew (so Hölscher, Stevenson), giving the sense ‘he metes out destruction in his wrath’. Alternatively Dhorme regards elîm as ‘malefactors’ as in Ass. and yeallq as meaning ‘he destroys’ (cf. Ass. alêqu), giving the translation ‘He destroys malefactors in his wrath’. The odd colon with the change of subject indicates a gloss. 18. Both teen (‘chopped straw’) and m¿Ñ (‘chaff’) are winnowed from the heavier grain on the threshing-oor, when the peasant in Palestine took the advantage of the evening breeze. teen, lighter than grain but heavier than môÑ, falls at some distance from the grain and is used as fodder; m¿Ñ being carried clean away. The gure is a common one in the OT describing the total discomture of an enemy (Isa. 29.5) and specically, as here, of the wicked; cf. Ps. 1.4; 35.5. In v. 18b genattû sûh is a relative clause with the relative particle omitted as often in poetry. gna, regularly ‘to steal’, means also ‘to snatch away surreptitiously’; cf. 27.20, also with sûh as subject, and also the eighth commandment (Exod. 20.15; Deut. 5.19; Gen. 40.15; Deut. 24.7), where the verb means ‘to kidnap’ (Alt 1953). 19. Rashi and Jewish exegesis take v. 19a as Job’s citation of the argument of current orthodoxy. Verse 19b is Job’s reply to the argument of orthodoxy which he has just cited. In v. 19a there may be a double entendre. Without ’elôah as subject, ’ônô might be understood as ‘substance’ which a man stores up for his sons; with ’elôah as subject it means that God stores up the trouble a wicked man incurs for his sons. 1
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20. In MT kîô may be a hapax legomenon, which none of the versions or commentators recognizes. The original may be ’êdô, as Rashi supposed, or possibly, and more likely, pîô, a corruption having occurred in the square script. pî (‘disaster’) is well attested in Job (e.g. 12.5; 15.23). Dahood (1957: 316) has proposed that kaddô (‘his agon’) should be read for MT kîô. k in Gen. 24.14ff. and Judg. 7.16 denotes a water-jar and in 1 Kgs 17.13f. a container for meal, but in the Ras Shamra texts it denotes a large liquid measure or container, like a agon. The parallel colon indicates that drinking is involved, which suggests that MT yir’û might be a corruption, or perhaps a byform, of yirweh (‘let him drink his ll’). The conception of ‘drinking the wrath of the Almighty’ reects the image of ‘the cup of the Lord’s fury’ from which the nations must drink in his judgment (e.g. Isa. 51.17, 22; Jer. 23.15). MT ‘enw, read as singular ’ênô (lit. ‘his eye’) in the context, means ‘the man himself’; cf. Arab. hwa ‘aynuhu (‘the very man’), which obviates any reference in the verb to ‘seeing’ rather than ‘drinking one’s ll’. Job’s argument is that the doctrine of the theodicy would be more convincing if the malefactor himself were liable to retribution. 21. The verb Ñ here means ‘interest, concern’ rather than ‘take pleasure in’, reecting the nuance of the Syr. cognate and particularly Arab. aa, meaning in the IIIrd Form ‘to observe carefully’. The reading uÑÑÑû is well attested in the ancient versions except S, being restored in Origen’s recension of LXX from Theod. Aq. with his usual literalism renders ‘was halved’. Theod. and V read ‘was cut short’, for which Dhorme cites the support of Ass. ¨aÑâÑu (so Hölscher). T and S on the other hand read ‘have been assigned’, which perhaps indicates a reading ¿raÑû, proposed by Ewald; cf. 14.5a ’im arûÑîm ymyw, ‘since his days are determined’. The sequel to this passage might rather suggest uqqqû ‘have been appointed, decreed’, which would be closer to MT in the Old Heb. script. But there is no need to emend since the verb may be cognate with Arab. ¨aÑÑa, ‘to assign exclusively to’ (so G.R. Driver 1955: 83). 22. This verse is taken as a gloss by G.B. Gray, Stevenson, Tur-Sinai; cf. Pope, who observes that it is more appropriate to Job’s friends. He treats it as the end of the citation of the orthodox opinions in vv. 19-21. Fohrer, who pays great attention to strophic arrangement, takes it as the conclusion of this strophe, where it serves as rebuke to those who would circumscribe God by a strict law of retribution. This is of course the nal answer of the Book, but Job does not reach it so easily and certainly not at this stage. It may rather be another citation expressing Job’s criticism of his friends’ limitation of God’s justice to the convention of human society, which he goes on further to criticize in the light of empirical experience in vv. 23-26, to which verses we regard it as the introduction. This couplet in its original context outside the Book of Job may reect the sapiential tradition which aimed at adapting 1
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humanity to the situation as it was under the divine economy, in which humans may impose their own conditions and moral judgment. yelamm is in the 3rd person of the indenite subject. rmîm is formally ambiguous. It is taken in T to mean ‘heavens’ (cf. Ps. 78.69), but the verb yišp¿Ó indicates a personal object ‘exalted ones’, the celestial ministers of God, who are subject to his correction (cf. 4.18; 15.15; Ps. 82.1). Here the signicance of the verb is in its primary sense ‘to rule, govern’, as in the Ras Shamra texts, where the participle pÓ is parallel to mlk (‘king’, Gordon UT 51, IV, 44; ‘nt, V, 40) and to zbl ‘prince’ (Gordon UT 68.15, 16f.; 22, 25). Judgment, which consisted in assessing a person’s conduct in conformity with established government and bringing it into conformity, is a secondary meaning. 23. ‘eÑem, lit. ‘bone’, means here ‘the essence’; cf. ‘eÑem with pronominal sufxes signifying ‘oneself’, etc. MT šal’anan is a scribal error for ša’ann under the inuence of MT šlewû in v. 23b, which is a scribal error for the sing. šlw through dittography at the stage of the development of the alphabet illustrated in the Qumran MSS. 24. For the hapax legomenon ‘aÓînyw Dillman conjectured the meaning ‘pails’, citing Heb. ma‘aÓn (‘oil-vat’) (so Budde, Duhm, G.B. Gray). The versions render the word as parts of the body parallel to his ‘bones’ in v. 24b, for example, ‘entrails’ (LXX, V), ‘breasts’ (T), ‘sides’ (S). The word is probably a corruption in the Old Heb. script of ‘aÓmyw (‘his thighs’), known in Aram. and Syr. (so Bochart, Klostermann, Ehrlich, Tur-Sinai, Hölscher, Stevenson, Fohrer, Pope, Terrien). Agreeable with this reading and the parallel in v. 24b, le (‘fat’) must be read for MT l (‘milk’). m¿a is a hapax legomenon in the OT, but mîm is found parallel and complementary to šemnîm (‘fat’) in Isa. 25.6, of fat burnt-offerings in Ps. 66.15 and ‘fatlings’ in Isa. 5.17. le is supported by LXX, V and S. šqh is attested in the OT only in the Hiphil (‘to give to drink’) and here in the Pual. The specic sense of moisture, or freshness, to the marrow of the bones reveals šiqqûy le‘aÑemôê¤ (Prov. 3.8). 25. be in ’¤al baÓÓôh has a partitive signicance; cf. b with the sense of Heb. min in Ugaritic. 26. It is not easy, if indeed possible, to determine whether rimmh here means ‘worms’ (collective sing.) as the parallel tôla‘ in Isa. 14.11 and Job 25.6 indicates, or ‘decay’, ‘corruption’; cf. Arab. rimmatu(n). 27. mezimmô is ambiguous, meaning either ‘reason, discrimination’ (Prov. 1.4) or, more often, ‘sinister thoughts’ or ‘devices’ (Pss. 10.2; 21.12; 37.1; Jer. 11.15; Prov. 12.2; 24.8), in many cases, as here, parallel to mašeô. 1
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29. It has been assumed that ‘ôberê ere¤ were travelling merchants in caravans, and that their ‘signs’ (’¿¿) were not arguments or proofs, as Dillmann, Budde, Duhm, S.R. Driver and G.B. Gray assume, nor reminiscences of deliverance in straits (so Hölscher), but grafti such as are known in Sinai and the Hejaz (so Dhorme), recalling deliverance from the hazards of the way. Fohrer, on the other hand, would see a reference to the reminiscences of any who had any breadth of experience in the world or even ‘any passerby’, as in Pss. 80.13 (EVV 12); 89.42 (EVV 41); Lam. 1.12; Prov. 9.13. The association with ‘the day of wrath’ (v. 30a) might seem inconsistent with the hazards of wayfarers, though they too were in peril of natural disasters (cf. 20.28). 30. For MT yûlû, for which in any case the masc. sing. should be read, the general sense and the parallel in v. 30a suggested the emendation to yuÑÑal (‘rescued’) to Dillman, Graetz, Beer and Hölscher, while Fohrer reads yû¤al nearer MT in the square script, citing the verb used of Jacob coming through his encounter at the Jabbok and ‘prevailing’ (Gen. 32.31). This verb, however, which we nd acceptable, may rather be cognate with Arab. wakala (‘to appoint a trustee’, waklu[n]), of the Arab. invocation ’allhu wakl. 31. The implication of ‘al-pnyw may be that no one can dare to convict the prosperous sinner ‘in his despite’; cf. ‘al-pnay in the rst commandment in the Decalogue (Exod. 20.3; Deut. 5.7); so E. König. 32-33. The sequence of the action indicates that the text of MT is disarranged. The meaning of the various cola apposite to the theme is in no doubt, with the notable exception of v. 33a, meqû-lô rieê naal (‘sweet to him are the clods of the valley’), which we nd meaningless and incongruous with the context. After much consideration our rst attempt to recover the sense of the colon was to take the verb in its literal sense, the only possible one in Heb., and read meqû-lô zûê nal (‘sweet to him are the honey-ows’, lit. ‘secretions of bees’), involving no emendation but the assumption of the corruption of z to r (doubtful) and w to g in the square script. If this were the original it would refer to grave-offerings of food, actually attested in Israel in Samaria in the Israelite period (Sukenik 1945: 42-58). If this were accepted it would indicate a displacement from after the actual burial in v. 33bc. But we doubt this meaning of naal, which is certainly Arabic, but not attested in Heb., Aram. or Syr. We would therefore suggest that the colon should read: miq¿nn-lô be‘û welîl Having provided for his own elegy, with ute and pipe.
Admittedly, this is further from MT, with the graphic difculty of the assumption of the omission of such a distinctive letter as ‘ in any Heb. script. In an obviously corrupt text, however, after initial corruption the text is liable to more extensive damage. We would therefore suggest that v. 32a notes the 1
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taking of the corpse for burial, v. 33a the elegy (qînh) for the defunct, with musical accompaniment, v. 33bc describes the cortege, naturally preceded by the professional mourners, while v. 32b refers to the watch posted over the grave. We take miq¿nn as the Hithpael of q¿nn (‘to declare an elegy’, qînh) in the reexive sense, and would emphasize lô’; the rich sinner has had his own elegy prepared for him. The classical example of such an elegy, introduced by both noun (qînh) and verb (wayeq¿nn), is David’s elegy for Saul and Jonathan (2 Sam. 1.19ff.), which is both elegy and eulogy (vv. 2224). We may be sure that, in the elegy which the ourishing sinner had had prepared for himself and duly edited, the element of panegyric was not lacking. The elegy in regular meter and sung or chanted may well have been accompanied by music, the plaintive wind-instruments, ‘û, used on a happier occasion in v. 12, and the pipe (lîl), which could easily be handled in processions, as in the procession from Gihon after Solomon’s anointing (1 Kgs 1.40). 32a. The plural qerô may denote a family burial-ground or it may be a pluralis excellentiae signifying conspicuous tombs of notables, as the rockhewn tombs of the family of Tobiah (Neh. 6.1) at Iraq al-Amir east of the Jordan and northeast of Jericho in the Persian period, when the Book of Job was produced. The verb yûal is used with qeer in 10.19. 33bc. Buttenwieser cites a late Egyptian text which contrasts the cortege of a rich man with the burial of a poor man carried out on a reed mat ‘with not a man on earth walking after him’. 33b. mša¤, here intransitive, recalls the intransitive verb mša¤ in Judg. 4.6, describing the march of the men of Zebulun and Naphtali to Tabor in Barak’s campaign, meaning, however, in that case, we believe, in small staggered parties (so ‘long drawn-out’) to evade suspicion. 32b. gîš is found in the OT meaning a ‘heap of sheaves’ (5.26; Exod. 22.5; Judg. 15.5). Here, reading possibly gašô from geeš, it signies grave-mound, cf. Aram. geaš (‘to heap up’) and more specically Arab. jadau(n) (‘gravemound’). In the verb šqa (‘to be wakeful’, hence ‘watchful’), Dhorme suggests a reference to the statue or symbol of the presence of the defunct, like the obelisks above the rock-hewn tombs of Petra, watching over his tomb (so Merx, Budde and Duhm, who read the plural, and Hölscher, who reads yiššq). But we prefer to retain yišq¿, the subject being indenite, the implication being that there are grave-goods worth plundering. Hölscher and Fohrer think rather of the service to the dead, for example, drink-offerings and the like, citing šeqh in caring for (cattle) in Ben Sira 38.26, where, however, the parallel with ‘attention’ indicates that the meaning is rather ‘alertness’ in providing the fodder. 1
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34. heel means ‘breath’, ‘vapour’, as, for example, in Isa. 57.13 and Eccl. 1.14; 2.15; etc. where it is parallel to rûa in the sense of ‘wind’. Figuratively it means that which is insubstantial and elusive as, for example, in Jer. 10.15; 51.18, where it is parallel to šeqer (‘deceit’). In the present passage it is used adverbially. ma‘al usually denotes ‘treachery’ or ‘deceit’. It refers to the friends’ deluding themselves by blinking off facts and setting Job in a false light.
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Job 22 ELIPHAZ’S STATEMENT
On our rejection of a third round of debate involving Job’s intensied appeals for a legal confrontation with God (ch. 23; 26.1-4; 27.1-6, 11-12) in response to Eliphaz’s indictment (22.6-9) and culminating in Job’s apologia pro vita sua (ch. 29), the statement of his ruin (ch. 30) and his great oath of purgation (ch. 31), see above, pp. 59-61. This direct personal matter in the forensic idiom we distinguish on grounds of matter and form from secondary intrusions of sapiential poems (ch. 24; 26.5-14; 27.7-10, 11-15; ch. 28). Chapter 25, attributed, possibly secondarily, to Bildad, falls into the hymnal category. Eliphaz’s statement falls into two parts: vv. 3-20, which asserts the orthodox belief in the theodicy, and vv. 21-30, where Job is exhorted to humility and repentance, and consequent blessing is promised. The address is divided into six strophes (vv. 2-5, 6-9, 10-14, 15-20, 21-26, 27-30). The literary afnity of the rst strophe (vv. 2-5), where Eliphaz takes up the debate by citing Job’s statement (21.15) that a person’s goodness or wickedness can neither prot nor harm God, is with a sapiential controversy. The statement that virtue prots the good person (v. 2b) is characteristic of the wisdom of Proverbs, and from the standpoint that Job’s suffering implies sin (v. 4) the second strophe (vv. 6-9) arraigns the sinner. Here Job seems to be accused of the most blatant sins, which could not possibly have escaped notice, and were certainly not suspected by Eliphaz in his rst speech, where it is recalled that Job had been a pillar of society (4.3ff.). That such an indictment was made, and especially by the most sympathetic and mature of Job’s friends, is surely designed to afford Job the opportunity to answer the charges, anticipating his apologia (ch. 29) and his oath of purgation (ch. 31). The alleged sins are signicantly against the poor and weak, of which a man of Job’s status and prosperity may have been guilty, albeit by omission. Formally, the cumulative indictment of sin followed by the announcement of doom in vv. 10-11 introduced by ‘al-kn (‘therefore’) is familiar in Hebrew tradition in prophetic address. Actually the passage on sin and retribution (vv. 5-11) and that on obedience to God and consequent prosperity (vv. 21-26), which is introduced by an imperative (with conditional signicance), are expanded in conditional sentences. In the third strophe (vv. 10-14), v. 12, on God’s exaltation is probably a gloss on v. 13 since it breaks the argument between vv. 11 and 14 and is pointless to the 1
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argument of Eliphaz here and is not included in the citation of Job’s argument in vv. 13-14. Eliphaz follows the prophetic line of argument from sin in vv. 69 to retribution in vv. 10-11, facts of experience which refute Job’s argument in vv. 13-14. This theme and the citation of the view which is to be refuted is familiar in sapiential dialectic and is paralleled in wisdom psalms (e.g. 73.11; 94.7). In the fourth strophe (vv. 15-20), in the form of a question, a warning is given, based on the downfall of the ungodly, with an assurance to the righteous. In the sapiential tradition that is familiar in the exhortation of a sage to his disciples. In the second part of Eliphaz’s address the bulk of the rst strophe, the fth in the chapter (vv. 21-26), is occupied with exhortation to return and reach agreement with God, and the second, the sixth in the chapter (vv. 27-30), with the assurance of consequent blessings. This had its literary counterpart in preexilic prophecy (e.g. Amos 5.14-15; Isa. 1.18-20; Hos. 6.1-3), and was also at home in the wisdom tradition in the exhortation of the sages. The passage ends with two couplets, vv. 29 and 30, assuring the innocent one who is humbly dependent on God and thereby asserting faith in the theodicy. The text is almost certainly extended by later glosses, for example in v. 12 (see above) and vv. 17-18, which is probably prompted by 21.14-16. Verses 24-25, which exhort people to count their gold as pebbles of the wadis and accept the Almighty as their treasure, is a strange gure which interrupts the sapiential argument in the fth strophe and is probably a later gloss; its removal reduces the strophe to more regular proportions and strengthens the argument. Eliphaz’s opening question makes God independent of any advantage from humans (v. 21), whose good conduct as the wisdom tradition insists, benets himself (v. 2b), just, as we may infer, the sin of the wicked bears the seeds of their own destruction (15.20ff.; 18.6-14). Or, we may say, a good person has the responsibility, if not also the potential, to full oneself. Eliphaz emphasizes God’s independence of the best a human can offer by a gure from commerce. The blameless conduct of humans is not ‘gratefully received’ as a prot to God (v. 3). Asking the rhetorical question, which is tantamount to a strong denial, ‘Would he reprove you for your piety towards him?’, Eliphaz concludes, as in his opening address (4.8f.; 5.6), that suffering betokens sin, with which he now charges Job directly and specically (v. 5). His particular indictment (vv. 6-9) is signicantly limited to treatment of the underprivileged and contains mainly sins of omission. They relate therefore to Job’s status and wealth, which have certain social obligations, noblesse oblige, as Job recognizes in his apologia (v. 29) in the prelude to his great oath of purgation. In Eliphaz’s indictment there is the recognition that such prestige and afuence as Job had enjoyed has its peculiar dangers. The subject, himself free from poverty and not understanding its stresses, may be less than sympathetic to those in need (vv. 7, 9a). In certain cases his sins seem to be sins of commission rather than sins of omission, such as ‘stripping the poor of clothing’ 1
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(v. 6a) and ‘breaking the arms of orphans’ (v. 9b). But this may simply mean neglecting to give an orphan a chance to maintain himself, while ‘stripping the poor of clothing’ and ‘taking pledges (cf. Amos 2.8) where there was no actual need’ (v. 6b), both probably refer to taking pledges, which was a legal right indeed but might well have been waived by Job. The imputation of God’s transcendence and consequent aloofness to human conduct (vv. 13f.) is a more serious charge, where the argument of Job in 9.4-10 is cited (vv. 13f.). This, Eliphaz concludes, would explain Job’s calamity, which he guratively describes as ‘snares’, ‘sudden terrors’, ‘darkening of his light’ and ‘ood’ (vv. 10-11), citing the language and aphorisms that colour the depiction of the fate of the wicked in the addresses of Bildad and Zophar (18.5, 6, 8-10; 19.28), with particular reference to Job’s demolition of their case (ch. 21). Eliphaz’s indictment concludes with the sapiential warning of the danger of pursuing the way of the wicked, sudden death and overwhelming ood (15f.) again reecting the admonitions of Job’s friends. This consideration of the social order which faith and wisdom upheld is conrmed, as in the Plaint of the Sufferer and Wisdom Psalms (e.g. Ps. 58.11ff. [EVV 10f.]), by the recognition of retribution by the righteous, not without manifest satisfaction and indeed ‘unholy glee’ (vv. 19-20). Eliphaz’s nal word to Job (vv. 21-26) ends, as his rst address (5.8-26), with encouragement to reconciliation with God and humble obedience (v. 25; cf. 5.8 and hope of rehabilitation (v. 26; cf. 5.16a, 18-26). Chapter 22 1.
Then answered Eliphaz the Temanite:
2.
‘Can a man bring prot to God? Nay, but the wise man simply prots himself. If you are right does the Almighty “receive it with pleasure”? Or is there any gain to him in your blameless conduct? Is it for your piety towards him that he reproves you? Could he come into court with you? Is not your wickedness great, And your iniquities endless?
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
1
For you have exacted pledges of your brothers where there was no need, And stripped the naked of their clothing. You have not given a drink of water to the weary, And from the weary you have withheld bread. The land was for the man of strong arm, And the favoured man was settled in it. You have sent widows away empty-handed, And have broken1 the arm of orphans. Therefore snares are round about you, And sudden terror confounds you.
304 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.
Job 22. Eliphaz’s Statement Your light2 is darkened so that you cannot see, And a ood of waters covers you. 3Is not God the height of the heavens themselves? See the highest stars, how exalted they are! Yet you say, “What does God know? Can He exercise judgment through the deep darkness? The clouds hide Him so that he does not see, And the vault of heaven is His beat.” Will you keep to the way of the wicked,4 Which men of sin have trodden, Who were snatched away untimely, Their foundations dissolved in a ood? 5 They said to God, “Away from us! Yea, what can the Almighty do to us?”6 Yet it was he who had lled their houses with good things, But the purpose of the wicked is remote from Him.7 The righteous see it and are glad, And the innocent laughs at them. Is not their substance8 wiped out, And their abundance consumed by re? Be accommodating with Him and in accord, Thereby is the way to happiness. Accept direction from His mouth, And lay up His words in your heart. If you humbly9 turn to the Almighty, If you remove iniquity from your tent, 10 And rate11 your ne gold as12 dust, And gold of Ophir as the pebbles of the wadis, And the Almighty becomes your gold ingots, And your silver in heaps, Then you will nd your condence in the Almighty, And shall lift up your face to God. You will make petition to him and he will hear you, And you shall have reason to pay your vows. And you will decide on a matter and it will be established for you, And light will shine on your ways, For he humbles13 him14 whose look is haughty,14 But the man whose eyes are lowly he delivers. He even15 scours an unclean man, And he will be delivered with his hands clean.’16
Textual Notes Chapter 22 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 1
Reading teakk’ with LXX, V, S, T for MT yeukke’, which lacks agreement. Reading ’ôre¤ ša¤ with LXX for MT ’ô-¿še¤. The whole verse is probably a gloss. See Introduction to ch. 22. Reading ‘awîlîm, possibly written originally in scriptio defectiva, for MT ‘ôlm. Verses 17-18 are probably a gloss. See Introduction to ch. 22.
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Reading lnû with LXX and S for MT lmô, n being corrupted to m in the Old Heb. script. Reading mimmennû for MT mennî. See on Textual Note 12 to ch. 21. Reading yeqûmm with Theod. for MT qîmnû, assuming corruption of nal m for n in the Old Heb. script, and the metathesis of y and q. See Commentary ad loc. Reading t‘neh with LXX for MT tibbneh. Verses 24-25 are probably. See introduction to ch. 22. Reading wešatt or tšî for MT šî, which, however, may possibly be retained as a perfect passive. Reading ‘im (of comparison) for MT ‘al. Reading hišpîl for MT hišpîlû, taking nal w as a dittograph. Reading h’¿mr ga’awh. See Commentary ad loc. Reading gam yemallÓ metri causa, gam having been omitted by haplography before ym of yemallÓ in the script at the stage of the Qumran MSS. Reading kappyw with S and V for MT kappê¤, w being corrupted to k in the old Heb. script.
Commentary on Chapter 22 2. s¤an (‘to care for, do a service to’; cf. 15.3) is attested as a synonym of šre (‘to serve’) in 1 Kgs 1.2, 4. kî has the adversative sense ‘Nay but’. ‘alêmô signies ‘on his own account’. 3. Ñ must be understood as parallel to beÑa‘ (‘prot’, lit. something broken off; cf. Gen. 27.26; Ps. 30.10; Mic. 3.14), and if, as seems likely, a gure from commerce is indicated (so Fohrer), eÑ would correspond to a merchant’s ‘Gratefully received!’ or ‘My pleasure!’. 4f. On the signicance of vv. 1-5, see above, p. 301. 6. ‘Brothers’ must be understood to refer to kinsmen, who merited more responsible patronage. The sins are introduced by kî (‘because’) in v. 6 and retribution by ‘al-kn in v. 10 reecting prophetic declaration. Dereliction of social duty is aggravated by the neglect of the obligation that when someone’s outer garment is taken as pledge (cf. Amos 2.8) it must be retained before nightfall (Exod. 22.25-28; Deut. 24.10ff.). Consideration for the poor (v. 6) and hungry (v. 7), the widow and orphan (v. 9), while a charge on the community, is peculiarly the responsibility of a man of status and substance. Hence the condemnation of the abuse of power to grab land (v. 8). 8. This colon, not directly addressed to Job, may be an intrusion, perhaps the citation of a declaration, possibly prophetic, on the monopoly of land, which ought to have been a communal asset, by force (zerôa‘, lit. ‘arm’) or by political favour; cf. the animadversion of the prophets on such acquisition and monopoly of land (Isa. 5.8). 1
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neû’ nîm (lit. ‘he who has been lifted up in respect of face’) refers originally to prostration before a superior, who then extended his sceptre and lifted the face of the one he favoured from the ground. 9. The care of the widow and orphan is frequently recommended in the OT (Deut. 10.18; 14.29; 16.11, 14; 24.19; 26.12; Isa. 1.17) and the neglect of this duty duly condemned (Exod. 22.22; Deut. 27.19; Jer. 7.6; Zech. 7.10). This is cited as the normal duty of a king in the Canaanite legends of Aqht and Krt (Gordon UT 127, 46-50): ltdn dn ’almnt ltpÓ pÓ qÑr npš ltdy tšm ‘l dl lpnk ltšlm ytm b‘d kslk ’almnt
Thou dost not judge the case of the widow, Nor uphold the suit of the distressed; Thou dost not drive away the oppressor of the poor; Before thee thou dost not feed the fatherless; The widow is behind thy back.
‘Breaking the orphan’s arm’ may have been hindrance to his efforts to support himself and his mother. 10. As in Isa. 24.18, pa or paa (‘trap’) is used in juxtaposition with paa, which means ‘pack (of hunting dogs)’ as well as ‘terror’. Here the emphasis is on ‘terror’, though there may be double entendre, the net being set for the quarry, which is startled by the pack as in Isa. 24.18. See further on 15.21 and 18.8-10. 11. On the reading ’ôre¤ ša¤ for MT ’ô-¿še¤, see Textual Note. ši‘h (‘ood’) is found again at 38.34. The root šapa‘, with an Aram. and Syr. cognate meaning ‘to overow, abound’, is attested as šepa‘ in Deut. 33.19 and šip‘h, meaning a crowd of men (2 Kgs 9.17), horses (Ezek. 26.10), camels (Isa. 60.6) and, as here, waters. 12. The fact of God’s exaltation, which is cited in Isa. 40.26-27 to encourage faith in his providential care, may suggest to the sinner that he is transcendent and beyond all care for human order. For g¿ah, T reads be¿ah and S reads hibîah (‘he has made high’). The abstract ‘the height of the heavens’ may be intentional, in apposition to ‘God’, but the verse is probably a gloss on v. 13. 14. ‘The circle of the heavens’ (û šmayim) is the horizon where land and sea according to the ancient conception met in the surrounding sky, which was depicted as a vault; cf. 26.10, ‘he has described a circle upon the face of the waters’, and Prov. 8.27 and Isa. 40.22, ‘the circle of the earth’. 15. In defending MT ’¿ra ‘ôlm (‘the old way’) against the proposed emendation ’¿ra ‘awîlîm (Ball, Tur-Sinai), which has no support in the ancient versions, Dhorme thought of the ancient sinners ‘the sons of God of old’ (’ašer 1
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m‘ôlm), who mated with the daughters of men (Gen. 6.4) and the generation of the ood. Dahood (1962: 65ff.) makes the more feasible suggestion that the phrase, reading the abstract ‘ôlm, means ‘dark path’ (cf. 42.3 ma‘alîm ‘Ñh, ‘obscuring the purpose’), but the parallelism supports the reading ‘awîlîm in scriptio defectiva. 16. qummeÓû (‘were snatched away’) is Aram. rather than Heb., being attested only here and 16.8. Eliphaz again cites Bildad’s description of the fate of the wicked. After the passive yûÑaq (‘is poured over’), yeÑôdm may be taken as the accusative of the objective of the action (GKC, §121d). 17-18. This passage, which interrupts the sequence of thought in vv. 15-16, 19-20, is generally regarded as secondary, possibly inspired by v. 12, which also is possibly an intrusion; both passages are inuenced by Job’s citation of the statement of the wicked who ourish (21.14f.). 17. On the reading lnû with LXX and S for MT lmô, see Textual Note. 18. Reading mimmennû with LXX for MT mennî. 20. This verse was not in the original LXX, and was restored by Origen from Theod. With a slight adjustment, qmênû and yirm might be read in the sense of ‘our enemies’ and ‘their remnant’ (so Olshausen, Siegfried, Ball, Duhm, Stevenson). The versions indicate the sing. of a noun in the former with the 3rd plur. masc. pronominal sufx in the latter. Theod.’s rendering, ‘their substance’ (yeqûmm; cf. Gen. 7.4, 23; Deut. 11.6—so Merx, Graetz, G.B. Gray, Dhorme, Hölscher, Weiser, Pope, Fohrer), suggests the meaning ‘abundance’ for yirm, which may also mean ‘their remainder’ (so Fohrer, Rowley). If this were so, the passage would recall the destruction of the sinner’s family without survivor in 20.26. 21. hasken-n’ ‘immô is a rare expression. The Qal of the verb, meaning ‘to benet’, is attested in v. 2 and 15.3, and the Hiphil, meaning ‘to be accustomed’, in Num. 22.30 (JE). This may support V ‘to agree with’, which is also implied in S, ’eštewî (‘correspond to’). šelm has its primary meaning ‘to be whole, at one’, that is ‘in accord’. MT teô’e¤ is evidently a verbal noun, ‘your coming’, with preformative t analogous to verbal nouns such as temûrh, teûnh, etc. The ancient versions, however, and some Heb. MSS, attest the reading teû’e¤ (‘your produce’) (so Dhorme), but ‘produce’ in v. 21b seems out of context. Dillmann, Budde, Hölscher, Stevenson and most modern commentators read MT (‘you shall reach’). 22. qa (‘receive’) from lqah, is used of receiving the traditional wisdom of the sages, leqa, a regular technical term in Proverbs and wisdom psalms. 1
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tôrh is used here in the general sense of ‘revealed direction’ and not in its specic sense of ‘law’, still less of the Pentateuchal Law. 23. MT tibbneh, ‘you will be rehabilitated’, lit. ‘built up (again)’, would suggest the apodosis of a conditional sentence, after the protasis ’im-tašû ‘adšadday. The apodosis, however, is introduced after an accumulation of protasis by kî-’az in v. 26. Thus tibbneh, or more probably its original, is an imperfect of attendant circumstances like tarîq in v. 22b. For MT tibbneh LXX read ‘humble yourself’, which suggests either tikkna‘ (so Merx, Graetz, Siegfried) or more probably t‘neh (so Ewald, Dillmann, Beer, Duhm, Oort, Ehrlich, Dhorme, Fohrer, Terrien). Hölscher notes both, but, while citing t‘neh‘ rst in his note, evidently preferred tikkna‘ in his translation ‘beugest dich’ (so too Weiser). 24-25. This passage is taken as secondary, interrupting the sequence of thought in 23.26 (so Fohrer). The abrupt introduction of the striking metaphor of the Almighty as gold is strange, as is also the imperative šî in the protasis of a conditional sentence, though that usage is attested in Heb. (GKC, §11o) and in Arab. Alternatively wešatt may be read. As šî… is an abrupt usage of the imperative in the protasis after ’im-tšû in vv. 23a, it probably indicates the intrusion of an aphorism from Wisdom. 24. beÑer (here pausal form bÑer), parallel to ’ôîr, sc. ‘gold of Ophir’, is parallel in its plural form to kese (‘silver’) in v. 25; cf. Ps. 68.31. It is a cognate of Arab. baÑara (‘to examine’, sc. after testing). Dhorme aptly cites miÑr in connection with bôn (‘testing’) in Jer. 6.27. On Ophir, the source of the gold, see on 28.16. In v. 25b it is proposed to emend MT ûeÑûr to ’u¤eÑûr, as in certain Heb. MSS. This, however, is to miss a deliberate wordplay between beÑûr (‘in the category of pebbles’, be being beth essentiae) and beÑer (‘ne gold’). There is a similar word-play between ‘r (‘dust’) and ‘ôîr (‘gold of Ophir’). Besides the word-play, the chiastic parallelism may be noted, giving the passage all the appearance of an intrusive aphorism. 25. Dhorme justly emphasizes the plural in beÑrê¤ and kese tô‘ô in the sense of ‘ingots of gold’ and ‘silver in heaps’. tô‘ô means literally ‘heights’ or ‘protuberances’ (Num. 23.22; 24.8). Bochart proposed that the word, from the root y‘a, is a metathetic cognate of Arab. ya‘a (‘to be high’). 26. kî-’z at length introduces the apodosis. ’z is used exactly as Arab. ’idan (‘in that case’). ti‘ann here and in the similar colon in 27.10 is rendered by LXX secheis parrsian (‘you will have condence’); cf. the usual meaning in Heb., ‘to have pleasure’. In 27.10, S renders tekal (‘trusted’). G.R. Driver (1955: 84) therefore, taking the verb as a metathetic cognate of Arab. ‘ajana (‘to tie on a rope, support’), translated ‘depend’. 1
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28. gzar means ‘to decree’, here ‘to decide’, and is probably an Aramaism.’ômer here has the nuance of Arab. ’amru(n) (‘a matter’). The verb qûm (lit. ‘to stand’), means ‘to be established’ as the Hiphil means commonly ‘to establish’. 29. MT is corrupt. The subject of the main verbs in v. 29a, b must be God, and so the sing. must be read for the plural. gwh (‘back’) is meaningless and has no parallel. ša ‘ênayim (‘the man whose eyes are lowly’, lit. ‘the downcast of eyes’) must have a parallel in the original of watt¿’mer gwh. The solution is suggested by the verb ’amâru in the Canaanite dialect of the local glosses in the Amarna tablets and in the Ras Shamra texts. In the latter it is found with the inxed t and the reexive form of the causative meaning ‘to see’ (Gordon UT 137.32; ‘nt I, 22). Instances in the OT are noted by Dahood in Pss. 11.1; 29.9; 71.10; 77.9; 94.4; 105.29 (1963b: 295ff.). So, in the present passage, for MT hišpîlû watt¿’mer gwh we propose hišpîl h’¿mr g’eh (‘he humbles him whose look is haughty’, lit. ‘who looks haughtily’), which gives the desired parallel to ‘but the man whose eyes are lowly he delivers’ (v. 29b). Hebrew commonly localizes different emotions in particular organs, for instance, pride in the eyes (Isa. 2.11; 5.15; 10.12; Pss. 18.28 [EVV 27]; 101.5; 131.1; Prov. 6.17; 30.7). In Classical Hebrew, ’î is negative (e.g. ’i¤ô, ‘inglorious’). Theod., S and V either ignore MT ’î or read ’îš. MT ’î may mean ‘any’ (cf. Prov. 31.4 and Arab. ’ayyu), hence ’î nqî may mean ‘any innocent man’. But in the context we prefer to read ’î as a negative. The recurrence of the verb mlaÓ in the couplet is suspicious and surely indicates a word-play. We accordingly take the rst yemallÓ as cognate with Arab. malaÓa (‘to scour’), which suggests that ’î nqî means ‘unclean’. The assertion that God will scour the unclean man who turns humbly to him directly contradicts Job’s assertion that even if he has been at pains to cleanse himself, God will resume him into lth (9.30-31). In agreement with the 3rd sing. masc. nimlaÓ, MT kappê¤ may be emended to kappyw, which involves only the reading w for k, which are easily confused in the Old Hebraic script.
1
Job 23 JOB’S RESPONSE TO ELIPHAZ: HIS ARDENT DESIRE FOR CONFRONTATION WITH GOD
Chapter 23 consists of three strophes: vv. 2-7, 8-12, 13-17. The rst (vv. 2-7) is in the forensic form of an appeal for a confrontation with one’s opponent in open court; the second (vv. 8-12) elaborates the theme of the inaccessibility of God for such a confrontation and is otherwise cast in the legal form of an assertion of innocence; the last strophe (vv. 13-17) is in the form of a hymn praising God’s sovereignty, omnipotence and awful majesty, but is adapted to the theme of the second strophe, the inaccessibility of God, whose will is arbitrary and whose majesty simply confounds humanity. Here the drama moves near to its climax. Job is condent that, if confronted by God, he would be able to put his case with such condence in his ability (vv. 4f.) and assurance of his innocence (v. 7) that God would have to take it seriously (v. 6b) and by the divine response Job might know the charge to answer (v. 5b). He is all too conscious of the transcendence of God (vv. 8-9), but he has also faith that God who is transcendent is also omniscient and indeed knows the intimate way of life of his obedient servant (v. 10), which Job species in the wisdom tradition expressed in Ps. 119.3, 13, 15, 19, 72, 88, 101, as the faithful keeping of God’s commandments and ‘storing up the words of his mouth’ (v. 8). But despite his condence in the justice of his case, which he questions if divine justice could gainsay, a confrontation with God is still a wish rather than a certainty. Job’s statement signicantly begins with his resentment at the heavy hand of God on the innocent (v. 2) and the consciousness of the inaccessibility of God (v. 3), which recurs at vv. 6-9, expresses his appalment at God’s awful determinism (vv. 13-16), but ends with the subject’s determination not to be silenced before the dark mystery which veils God (v. 17). Chapter 23 1.
Then Job answered and said:
2.
‘Still is my complaint resentful;1 His hand2 is heavy despite my groaning. Oh that I knew where I might nd Him, That I might come to His seat!
3. 1
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I should state my case3 before Him, And ll my mouth with arguments. I should know with what words He would answer me, And understand what He should say to me. Would His great power be (sufcient) in his contention with me? No! He himself would have to give heed to me. In that case He would have an upright man to reason with, And I should bring off my case4 completely. If I go east, He is not there, And west, I cannot perceive Him. When I turn5 north, I do not see him,6 I turn7 south, but do not behold Him.8 But he knows my intimate way, Were he to test me I should come forth as gold. My foot has held fast to his steps,9 I have kept to course without swerving; I have not departed10 from the commandments11 of His lips, I have stored up the words of His mouth in my bosom.12 But if He chooses13 who can turn Him? What He himself desires that He does, For He will complete what He has decreed,14 And many such things are in His mind. Therefore His presence confounds me, When I consider Him I am terried of Him. Yea, God has unmanned me, And the Almighty has confounded me. Yet I am not silenced by His obscurity,15 And by his presence16 covered by thick darkness.
Textual Notes to Chapter 23 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 1
Reading mr with S, T and V for MT merî (‘rebellion’). Reading yô with LXX and S for MT yî. Reading mišpÓî with LXX for MT mišpÓ, y being omitted by haplography before following w in the script at the stage of its development in the Qumran MSS. Reading mišpÓî with LXX, S, V and many Heb. MSS for MT miššôeÓî. Reading ba‘a¿î for MT ba‘a¿ô, assuming corruption to y to w in the square script as at Qumran. Reading ’eezhû for MT ’az. Reading ’e‘eÓ¿ for MT ya‘aÓ¿. See Commentary ad loc. Reading ’er’hû for MT ’er’eh assuming scriptio defectiva. Reading ba’ašuryw with LXX and S for MT ba’ašurô. Reading l¿’ ’mîš with LXX, V and many Heb. MSS for MT wel¿’ ’mîš. Reading mimmiÑw¿ with LXX and V for MT miÑwa. Reading beêqî with LXX and V for MT muqqî. Reading bar for MT be’e. Reading uqqô with S and V for MT uqqî, w being corrupted to y in the script as in the Qumran MSS. Reading oškô for MT ¿še¤, assuming omission of w after k in the Old Heb. script.
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16. Reading ûmippnyw for MT ûmippnay, assuming omission of w by haplography after y in the script represented by the Qumran MSS.
Commentary on Chapter 23 2. See Textual Note. In support of the reading îî cf. 7.11, ’îh bemar našî, and 10.1, îî ’adabberh bemar našî. MT merî, if correct, would mean ‘rebellion’ in the sense of ‘resentment’, which may also be conveyed by mar. 3. As indicated by mî-yittn, ya‘tî is an optative perfect, regular in Arab. tekûnh (lit. ‘emplacement’) denotes ‘seat’; cf. h¤în môš in 29.7; Ps. 103.19 (so Jerome, Sym., T and S). 4. On ‘ra¤ (lit. ‘to arrange in order’, and specically ‘to draw up a case’ [mišÓ]), see on 13.18. On tô¤ô, here ‘arguments’, see on 5.17. The cohortatives without conjunctions in vv. 4 and 5a are tantamount to protasis in a conditional sentence to which v. 6a is the apodosis (GKC, §108a, f). 6. None of the ancient versions supports MT yim, for which Dhorme and Graetz read yišma‘ (‘would hear’) and Duhm yîm l (‘would heed’). But îm is used in this sense with l understood in Isa. 41.20, so MT may be retained. Tur-Sinai suggests that ra-k¿a means ‘attorney’ or ‘plenipotentiary’. But Job is surely pressing that God cannot evade his argument, however remote he may be, but should answer him personally. 7. šm, most familiar in Classical Heb. as meaning ‘there’, is used here to mark the next stage of the argument, like Arab. umma. Ugaritic tm, though occasionally meaning ‘there’, has possibly also the signicance ‘then’ (e.g. Gordon UT 124, 4, 6, 8). See further on 35.12. Thus there is no need to assume an original yišm¿r with Dhorme. The Piel pillÓ, with no apparent object, is apparently a difculty. It has been suggested that it is intransitive with a reexive force, našî possibly being understood. But this is not otherwise attested except possibly at 20.20. In both cases, if the sense is reexive the emendation to the Hiphil could be more natural. In this case, MT mišš¿eÓî (‘from my judge’) would be better emended to mimmišpÓî after several Heb. MSS and LXX, S and V. Alternatively mišpÓî (‘my case’) may be read as the object of the Piel pillÓ in its usual transitive sense. This is the more probable since God is cited by Job as his adversary at law and not as his judge. 8. hn, meaning ‘if’, is an Aramaism. 9. On this meaning of ‘h (‘turn’), cf. 1 Sam. 14.32 as understood by LXX (ekklith) and probably 1 Kgs 20.40 and Ruth 2.19 and possibly Ugaritic ‘šy (Gordon UT 2 Aqht I.30; G.R. Driver 1950b: 53-55). Tur-Sinai, after D. Yellin 1
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and I. Eitan, proposes that ‘a¿ô is cognate with Arab. ašwatu(n) (‘covering’), omitting we before the following wel¿’ as a dittograph, which might have support in ‘Óa in its usual meaning ‘to cover’, as Pss. 65.14 (EVV 13) and 73.6; but the context demands the nite verb in v. 9a, with ’e‘eÓ¿ (‘I turn’) as parallel. ‘Óa in this sense, so understood by S and V, is not attested elsewhere in Classical Heb., but has cognates in Syr. and Arab., adduced by G.R. Driver (1950b: 54) and Guillaume (1963: 115ff.). Verses 8f. have been regarded as secondary intrusion (so Budde, Duhm, G.B. Gray, Ball, Fohrer), but Dhorme retains the passage, which may be a parody of Ps. 139.7ff., where the psalmist declares that wherever he turns he nds God and is found by him. 10. For dere¤ ‘immî (lit. ‘my way with me’), LXX and V have simply ‘my way’. S reads ‘my way and my standing’, suggesting the reading darkî we‘omeî, which Dhorme accepts, citing Ps. 139.2ff. (so too Hölscher). ‘immî (lit. ‘with me’) means something intimate to one, something of which one is conscious; hence Friedrich Delitzsch proposed that dere¤ ‘immî meant ‘the way of which I am conscious’ (cf. Renan ‘my conscience’), while Ewald and Dillmann proposed ‘my usual, characteristic way’. The gure of assaying is familiar in Hebrew Wisdom literature (e.g. Prov. 17.1), Psalms (e.g. 66.10) and postexilic prophecy (e.g. Isa. 48.10). The ‘way’ or ‘proper conduct’ reects the idiom of Wisdom literature (e.g. Prov. 2.8; Pss. 1.6; 37.34). The specic way of God’s commandments (v. 12) reects the phrase in the Wisdom Psalm 119.15, 31f. 11-12. See Textual Notes. 13. For MT wehû e’e, T and V offer ‘and (even) if he is alone’, taking be as beth essentiae. But in this rendering yî would be expected. Alternatively, be’e might be defended by assuming the hostile sense of be, ‘if he is against a certain one’; cf. Gen. 16.12, yô bakk¿l weya k¿l bô (‘his hand is against all and the hand of all is against him’). But the parallel indicates that MT is a corruption of bar (‘he chooses’); so Beer, Duhm, Budde, Oort, G.B. Gray, Dhorme, Hölscher, Mowinckel, Fohrer, Pope after LXX. 14. On the reading uqqô for MT uqqî with S and V, see Textual Note. 16. hra¤ libbî (lit. ‘has made my heart tender’) means ‘unmanned’, the heart being the seat of courage or resolution as well as cognition; cf. nmas l (‘courage melted away’, Josh. 2.11). The phrase is used parallel to ‘fear’ in Deut. 20.3; Isa. 7.4; Jer. 51.46. 17. MT niÑmattî recalls Ñma, also used in Aram., Syr. and Arab. meaning ‘to be quiet’, which is understood by S. In this case, MT l¿’ may be retained with kî used conversatively, ‘yet I am not put to silence’. 1
Job 24 JOB’S RESPONSE TO ELIPHAZ (CONTINUED, VV. 1-12), WITH TWO CITATIONS FROM WISDOM POETRY (VV. 13-18, 19-25) Commentators have differed widely on this chapter. It is generally agreed that the assertion of the condign punishment of the oppressor (vv. 19-25) is not part of Job’s statement in the intention of the author (so Dhorme and G.B. Gray). It expresses the theme of Job’s friends, and has been claimed for Bildad (so Hoffmann, including vv. 13-17, and Barton, who would include vv. 5-8, but would limit 17ff. to 17-22, 24), and it must be said that the exceptionally short statement of Bildad in the following ch. 25 seems to demand a supplementation, either from this passage or from what follows ch. 25. As for the rest, Siegfried regarded vv. 17-24 as a later interpolation asserted to modify one statement of oppression without redress in vv. 1-12. The unity of vv. 1-18 has been further disputed. Certainly vv. 13-18 seems a self-contained unit, and has been regarded as an importation (so G.B. Gray and Westermann, who included in this category vv. 5-8, 10f.). The same view is taken by Duhm and Fohrer, who would resolve the whole chapter into a number of independent poems from sapiential circles. Considerations of form-criticism would certainly suggest some such solution. Verses 1-12 have their prototype in Egyptian Wisdom literature in the Complaint of the Eloquent Peasant (ANET, 407-10) and similar works; the formal prototype of vv. 13-18 is the listing of subjects with common characteristics, as in Prov. 30.15f. (things never satised), 30.18f. (progressive forces which are imperceptible), 30.21-23 (things intolerable), 30.24-28 (things small but effective), 30.29f. (things stately). On the same formal grounds we may distinguish a sapiential poem on the theodicy in vv. 19-25, which was probably inserted as a corrective to the satire in vv. 1-12. From this point until Job’s apologia pro vita sua, culminating in his oath of purgation (vv. 29-31), we are confronted by the disruption of the former regularity of sequel of addresses and by a substantial amount of poetic interpolation, culminating in the poem on Wisdom (ch. 28), so that it is fair to discern in ch. 24 the beginning of this process. Of the secondary nature of vv. 13-18 and 19-25 we are in no doubt but we regard the case as different in 1-12. Granted the poetic matter cited in vv. 1-12, which Fohrer would resolve into series of independent poems (vv. 1-4, 10-12, 22-23, 5-8, in that order, with 1
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v. 9 a gloss on v. 3), this is held together by the introduction ‘Why are set times (of judgment) not xed by the Almighty…?’ (v. 1) and the conclusion ‘The life-breath of the injured cries out, yet God pays no heed to their prayer’. This is the theme of Job’s complaint so that we have no hesitation in regarding it as a citation by the author himself to form the conclusion of Job’s statement in the short ch. 23. We see no compelling reason to differ from the order in MT except to admit Fohrer’s view that v. 9 is a secondary elaboration of injustice to the widow and the destitute in v. 3. The tricolon in v. 12 thematically concludes the opening question of God’s neglect of redress for the injustice described in vv. 2-11. The order in MT of the above sections seems to us to raise no question. The statement that ‘the needy of the land are all made to hide themselves’ (v. 4) is naturally developed in the passage on their furtive nightly depredations from their refuge in the wilds (vv. 5-6), where their exposure (vv. 7-8) leads to the statement that, keeping the ocks of others as landless paupers, they are insufciently clad (v. 10a), hungry while as day-labourers in another’s harvest (v. 10b), with festering sores, they manipulate the heavy stone oil-press (v. 11a), and thirsty, they tread another’s wine-vats (v. 11b). Admitting Fohrer’s bracketing of v. 9 as a gloss or variation on v. 3, we follow Dhorme’s arrangement of text between vv. 14 and 17, viz. vv. 14ab, 15ab, 14c, 15c, 16abc, 17ab, but read v. 18acb as the tricolon ending the passage. Chapter 24 Job’s Response to Eliphaz (continued, vv. 1-12), with Two Citations from Wisdom Poetry (vv. 13-18, 19-25). 1. 2. 3. 9. 4. 5.
6.
1
‘Why are set times (of judgment) not xed by the Almighty, And those who acknowledge Him1 never see his days of reckoning? The wicked2 remove boundary marks; They lift ock and shepherd.3 They drive off the ass of the fatherless; They take the widow’s ox in pledge; 4 They snatch the orphan from the breast, They take the suckling5 of the poor in pledge. They divert the poor from the administration, And the needy of the land are all made to hide themselves. As6 wild asses in the wilderness They go forth at dusk,7 Anxiously seeking what they may snatch in the evening Since there is no food8 for their children. In elds by night9 they reap, They hastily gather the grapes of the vineyard of the wicked;
316 7.
They lie naked10 all night without clothing, Without covering from the cold.
8.
They are wet with the downpour of the mountains, And cling to the rocks for want of shelter; Keeping the ocks,11 they go about without clothing, And themselves hungry, they carry the sheaves; With festering sores12 they press olive-oil; They tread the wine-vats, though they (themselves) are thirsty. The bowels13 of the dying14 groan, And the life-breath of the injured cries out, Yet God pays no heed15 to their prayer.16
10. 11. 12.
13.
14. 15. 14c. 15c 16.
17. 18a. c. b. 19. 20.
21. 22. 23. 24.
25.
1
Job 24. Conclusion to Job’s Statement
There are those who rebel against God,17 They do not recognize his ways, And will not abide in his paths. When it is not yet light18 the murderer rises, To slay the poor and needy; The eye of the adulterer watches for the twilight, Saying, “No eye will mark me”. And at night the thief ranges,19 Yea, he puts a veil on his face. In the dark he breaks into houses; Day is a terror to all of them,20 They are all alike21 strangers to the light, For the morning is the shadow of death to them, But they are familiar22 with the destructive works of deep darkness. Headlong they rush23 from the daylight,24 (Such a one) dare not take the road on the heights,25 His allotted portion26 in the land is cursed. The drought and the heat snatch away27 snow, So for the wicked,28 Sheol snatches them away.29 The mother who suckled (such a one) shall forget him, His eminence30 shall no longer be remembered. So wickedness is broken like a stick! He mates with a barren woman who has no child, And with a widow and it does not benet him. But God shall grip the mighty in his strength, He shall rise up and (the wicked) may not rely on his security.31 (God) shall put him down at on his face, and he will be spread-eagled, Yea, the eyes of Yahweh32 are upon his ways.33 His exaltation34 is for a little while and it is gone; Yea, he droops35 like dog-tooth,36 shrivelling up, Cut down37 like the top ears of corn. And if it is not so who will give me the lie, And reduce my statement to nothing?’38
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Textual Notes to Chapter 24 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.
22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 1
Reading the plur. y¿e‘yw with Qere. Inserting r‘îm or reš‘îm with LXX metri causa. Reading wer¿‘ô with LXX for MT wayyir‘û. See Commentary ad loc. The verse is probably a secondary expansion of or variant on v. 3. Reading ‘l, the participle of an ‘/w verb for the preposition ‘al in MT. See Commentary ad loc. Reading h¤ or ’¤ after LXX, V and S for MT hn. Reading keî Ñillîm for MT beo‘olm (conjecture). Reading bel¿’ leem for MT l¿’ leem. See Commentary ad loc. Reading belayl for MT belîlô, taking nal w as a dittograph of following y in the script at the stage of the Qumran MSS. Reading ‘arûmîm for MT ‘rôm, as suggested by the number of the verb. Reading r¿‘îm for MT ‘rôm. See Commentary ad loc. Reading binešûr¿m for MT bên šûr¿m. See Commentary ad loc. Reading m‘ê for m‘îr. Reading mîm for MT meîm. Reading yišma‘ for MT yaîm. Reading teillm after S for MT tilh, the pronominal sufx having been lost through similarity to the following hmmh. Reading ’l for MT ’ôr, as indicated by the pronominal sufxes in the sequel. Reading l¿’ ’ôr for MT le’ôr. See Commentary ad loc. Reading yehall¤ gann for MT yehî ¤eann. See Commentary ad loc. Reading yôm meittm kullmô for MT yômm ittemû-lmô. See Commentary ad loc. Reading yadw after MT wel¿’-ye‘û ’ôr in parallelism with kullmo (‘all of them’), restored in v. 16b. yadw has been displaced in MT to v. 17a, where it is superuous to the metre. Reading yakkîrû for MT yakkîr, the nal w being omitted by haplography after r in the square script. Reading qallû ‘al-pnîm (conjecture) for MT qal-hû’ ‘al-penê. See Commentary ad loc. Reading miyyôm for MT mayim. See Commentary ad loc. Reading mermîm for MT kermîm, with corruption of m to k in the Heb. script and transposing v. 18b and c. See Commentary ad loc. Reading elqô for MT elqm in agreement with the context. Regarding MT mayim as displaced from v. 19b after corruption. See following Textual Note. Reading mûmyîm corrupted to MT mayim and displaced before šele in v. 19a. Reading aÓm for MT ÓÓ’û (pausal). Reading rûm¿h for MT rimmh. Reading beayyyw for MT beayyîn. See Commentary ad loc. Reading ‘ênê yhwh for MT ‘ênêhû. See Commentary ad loc. Reading der¤yw for MT dare¤êhem, with V. Reading rûmô for MT rômmû. Reading wehumma¤ for MT wehumme¤û. Reading kîl’ after 11QtargJob for MT kakk¿l. Reading yimmal for MT yimmlû. Reading le’ayin for MT le’al.
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Commentary on Chapter 24 1. The versions give no clear idea of the meaning of the text, owing mainly to their assumption that the verb Ñpan means ‘to hide’ as in many passages in the OT, and this has occasioned certain assumptions on their part as to the state of the Heb. text. But the verb means also ‘to store up’ or ‘preserve’ (e.g. 15.20; Hos. 13.12; Ps. 31.20; Prov. 2.7; Song 7.14), and may also have a homonym cognate with Arab. Ñafana (‘to set the feet evenly’), hence conceivably ‘to x regularly’, which the context of the present passage demands best suiting the object ‘ittîm (‘[set]) times’), parallel to ‘his days’, sc. of reckoning; cf. the ‘day of Yahweh’ in Amos 5.18ff.; Zeph. 1.7ff.; Isa. 2.12ff.; and particularly Joel 4.1ff. (EVV 3.1ff.), where ‘that day’ is parallel to ‘that time’ (‘) in the present passage and is associated with judgment. 2. û is an orthographic variant of the more regular sû (‘to be removed’). The metre demands one more beat, hence r‘îm or reš‘îm should be added after LXX. Perhaps r‘îm was omitted by error owing to its resemblance to wer¿‘ô (‘and its shepherd’, for MT wayyir‘û) in v. 2b. The shepherd was taken with the sheep, so that he could not be a witness to the crime. Thus to the crime of theft the malefactor adds that of kidnapping, which is a capital offence in the Israelite apodeictic codes (Exod. 20.15; 21.16ff.; Deut. 5.9; 24.7). Alternatively the meaning may be that wicked creditors are not merely content with foreclosing a mortgage on the ock but they take also a mortgage on the shepherd’s person and foreclose it remorselessly, distraining him as a slave. See further on v. 9. 3. The taking of the ass or the ox of the poor in pledge deprived them of the necessary means of livelihood, like the distraining of millstones which was forbidden in Deut. 24.6, ‘One must not take the nether or upper millstone in pledge (yab¿l), for (he who does so) takes a man’s life in pledge’. The offence was the more heinous since the victim was a widow, who was a special charge upon the charity of the community in Israel as in Ugarit; cf. Deut. 24.17-22, where it is forbidden to take a widow’s cloak in pledge (Deut. 24.17). 9. This verse, with specic reference to inhumane treatment of orphans, presumably the children of widows, belongs here (so Dhorme), rather than in the list of deprivations between vv. 8 and 10 in MT, where it has been taken as a marginal gloss on vv. 2-3 (so Siegfried, Budde, Duhm, Hölscher, Stevenson, Fohrer). G.B. Gray admits the possibility that, if not a gloss, it belongs after vv. 2-3. In any case it seems best taken as a gloss, or variant on v. 3. gzal means ‘to plunder’ or ‘snatch forcibly’. The latter is the sense here; cf. 20.19; Gen. 31.31; Judg. 21.23; 2 Sam. 23.21. MT šôd, where the sense of the context indicates ‘breast’, is attested in Isa. 60.16, 66. Elsewhere in the OT the word means ‘plunder’, and šô has been suspected as a scribal error for š 1
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(‘breast’), but the recurrence of šô in Isaiah indicates that, as Fohrer suggests, it may be a byform of the more regular noun. For MT ‘al-‘nî yab¿lû (‘they take pledges to the disadvantage of the poor’) which is tautological and colourful in the context, Klostermann proposed ‘l for MT ‘al (‘the suckling’), the participle of ‘ûl, cognate with Arab. la, yal (‘to suckle’). The context indicates the taking of children for the debt of parents; cf. Exod. 21.7; 2 Kgs 4.1; Neh. 5.5; Isa. 50.1; and, in Mesopotamia, the Code of Hammurabi §117. 4. dere¤ usually means ‘way’ in Classical Heb., which in this context has no particular point. Here and in other contexts which imply ordered government of humans or God the noun is cognate with Arab. daraku(n) (‘administration’), a usage well attested in the the Ras Shamra texts (e.g. Gordon UT Krt, 41f.), where drk(t) is parallel to mlk (‘kingship’). Thus in Amos 2.7 weere¤ ‘anwîm yaÓÓû may be read ûmiddere¤ ‘anwîm yaÓÓû (‘and divert the poor from the administration’). 5. h¤ or ’¤ should be read for MT hn, an Aram. particle meaning ‘as’. In v. 5b the metre demands another beat. Besides, MT beo‘olm (var. keo‘olm, cf. S, T and V leo‘olm), meaning ‘on their business’ does not suit the gure of wild asses in v. 5a. Hence we propose that this is the corruption of an original text beî or keî Ñillîm (‘at dusk’, lit. ‘in proportion to shadows’), assuming corruption of Ñ to ‘ in the square script. šiar denotes anxious search as in 7.21. ‘arh is probably an adverbial accusative, common in Arabic, meaning ‘in the evening’, rather than ‘ere with h locale, meaning ‘until evening’ as suggested by Dahood (UHP, p. 16). In view of nightly depredation by wild asses on border lands, the former meaning is to be preferred. Weiser, Fohrer, Gordis and Pope take the word as indicating the desert, where like wild asses the destitute seek food. But the following verse referring to nightly pilfering of cornelds and vineyards supports our interpretation. The familiar meaning of Óerep in Classical Heb. is ‘prey’, but it also means ‘food’ in general (e.g. Ps. 111.5, Óere nan lîr’yw; Mal. 3.10; and possibly Prov. 31.15). Here we propose that the word is taken in the Aramaic sense of Óera, used of a creditor snatching his debts, hence our translation ‘what they may snatch’. Oppression and destitution breed theft. In MT lô leem lanne‘rîm Wright read l¿’… (so Budde, Beer, Duhm, Dhorme, Stevenson; Guillaume proposed lû… ‘(to see) if there be food…’, while Hölscher read lalleem (‘for the food…’; so too Fohrer). Perhaps we may rather read bel¿’ leem… (‘since there is no food…’). 6. MT belîlô (‘his mixed fodder’) might possibly be read belî l¿’ (‘which does not belong to him’), or better, belî lmô (‘which does not belong to them’), with the omission of m before w in the Old Heb. script, after LXX, S, V and T, the plur. being demanded by the verb yiqÑ¿rû. One Heb. MS reads belayelh (‘by night’) and is evidently supported by ‘before daylight’ (so LXX). In view 1
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of our interpretation of v. 5 this is feasible (so Merx, Bickell, Beer, Budde, Duhm, Oort, G.B. Gray, Dhorme, Peake, Hölscher, Fohrer). According to the former reading the reference would be to the poor who are hired or forced to do work in the elds of others, and would agree with vv. 10bff.; according to the latter it would agree with v. 5 according to the interpretation we have adopted, stealing at night by the destitute. In v. 6b it is proposed to emend rš‘ to ‘šîr (so Budde, Beer, Duhm, Oort, Peake, G.B. Gray, Fohrer, op.cit., p. 369, though translating ‘Frevler’ in p. 367), but without the support of the versions. rš‘ may well stand, denoting the prosperous wicked, as often in the Psalms. lqaš at rst sight suggests leqeš and malqôš, respectively the ‘late aftergrowth’ and ‘rains at the end of winter’, which coincide with the rst mowings of spring pasture. Here the verb may be the Heb. cognate of Arab. laqaa (‘to gather up hurriedly’, as thieves in a vineyard). 8. zerem (‘rainstorm’) and maseh (‘shelter’) are found together as here in Isa. 25.4, where God is a shelter from the storm. rÓa is found in the OT only in Job, in 8.16 of a fresh, sappy plant; cf. Arab. raÓdu(n) (‘fresh’, as distinct from clotted dates). Here it means ‘wet’, as the cognate in Ass., Aram. and Syr. 10. Though ‘naked’ (MT ‘rôm, which in any case should be plur. in agreement with the verb) would agree with ‘without clothing’ in v. 10a, we prefer to regard it as a corruption of r¿‘îm (‘shepherding’). Since vv. 10f. refers to men harvesting, though themselves hungry, pressing olive-oil, though themselves blistered (see below), and treading out grapes, though themselves thirsty, it is natural to nd reference to shepherds of the wool-bearing ocks, themselves without clothing. 11. yaÑhîrû, ‘they press out olive-oil’ (yiÑhr), a denominative verb, has suggested that šûr¿ or šûr¿âm, which may be a dual, refers to ‘rows’ of olive trees (so Dahood 1962: 68, ‘between the rows they pass the noonday’, Ñohorayim), or possibly, as Hölscher suggested, the dry stone terrace-walls of the hillsides, where olive-trees are grown (so also Mowinckel). Larcher’s translation in JB, ‘they have no stones for pressing oil’, evidently envisages the reading be’ên šûrayim and assumes that the noun means an olive-press of two stones like two courses of masonry, the usual meaning of the noun. In agreement with the rest of vv. 10f., where the particular privation of the destitute is mentioned with relation to their particular labour, we suggest that the text behind MT bên šûr¿m contains a reference to a particular hardship of those who press out the olive-oil which the produce for which they labour was meant to relieve. Hence we propose that MT is a corruption of binešûr¿m (lit. ‘with their abrasions’), taking nešûr¿ as cognate with Arab. naara (‘to rub off’) the V form meaning ‘to break out, suppurate’; cf. Syr. near, to suppurate’. In this case the noun would refer to blisters and suppuration from open sores of those who manipulated the heavy stone olive-press. 1
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12. MT m‘îr meîm is suspect, having no parallel. This, however, is partially restored if we emend to m‘a¿m (‘by reason of their bondage’, as Fohrer, Lévêque after Steuernagel). Closer to MT, and completely restoring the parallelism, is the emendation mê‘ê mîm (yin’qû) (‘the bowels of dying men [groan]’). n’aq is known in the OT only here and in Ezek. 30.24 and in the noun form in Exod. 2.24; 6.5; Judg. 2.18. The groaning of the bowels of dying men is no more strange than ‘the life-breath of the injured crying out’. Isaiah 63.15 refers to ‘trouble of the bowels’, which does not exclude sound. S supports the reading mîm, the desired parallel to allîm. The enormity of such oppression is appreciated in view of the law in the Book of the Covenant which awards compensation even to injured slaves (Exod. 21.26f.). The sudden tricolon after the predominant bicola throws the emphasis on to the third and nal statement, which alleges the indifference of God. MT yîm tilh (‘considers it a moral obtuseness’; cf. 1.22) if not impossible, is at least suspect, and two Heb. MSS read teillh (‘prayer’), which was also read by S. This would indicate the reading yišma‘ (‘hears’) for MT yîm (so Graetz, Budde, Ehrlich, Ball, Dhorme, Hölscher), though yîm, with l understood, meaning ‘pays heed to’, is possible (so Mowinckel, Fohrer, Pope, and evidently NEB). 13. Dhorme suggested that this verse, introduced by the pronoun hmmh, is displaced from after v. 16, with which indeed the general sense would agree. Hölscher regards the verse as in position. He notes that vv. 14-18 was lacking in the original LXX, and argues that after the addition of vv. 14-18 the original v. 13 was adapted by the substitution of ’ôr (‘light’) for an original ’l (‘God’) and then introduced by hmmh, which referred to nocturnal miscreants mentioned in vv. 14-18. In support of this view it must be admitted that MT m¿reê (‘those who rebel against’) more naturally indicates a personal object than the impersonal ’ôr, and that ’l is the more natural antecedent of the pronominal sufx in der¤yw (‘his ways’) and neî¿yw (‘his paths’). be in bem¿reê is probably beth essentiae, signifying ‘in the category of’, being analogous to bi introducing the predicate in a nominal sentence in Arab. 14. For MT l’ôr, which is contradicted by the main point of this passage, l¿’ ’¿r (‘while it is not yet light’) has been read generally since it was suggested by Wright. Hölscher suggested bel¿’ ’ôr with the same meaning. The verb rÑa, used in the commandment in the Decalogue (Exod. 20.13; Deut. 5.17), though used for unpremeditated manslaughter in the case of an accident (Deut. 4.42; 19.3, 4, 6), usually denotes premeditated killing, whether murder or in discharge of blood-revenge (Num. 35.27, 30). qÓal (‘to kill’) is certainly an indication of Late Hebrew, probably under Aram. inuence. The only instances in the OT are here and 13.15 as well as Ps. 139.19 and in the verbal noun qeÓel in Obad. 9. Verse 14c, on the thief, goes naturally with vv. 15c and 16a, which refers to burglary, and has been displaced in MT. 1
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15. n¿’ is the adulterer, the participle of n’a, being used in the Piel in the seventh commandment (Exod. 20.14; Deut. 5.18). neše is the twilight (cf. 7.4ff.). The adulterer in Ben Sira 23.25f. remarks ‘the darkness is about me’. The twilight is also noted in Prov. 7.9 as the time when the prostitute spies out her clients. ser has the connotation of Arab. atara (‘to veil’). 16. The verb for house-breaking, ar, lit. ‘to dig’, recalls matere in the Book of the Covenant (Exod. 22.1 [EVV 2]) and Gk. toich¿ruchos (lit. ‘one who digs through a wall’), a relatively simple operation in mud-brick building or even stone building without mortar. In MT yômm ittemû-lmô (lit. ‘by day they seal up for themselves’) the transitive verb lacks an object. Dhorme reads the sing. with S and takes the clause as a relative clause without the relative particle and with ‘houses’ as antecedent (‘[houses] which he has sealed during the day’), that is, on which he has set an identication mark. According to the arrangement of the text which we adopt v. 16b is parallel to v. 16c (‘they are all strangers to the light’); so we read yôm meittm kullmô (‘day is a terror to all of them’) after Stevenson. The couplet v. 16bc categorized the nocturnal miscreants introduced as ‘those who rebel against God’ in v. 13a. In v. 16c, for the sake of metre, yaa (‘all together’) should be transposed from v. 17a to before l¿’ ye‘û, thus giving a parallel to kullmô (‘all of them’) in v. 16b. The transposition also relieves the overloaded v. 17a. 17. Ñl mwe (‘the shadow of death’) should probably be read for MT Ñalmwe in v. 17a, and Ñalmû (‘darkness’) for MT Ñalmwe in v. 17b. balehôt occurring in 18.11, 14; 27.30; 30.15, meaning ‘terrors’, means rather ‘calamity’ or ‘destruction’ in Isa. 17.14 (sing.) and Ps. 73.19; Ezek. 26.21; 27.36; 28.19. Here the plur. means ‘destructive works’. LXX tarachos (‘confusion’) suggests the reading behlô. 18. Dhorme retains MT qal-hû’ ‘al-penê-mayîm (‘he is a light thing on the surface of the water’); so also Pope, who regards it as displaced from the end of ch. 27, which he assigns to Zophar. Certainly it connects obviously with nothing in the strophe vv. 19-24. Budde and Beer emend, reading qal hû’ ‘alpenê šmyîm (‘he is accursed in the sight of Heaven’), which has the merit of agreeing with v. 18b. But since v. 18c refers to the wicked avoiding the exposed ground to evade detection, Larcher’s rendering in JB, ‘Headlong he ees from the daylight’, evidently reading qal-hû’ ‘al-pnyw miyyôm has much to recommend it, and we adopt it with the modication of the reading qallû (so Fohrer) and pnyw for MT penê proposed by Larcher. The avoidance of the heights by the miscreant to escape detection reects the highways of ancient Palestine which often kept to the height of a ridge, which was dry in all weathers and, once the ridge was attained, more level. Movement along wadis under the general surface of the land is also a well-known stratagem of raiding and smuggling parties in the desert. We propose to see a word-play 1
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between qallû (‘ee hastily’) in v. 18a and tequllal (‘will be accursed’). On this reading and interpretation we would see v. 18acb as the conclusion of vv. 13ff. See further, Textual Notes. 19. mêmê may be omitted from v. 19a metri causa. It has probably been transposed from v. 19b, where it has suffered corruption from an original mûmyîm (‘miscreants’); cf. Syr. mûmy’). This would certainly be an Aramaism in Job, not occurring elsewhere in the OT. mûm is used in the OT to denote ‘blemish’, physical (Lev. 21.17ff.; Song 4.7 etc.) and moral (Job 11.15; Prov. 9.7). This indicates the reading aÓm (‘snatches them’) for MT Ó’û (pausal) in v. 19b, mûmyîm being used proleptically. The verb is a gnomic perfect. 20. The abrupt change to the sing., if the passage is a unity, may be explained through the mention of the sing. reem (‘womb’). Alternatively the sing. pronominal sufx may refer to the indenite subject ‘one’. For MT reem meqô, Beer (followed by Duhm, Hölscher, Mowinckel and Fohrer) read re¿ meq¿mô (‘the public place of his town’), and Dhorme read reem peqô (‘the womb that formed him’); cf. Akk. patâqu (‘to form’). But MT may be retained, meqô meaning ‘which gave him suck’; cf. Syr. meaq. An apparent difculty is the use of reem (lit. ‘womb’), when ‘breast’ might rather be expected. By synecdoche, however, the noun may mean ‘young woman’ or ‘potential mother’; cf. Judg. 5.30 and the Moabite Stone. In the context rimmh is likely to be a corruption of rûm¿h (‘his eminence’; so Michaelis, Bickell, Budde, Beer, Duhm, Peake, Kissane) rather than šem¿h (‘his name’; so G.B. Gray, Dhorme, Mowinckel, Fohrer). 21. The transitive usage of r‘h (‘to keep company with’) may be attested in Prov. 29.3, r¿‘h zônô, cited by Tur-Sinai, though here the word may be a noun rather than the participle. Verse 21b refers to the convention of levirate marriage with the childless widow of a deceased brother. In this case the property of the dead man is secured not for the husband and his family, but for the offspring of the widow. The embarrassment of this situation is indicated in the reluctance of Naomi’s kinsman to marry Ruth, lest he impair his own property in redeeming his kinsmen’s property with his own capital when it would not be an asset to himself or his own family but to Ruth and her children (Ruth 4.6). 22. As noticed by Dhorme, MT mša¤ is cognate with Arab. maaka (‘to grasp’), as in Pss. 10.9; 28.3. Dhorme further reads the participle m¿š¤, the subject being God. yqûm would then have the pregnant sense of rising in hostility, as in Exod. 15.7; Deut. 22.26; Amos 7.9; etc.; cf. Arab. qawmu(n) (‘enemies’). For MT beayyîn read beayyyw with LXX, Sym., V and three Heb. MSS. The word may be taken as in Prov. 27.27; cf. miyeh (Judg. 6.4; 17.10) as signifying ‘his means’. Or there may be the nuance of the verbal 1
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noun in the IInd Form of the Arab. verb taiyatu(n) (‘security’), being a wordplay with ayyyw in this sense, which is usually expressed in Heb. by bÓa, and continuing with leÓa in v. 23a, but with the Arab. sense of ‘at on his face’, from Arab. baÓaa, ‘to spread out, atten’ (so Guillaume). 23. lô seems a clear case of Aram. le as nota accusativa with the pronominal sufx. In the context in MT yišš‘n is feasibly taken by Guillaume as cognate with Arab. ša‘ana (‘to be dishevelled’), hence our rendering ‘he will be spread-eagled’. On this interpretation v. 23b would refer to the eyes of God upon the wicked with hostile intent. Taking ayyyw leÓa and yišš‘n in their usual Heb. sense, Fohrer sees a reference to God’s support of the wicked oppressors even when their own condence fails (v. 22b) and to his looking protectively on them (v. 23b); accordingly he regards vv. 22-23 as displaced from after v. 12. The objection to the otherwise feasible reading ‘ênê yhwh for MT ‘ênêhû is that the divine name Yahweh is practically never used in the poetic dialogue in Job except in citation of a well-known phrase. If the emendation is accepted it may support the view that 24.19-25 is such a citation and is secondary. For MT dare¤êhem V reads der¤yw, which agrees with the sing. subjects in vv. 22b and 23a. 24. Suddenly in MT, as often in this passage, the number changes to the plur. In this particular verse, the number changes in a single colon (v. 24a). Preference for the sing. ‘ênennû involves less disturbance to MT, where MT rômmû (‘they have been exalted’) may be the corruption of rûmô (‘his exaltation’; so, after LXX, Bickell, Duhm, Beer, G.B. Gray, Dhorme, Hölscher, and Mowinckel, who renders ‘his arrogance’). This would involve the reading wehumma¤ after LXX, involving dittography in MT of w between nal k of wehumma¤ and initial k in kakk¿l in the Old Heb. script. m¤a¤ is a rare verb in the OT, being attested in Eccl. 10.18 of a roof-tree subsiding and in Ps. 106.43 of the wicked drooping. The verb is used in the Baal myth in the Ras Shamra texts of Sea ‘subsiding’ in his conict with Baal (Gordon UT 68.17). For MT kakk¿l 11QtargJob reads kybl, which van der Ploeg and van der Woude (1971: 28) render as ‘dog-tooth’ after I. Löw (1881: 183). MT yiqqeÑûn (lit. ‘they are drawn together’, sc. ‘shrivelled up’), is conrmed by 11QtargJob. For MT yimmlû the sing. may be read, the nal w being a dittograph before initial w of the following word. The verbal mlal is found in a similar gure in 14.2; 18.16; Pss. 37.2; 90.6. ‘Cut down like the top ears of corn’ refers to the corn cut not by scythe near the ground, but nearer the top of the stalk with the sickle. The tricolon marks the end of the citation, and v. 25 marks the author’s personal assertion. 25. Here, as in 19.6, 23, ’ô is simply an enclitic, like Arab. fa. Parallelism demands the reading in v. 25b weym le’ayin millî (‘and reduce my statement to nothing’). 1
Job 25 and 26 THE INTRODUCTION OF BILDAD’S THIRD ADDRESS: INTRODUCED BY 26.2-4, CONTINUED BY 25.2-6 AND CONCLUDED BY 26.5-15* The ascription of the short ch. 25 to Bildad and the lack of the usual dialectic introduction suggests that 26.2-4, ascribed to Job in MT, is really the introduction to Bildad’s third address in the same tone as Eliphaz’s opening address (4.3ff.), which may indicate a secondary attempt to construct a third round of debate. A secondary hand is indicated by the introduction of a Hymn of Praise in 25.2-6, completed, probably secondarily, by another hand responsible for 26.5-14. The dread of the imperial power of God by the powers ‘in the heights’ (25.2) is balanced by the dread of ‘the shades beneath’ of the majesty of the Creator. But the rst part of the hymn from 25.3 is interpreted by the sapiential argument a majore ad minus to assert the futility of the claim of a mere human being to state the justice of his case to God. The passage so arranged (26.2-4; 25.2-6; 26.5-14) falls into three parts: the introduction in the style of sapiential dialectic (26.2-4); a hymn of praise to divine power and righteousness (25.2-6), which by its adaptation to the sapiential statement of the signicance of man recalls the sapiential adaptation of the Hymn of Praise in Psalm 8; and nally the continuation of the hymn of praise to the power and providence of God (26.5-14), without sapiential adaptation. 25.2-6 is a single strophe; 26.5-14 falls into two strophes, each consisting, like 25.2-6, of ve couplets (26.5-9, 10-14), supporting the view that structurally as well as thematically 25.2-6 and 26.5-14 comprise a unity. The ascription of 26.2-4 to Bildad rather than, as in MT, to Job is signicantly supported by 11QtargJob. Chapters 25 and 26 (25.1; 26.2-4; 25.2-6; 26.5-14) 25.1. 26.2. 3.
* 1
Then answered Bildad the Shuhite and said: ( )1 ‘How you have supported the weak! How you have saved the arm of the powerless! How you have counselled the disingenuous, And shown sound wisdom to the simple!2 See General Introduction, p. 57.
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4.
From whom3 do you declare such words? Whose spirit is it that has come forth from you?
25.2.
Dominion and awe rest with Him; He maintains peace in His heights. Is there any counting of His troops? Whom does his ambush4 not surprise? How can a man be innocent before God? And how can one born of women be guiltless? If even5 the moon does not continue to shine,6 And the stars are not pure in His sight, How much less a human—a maggot? And a son of a human—a worm?
3. 4. 5. 6. 26.5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.
The shades writhe beneath, The waters and their inhabitants. Sheol is naked before Him; Uncovered is Perdition. He it is that stretches out a rmament over the void, That suspends the earth over nothing, That binds up the water in His clouds, Yet the clouds are not burst under their weight. He covers the face of the full moon,7 Spreading his cloud over it. He traces a circle8 on the face of the waters At the very limit of light and darkness. The pillars of the sky rock, Astounded at His rebuke. By His power he stilled the sea, And by His wisdom9 he struck down Rahab. By the winds of heaven10 He broke him in pieces;11 His was the hand that pierced the primeval serpent. These indeed are but the outskirts of His government.12 And what but a whisper of His purpose do we hear therein? And His powerful thunder13 who can understand?’
Textual Notes to Chapters 25–26 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 1
Omitting 26.1 after the rearrangement of the text as Bildad’s speech. Reading labbûr for MT lr¿. See Commentary ad loc. Reading m’e-mî for MT ’e-mî. Reading ’¿reô with LXX for MT ’ôrhû. See Commentary ad loc. Reading ‘ô for MT ‘a. Understanding yhl with LXX, Aq., T, V and one Heb. MS. Reading kese’ for MT kissh. See Commentary ad loc. Reading ¿qq-û with S and T for MT ¿q-. See Commentary ad loc. Reading ûieûnô (Qere) for MT ûieûnô. Reading berûô šmayim for MT berûô šmayim. See Commentary ad loc. Reading šibbrô for MT šierh. See Commentary ad loc. Reading der¤ô or darkô for MT der¤yw. See Commentary ad loc. Reading ra‘am geûrô (Qere).
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Commentary on Chapters 25–26 2. lel¿’-¤¿a is another instance of the Aram. nota accusativa le. 3. For MT weûšiyyh lr¿ hô‘t (‘and you have given abundant evidence of sound wisdom’) a reading is demanded which observes the parallelism with ‘How you have counseled the disingenuous?’. Here one Heb. MS reads lbr for MT lr¿, which suggests either labb‘r (‘the brutish’, so Graetz) or labbûr (‘the simple’); cf. Syr. berîr’ and late Heb. bûr (‘simple, rude’). On the meaning of tûšiyyh as ‘plan’, which includes both counsel and successful effect of counsel, see above on 5.12. The parallelism ‘Ñ // tûšiyyh occurs again in Isa. 28.29 and Prov. 8.14; cf. tûšiyyh as parallel to mezimmh in Prov. 3.21. 4. MT ’e-mî is taken by Hölscher as ‘by whose help’ (lit. ‘with whom?’). Alternatively m’e-mî (‘from whom?’, i.e. ‘By whose authority?’) may be read. In v. 4b ‘Whose breath comes forth from you?’ animadverts on Job as a mouthpiece. The sense is ‘Who inspired you?’ where rûa might be expected; but Bildad may prefer a more derogatory term nešmh (‘breath’), though the word is found in parallelism with rûa and qualied by ‘of the Almighty’ in 32.8, so that we may translate ‘spirit’. 25.2. The association of hamšl with paa (‘fear’ in the sense of inspiring awe) indicates that the verb is innitive absolute of mšal (‘to rule’) used as a verbal noun. It emphasizes the theme of divine government or Kingship. The Hiphil may imply God’s imposition of his rule, and in consequence his ‘peace’, like that of an imperial sovereign over powers that would contest it, for example, ym and tannîn, which God holds in check (7.12) and ‘the champions of Rahab’ (9.13), a theme developed in postexilic eschatology, God’s nal punishment of ‘the host of heaven, in heaven’ (Isa. 24.21) and rebellious angels in Dan. 10.13. 3. ’¿reô (‘his ambush’) sustains the military gure in v. 3a. The verb qûm for rising from an ambush (ma’ar) is used in Josh. 8.19. The sing. participle is collective, denoting the actual party in ambush. 4. The language is forensic. z¤h means ‘to be clean’, i.e., innocent, in parallelism with Ñaq, as in Ps. 51.6 (cf. Mic. 6.11). There is a word-play between z¤h in this sense in v. 4 and as meaning ‘pure’ or ‘bright’ in v. 5. 5. In MT ‘a-yra wel¿’ y’hîl the ancient versions indicate that ’ in ya’hîl is a mater lectionis, the verb being yhl from hlal as in 31.26. This suggests the reading ‘ô yra l¿’ yhl (‘even the moon does not continue to shine’). The w is omitted before l¿’ in certain Heb. MSS and S and T. 1
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6. tôl‘h (‘worm’), parallel to rimmh (‘worm’) as in Isa. 14.11, means literally ‘gnawer’. 26.5-11. This passage is omitted in the original version of the LXX. It is included in its present position in Theod., but that does not exclude the possibility that it is part of Bildad’s speech. It may have been included in Bildad’s speech in MT as part of the orthodox adjustment which the text apparently suffered in chs. 24–27 to soften the arguments of Job against the divine economy. 5. In view of the well-known motif of the conict of God and the powers of Chaos, typied as in the Babylonian New Year liturgy and its Canaanite counterpart by the unruly waters and monsters of the deep, we take mayim with š¿¤enêhem as the subject of yeôlelû (pausal form yeôllû) which involves the reading of the colon: hre’îm yeôlelû mittaa mayim weš¿¤enêhem
re’îm are primarily the shades in the underworld known to be consigned to the underworld with the various enemies of Cosmos including ‘the Manyheaded One’, that is, ltn, or Leviathan (cf. 26.13) in a hymn to the sun included in the Baal myth of Ras Shamra (Gordon UT 62 rev., 38-52). Among these enemies of Baal who also menace his kingship and are put in subjection are tnn and ltn, tannin and Leviathan, who menace the kingship of Yahweh and are overthrown in the OT (e.g. Isa. 27.1; 51.9; Ps. 74.13-14). In his argument for the theodicy, Bildad is citing a Hymn of Praise from the liturgy of the New Year festival, the major theme of which was familiar in Israel. From meaning the shades of the departed re’îm came to mean the vanished races who to the Israelites were invested with gigantic proportions, hence the rendering ‘giants’ in Theod., Jerome (commentary and Vulgate), S and T. Symmachus’s rendering theomachoi obviously has in mind the Titanmyth, while Aq. merely transliterates. 6. The parallelism ‘naked’ (‘rôm) // ‘without covering’ (’ên kesû) is found again in 24.7, where the words are used literally. The omniscience of God penetrates even to Sheol, where Job had wished for refuge and oblivion (14.13). The parallelism Sheol // Abaddon (‘Perdition’) is found again in 28.22 and Prov. 15.11; 27.20. Abaddon is derived from ’bad (‘to perish’), but there is no certain derivation of Sheol. It may be a noun derived from š¿’h, found in 30.14 meaning ‘ruin’ and in Isa. 10.3; 47.11; Zeph. 1.15 meaning ‘ruin’, or ‘destruction’ and compounded with ’l in the elative sense, meaning ‘vast’, or ‘prodigious ruin’; cf. harerê ’l, Pss. 36.7; 50.10; ’arezê ’l, Ps. 80.11.
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7. Ñôn in the OT designates generally the North, but this is a secondary meaning, derived from Mt Saphon, jebel ’al-’aqr on the northern horizon of Ras Shamra, and the seat of Baal as King in the Ras Shamra texts after his victory over the forces of Chaos. Ñôn in such a context symbolized the divine rule and order, like ‘the mountain of the Lord’s house’ at Jerusalem (Isa. 2.2). It is doubtful if this is the sigicance of the word in the present passage. It derives rather from Ñh (‘to spread out’); cf. Ñppî (‘carpet’). The Piel of the verb is used of overlaying with sheet or molten metal (1 Kgs 6.20, 32, 35) or laying a oor (1 Kgs 6.15); cf. rqa‘, with the same semantic range and the signicance of ‘rmament’ or ceiling (rqîa‘) in Gen. 1.6ff.; cf. NEB ‘spread the canopy of the sky over Chaos’. The establishment of the rmament over the void (t¿hû) and the earth over ‘nothing’ (belî-mh) reects the initial stage of creation from t¿hû w¿hû in Gen. 1.2 (P). In vv. 7ff. note the introduction of the various exploits of God by participles, a regular feature of the Hymn of Praise in Israel and in Mesopotamia. 8. The conception of God ‘who binds up the waters in his clouds’ recalls Prov. 30.4, again in a rhetorical question, mî Ñrar-mayîm baimlh. The gure in Job may envisage the water-seller’s skin, which conserves the shape of the animal, with the apertures for the legs ‘tied up’. The conception of the clouds as celestial water-skins (nielê šmayim) is found again at 38.37. The verb bqa‘ describes the colossal cloudburst in the Flood (Gen. 7.11) and the bursting of wineskins in 32.19. 9. Several Heb. MSS, Theod., S and V read kiss’ (‘throne’), seeing a reference to the veiling of the throne (cf. Isa. 66.1, ‘the sky is my throne’). Duhm proposed to emend MT penê to pinnê, reading me’az kisse’ô (‘establishing rmly the pillars of his throne’). Besides the fact that pinnh is found in the masc. only once in a doubtful passage (Zech. 4.10), and means not ‘pillar’ but ‘corner’ or ‘corner-stone’, this would be the only instance of the Piel of ’az, which has this meaning in the Qal. In this case me’az, attested in the sense ‘to close up’ at Neh. 7.3, might be taken as cognate with Aram. and Syr. ’aa (‘to close up’); cf. Akk. u¨uzzu (‘to overlay with gold or silver’; so Dhorme, Hölscher and G.R. Driver), a meaning which the verb has in the Hophal in 2 Chron. 9.18. paršz is a peculiar form, apparently a mixed form of praš, or rather pra (‘to spread out’) and praz (‘to separate’). The form may have arisen from a scribal note of a variant reading, of the original pra being corrupted to š for the sake of pronunciation before nal z in MT. At any rate, the verb is treated as pra (‘to spread out’) in Theod., S, T and V. The parallelism with me’az in the sense ‘overlays’ supports this and may indicate the participle p¿r.
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10. The conception is that of God tracing a circle on the waters which surround the earth according to the Mesopotamian conception of the world, East and West being boundaries of light and dark. We should read the participle ¿qq in agreement with the style of this Hymn of Praise, but this refers to the unrepeated act of God in creation, hence the perfect may be read, aq-û. The phrase recurs in the reference to creation in Prov. 8.27, beûqô û ‘al-penê tehôm. We should take qaq here in the sense not of drawing or engraving, which it often has, but of dening, or prescribing, a boundary, as in 38.10; Jer. 5.22; Prov. 8.29; Ps. 148.6; Mic. 7.11, and in the phrase belî ¿q (‘without limit’) in Isa. 5.14. ‘im has here the sense ‘to’ as regularly in Ugaritic and occasionally in Heb., especially in comparison, meaning ‘over against’. 11. ‘The pillars of the sky’ (‘ammûê šmayîm) recalls the Mesopotamian conception of the ‘pillars of heaven’ (išid šamê) laid at the horizon, which was also a Greek conception; cf. Pindar, Pythian Odes I, 39, 20 ki¿n ourania (‘the pillar of heaven’). The verb ra, not attested elsewhere in the OT, is taken by Aq. and Jerome as ‘rock, quake’, probably cognate with Arab. raffu (‘to throb, quake’). ra in Syr. means ‘to be removed’. The verb yimehû is pointed as the imperfect Qal of tmah, well known in Heb. as ‘to be astounded’. This may seem odd of pillars, but no more so than pillars as the object of God’s rebuke, ga‘arô (‘his thunder’; cf. Pss. 18.6; 104.7; Isa. 50.2); that refers to the convulsions of nature such as the effect of thunder as the sign of the power of God (so, also of Baal in the Baal myths of Ras Shamra). 12. The verb rga‘ poses a problem. The parallel maÑ rha suggests violent motion, as in Isa. 51.15 and Jer. 31.35, r¿a‘ hayym wayyeemû gallyw. The verbal correspondence between those two passages indicates an origin in the liturgy. With the same relevance to God’s control of the sea the verb ‘ar is used in Ps. 104.7, with which the reading of the verb in the present passage in S g‘ar would agree. This reading is not proposed by any of the versions in Isa. 51.15 and Jer. 31.35, so it is likely that the verb means ‘to trouble’, perhaps a metathetic cognate of Arab. ra‘aja with this meaning in the IVth Form. The association with ym and raha in the present passage recalls the reference to raha hammešubbt (MT hm še) in Isa. 30.7. For that reason we nd it likely that ra‘ is a homonym of the verb in Isa. 51.15 and Jer. 31.35, meaning ‘to be at rest’; cf. Arab. raja‘a (‘to return’, sc. to where one belongs, sc. to rest) and Jer. 47.6, hr‘î w¿mmî (‘be at rest and silent’), of a sword returned to its sheath. The parallel with maaÑ suggests that the verb may be transitive, perhaps Piel, though the Niphal in Jer. 47.14 indicates that the verb in the Qal has this sense. 1
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maÑ occurs in the same context of the establishment of Order against the menace of Chaos in the Baal myth of Ras Shamra; cf. Gordon UT 67 I, 1, 12: ktmÑ ltn bn br (‘though thou didst smite Lotan the primeval serpent’). On raha, possibly ‘the agitated one’, an appellative of Sea as the adversary of God in his establishment of Order, see above on 9.13. k¿a and teûnh (‘power’ and ‘wisdom’) are the instruments of God’s ordered creation in Jer. 10.12, which like the present passage reects the liturgy of the New Year festival. 13. It is proposed to read rûô for MT berûô as a fem. sing. subject to the verb in v. 13a. Dhorme understands MT šierh to refer to the wind dispelling the clouds, citing the use of the Arab. verb afara with this sense. We prefer the suggestion of Lyon (1895: 134-35), berûê šmayim šibbrô (‘he broke him in pieces with the winds of heaven’). Dhorme surprisingly questions how winds could be said to break the monster in pieces. In fact in the Babylonian creation myth Marduk rst distended the belly of Tiamat the monster of the Lower Deep with the storm-wind, which forced her mouth open; through her mouth he then shot an arrow which ‘pierced her stomach, clave through her bowels, tore into her womb…’ (Wilson 1858: 10). bra (cf. br the epithet of Lotan, the serpent in the Ras Shamra texts), does not mean ‘eeing’, but ‘belonging to the past’; cf. Arab. baria (‘to pass from one point to another’, e.g. ’albriu, ‘yesterday’) 14. hen is the equivalent of Arab. ’inn (‘Verily!’). qeÑô, if associated with Heb. qÑ (‘end’), from qÑaÑ (‘to break off’), means not the ‘consummation’ but the ‘outskirts’ of God’s works, perhaps even ‘fragments’. In view of the main theme of the passage, the ordered government of God, der¤ô (for MT der¤yw) must surely be taken as ‘government’, as drkt in the Ras Shamra texts in parallelism with mlk (‘kingship’) (Gordon UT Krt, 42), and daraku(n) in Arab. (so Dahood 1964a: 404). In mah-ššmeÑ Dhorme takes mah as exclamatory and šmeÑ (‘whisper’) as derogatory. See above on 4.12. In dr in v. 14b the close connections between God’s word or purpose and the event which he effects is well illustrated. In Heb. dr signies now the spoken word, and now the matter in purpose or effect, that is to say the event. Here perhaps the nuance is ‘purpose’ as in Arab. dabbara, for example the proverb ’al-’innu yudabbiru wallhu yuqaddiru (‘Man proposes, God disposes’). geûr¿yw (for MT geûr¿w) is either a plural of excellence or an abstract plural. The thunder (ra‘am) is the voice of God which proclaims his power and heralds the rain, which was anticipated at the New Year festival, where the theme was God’s triumph over the menace of Chaos and his establishment as 1
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King. In the Baal myth of Ras Shamra, which was related to the same occasion and celebrating the same theme, Baal, in announcing a new phase of creative activity, boasts of his new weapon, lightning, the secret of which he declares (Gordon UT ‘nt III, 17-28): rgm ltd‘ nšm wltbn hmlt ’arÑ
A word which men do not know, Nor the multitudes of earth understand.
Lévêque (1970: I, 306f.) does well to note that apart from in the Book of Job, ra‘am (‘thunder’) occurs only four times in the OT: in Ps. 77.19 (EVV 18), where the Great Deliverance at the Reed Sea is a specic instance of the assertion of God’s order, the theme of the great Autumn Festival, where his triumph over Chaos was celebrated; in Ps. 81.8 (EVV 7) in connection with the same theme on the same cultic occasion; in Ps. 104.7, in connection with God’s triumph over the chaotic waters as a prelude to creation, so feasibly in the same cultic context; and in Isa. 29.6, with reference to the theophany and reassertion of the order of God in the political situation.
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Job 27 JOB’S FINAL RESPONSE TO HIS FRIENDS Ascribed to Job (v. 1), there is general agreement that 27.2-6 truly expresses his ardent assertion of his innocence and his determination to maintain his integrity. But beyond this point the majority of scholars judge the matter of this chapter quite uncharacteristic of Job. The condemnation of the ungodly man and his hopeless prospect (vv. 7-10), with the poem on his miserable end (vv. 13-23), has been assigned to Zophar, whose sentiments it certainly expresses, despite the fact that there is no customary ascription to him (so Bickell, Duhm, Peake, Strahan, Stevenson, Ball, G.B. Gray, Hertzberg, Barton, Lefèvre, Tournay, Pope). Dhorme and Hölscher regard vv. 7-12 as Job’s statement, conning Zophar’s address to vv. 13-23. According to Dhorme, Zophar’s statement begins at v. 13 and continues with 24.18-24; 27.14-23, which would correspond more closely to the proportions of the various rounds of debate. Hölscher is also conscious of the deciency of 27.13-23 as a speech of Zophar, and conjectures the loss of the rst part of his statement. Fohrer assigns vv. 11-12 to Job as the end of his statement in 26.1-4; 27.2-6, and regards 27.7-10, 13-23 as a separate poem on the end of the wicked. In view of Zophar’s known sentiments on that subject, it may be, if Fohrer is right, that this was a separate poem intended to be at some stage of the redaction of the Book Zophar’s third statement, but never actually assigned to him. On Fohrer’s view vv. 11-12, I will teach you concerning the hand of God, What is with the Almighty I will not conceal. You have all seen it for yourselves. Why then this empty vapouring?
is Job’s statement, though he nds difculty in believing that what Job had to communicate is anything new. Thus he concludes that vv. 13-23 are no part of Job’s statement, and conjectures that Job’s communication here promised has been lost. On our analysis of ch. 27 we would assign the whole to Job. We would resolve the chapter, Job’s nal reply to his friends, into three strophes (vv. 2-6, 7-10, 11-23). In vv. 2-6, introduced by an oath, Job protests his integrity and refuses to accept his friends’ assumption that his suffering betokens sin. In vv. 7-10 he invokes the convention of curse in the Plaint of the Sufferer on those who alienate themselves from him (‘his enemy’ or ‘antagonist’) on the assumption that such as sinners are alienated from God. In 1
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vv. 8-10 the consequences of the curse are elaborated. Here we would see the implication that Job expresses his awareness of the consequences if his assertion of innocence under oath were unfounded. In vv. 11-12, in didactic style, Job introduces his elaboration of the fate of the wicked in vv. 13-23, with whom he has associated his antagonists in v. 7, citing their own theme in their arguments against him, ‘all of which they have seen for themselves’, well-worn dicta assimilated supercially and repeated parrot-fashion, hence ‘empty vapouring’ (v. 12). This may well be the citation of a poem from the Plaint of the Sufferer in its application in the Wisdom tradition. We suggest that the new element of which Job proposes to convince his friends (v. 11), who have recurrently but objectively expatiated upon divine retribution, was his subjective appreciation of the consequences if he were as guilty as they allege. After Job’s initial oath, therefore, we would assign vv. 13ff. to Job as having the same force as the imprecation in his oath of purgation in ch. 31. This character of Job’s nal statement to his friends, with oath (vv. 2-6) and imprecation expressed (v. 7) and implied (vv. 8ff.) explains the heading to the chapter as Job’s mšl; cf. Balaam’s curses and imprecations in colourful gures (Num. 23.6ff., 18f.; 24.3ff., 15ff., 20, 21f., 23f.) Chapter 27 1.
And Job added his sworn declaration and said:
2.
‘As God lives who has put aside my right, As the Almighty lives who has embittered my life! As long as all my breath is within me, And the God-given breath is in my nostrils, My lips shall speak no falsehood, Nor my tongue patter deceit! God forbid that I should admit that you were right! Till I die I will not give up my integrity. I hold fast to my innocence and will not let it go; None of my days is a reproach1 to my heart.
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 1
Let my enemy be as the wicked, My antagonist as the unrighteous! For what is the hope of the godless2 When he lifts up his soul to God?3 Will God listen to his cry When distress comes upon him? Will he have condence in the Almighty? If he calls to God, will his entreaty be admitted?4 I will teach you concerning the power of God, The purpose of the Almighty I will not hide. You have all seen it for yourselves; Why then this empty vapouring? This is the portion5 of the wicked from God, And the lot of the tyrant6 which he will receive from the Almighty.
The Book of Job 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.
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If his sons grow up it is for the sword, And his offspring have not enough to eat; Those of his sons who have survived are gathered up7 by the plague, And he will have no widows to weep. Though he heap up silver like dust, And lay up dress in piles, He may provide himself, but the just shall wear it, And the innocent shall divide the silver; His house which he builds is like a bird’s nest, Even like the hut which a crop-watcher makes. He lies down rich for he has a store;8 He opens his eyes and it is gone. Terrors overtake him by day,9 In the night he is snatched away by a tempest. The east wind lifts him up and he is gone, Yea, it sweeps him from his place; Men bombard him without mercy, He strives hard to ee from their power. Men clap their hands at him,10 And hiss him away from wherever he may be.’
Textual Notes to Chapter 27 Reading yere for MT yeera. Omitting MT kî yiÑ‘ after the corruption of v. 8b. See following note. Reading yi’ le’elôah našô after LXX and S for MT yšel ’elôah našô in agreement with the following verse. 4. Reading y‘r-lô with LXX and S for MT be¤ol-‘. 5. Omitting the superuous ’m, metri causa. 6. Reading ‘rîÑ for MT ‘rîÑîm, omitting nal m as a dittograph before the following m. 7. Reading yiqqaÑû for MT yiqqarû. See Commentary ad loc. 8. Reading welô ’sô for MT wel¿’ y’s. 9. Reading kayyôm for mt kammayim. See Commentary ad loc. 10. Reading yip¿q ‘lyw kappayim with Theod. and V, assuming dittography of m before w in the Old Heb. script. For MT kappêmô S and LXXA and L read ‘his hand’. 1. 2. 3.
Commentary on Chapter 27 1. In MT mšl (lit. ‘likeness’), insofar as it applies to Job’s declaration, might be rendered as ‘reection’, denoting the statement of truths corresponding to experience, like Proverbs (mišelê šel¿m¿h) and, like them, couched in gurative language and often simile. But in view of Job’s curse upon his estranged friends as ‘the wicked’, elaborated in graphic detail in vv. 4ff., mšl may have the same signicance as mšl introducing Baalam’s pronouncements in Num. 23.6ff., 18ff; 24.3ff., 15ff., 20, 21f., 25f. The curse, with consequences graphically elaborated thus becoming a by-word or admonitory example (mšl), is well exemplied in the Twelve Adjurations and the sequel in Deut. 1
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27.15-26; 28.16ff.; cf. esp. v. 37. This well exemplies Job’s oath (vv. 2-4) and its amplication (vv. 8, 14-23), with his awareness of the like consequences to himself of guilt and hypocrisy, like his self-imprecation in his great oath of purgation (ch. 31). This suitably ends his dialogue with his friends. Though we may understand this specic sense of Job’s mšl in ch. 27, we do not nd it possible to express its full connotation in a single word, certainly not ‘discourse’ of EVV, but hope that ‘sworn declaration’ may convey the sense. 2. The clauses hsîr mišpÓî and hmar našî are relative clauses, the relative particle being omitted as often in poetry. 3. kî is the asseverative particle introducing the vow after the oath. The apparent tmesis between kol and nišmî (cf. kol-‘ôd našî bî in 2 Sam. 1.9) is explained in GKC (§128e) as not tmesis at all, but, ‘on the assumption of the adverbial sense of kol, ‘wholly’. According to the punctuation of MT, however, ‘ôd is regarded as a noun, which is apparent in the phrases be‘ôî and m‘ôî, kol-‘ôî meaning thus ‘the whole while’ (so Dillmann, Budde, Ehrlich, whom we follow). nešmh is here the life-breath, and rûa, which may denote inspiration, has here the same signicance, though the physical breath is visible evidence of the invasive divine inuence (rûa); cf. Gen. 2.7. 4. hh means ‘to con over’ inaudibly or audibly, as for instance the Law (Ps. 1.2). In the present passage, by our translation ‘patter’ we have tried to convey the manner of the recital of conventional moral platitudes, which Job spurns. Specically Job may be disowning acquiescence in his friends’ indictment and their exhortation to seek pardon for guilt that he will not admit, the substance of his declaration in v. 5. 5. lîlh llî (‘ad profanum!’) is part of the oath formula, indicating that which was not to be tolerated with relation to God. The acuteness of Job’s dilemma is underlined in this passage in his oath by the life of God who, he claimed, had wronged him (v. 2) and by his assertion that to admit the guilt that his friends allege against his own clear conscience would be sacrilege in the sight of God. 6. The verb ra is attested as transitive in the Qal (e.g. Pss. 69.10; 119.42; Prov. 27.11), but is generally used transitively in the Piel, which we adopt here. The objection to MT l¿’- yeera leî miyymy is that the verb seems to want an object. It is proposed to nd that in miyymy, min being taken in the partitive sense, ‘None of my days is a reproach to my heart’, sc. conscience (so Dillmann and the older commentators), which we adopt. Duhm and Dhorme emended yeera to yepar (‘my heart is not ashamed of my days’). 7. The colon, assigning Job’s adversaries (his ‘enemy’, ’¿y, and ‘antagonist’, miqômm), that is, those who, in inferring his guilt from his suffering, alienate themselves from him, to the category of those who are foredoomed to the 1
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punishment described in vv. 8-10, 14ff., is to be understood in the formal category of the curse of the innocent sufferer in the Plaint of the Sufferer, esp. Pss. 58.7-10 (EVV 6-9); 69.23-29 (EVV 22-28); 139.19-22. 8. According to MT of vv. 8ff., the sense is ‘What hope has a man of a hearing when he is cut off (yibbÑa‘ being read by Oort) when God withdraws (yšel) his life?’ But Hölscher feasibly proposes that kî yibbÑa‘ is a gloss on yšel ’elôah našô after the corruption of an original yia’ le’eloah našô (‘lifts his soul to God’), read by Ball, Dhorme, Tur-Sinai, Hölscher and Peake after S. For the phrase n’ neeš, meaning ‘to appeal’, cf. Deut. 24.15; Pss. 25.1; 86.4; 143.8; Jer. 22.27. This reading and interpretation is supported by the following verse. This sense of yia’ našô suggested to Mandelkern that MT kî yiÑa‘ should be emended to kî yiga‘ (‘when he entreats’, so also Dhorme). This, however, in our opinion, overloads the colon, though it is admitted by Mowinckel, Pope and Terrien. 10. On yi‘ann (‘puts his condence in’), see on 22.6. Taking the parallelism in vv. 9-10 as chiastic, we accept the reading y‘r-lô (‘will his entreaty be accepted?’) for MT be¤ol-‘ (‘at all times’), which has no parallel in the context (so Beer, Hölscher, Stevenson after LXX and S). yiqr’ is a case of the jussive in the protasis of a conditional sentence without a conditional particle (GKC, §159b). 11. y (lit. ‘hand’), means here ‘power’ or even ‘management’ as parallel to ‘purpose’. ’ašer ‘im-šadday (lit. ‘what is with the Almighty’) denotes God’s intimate thought and purpose; cf. ‘imm¤ in parallelism with bileae¤ in 10.13; cf. 9.35; 23.14; 1 Kgs 11.11 and Arab. ‘and ka (lit. ‘with me like this’, i.e. ‘it is my opinion’). 12. heel is used here as in 7.16; 9.29; 21.34, and the refrain in Eccl. 1.2; 2.1, 14, 15; 6.4, 12; 7.15; 9.9; etc. to mean vapour or what is insubstantial. 13. As the verse stands in MT it consists of two cola, each of four beats. This is supported by the ancient versions, but it may well have consisted originally of two cola, each of three beats. MT may be reduced by the omission of ’m, which seems superuous in v. 13a and by yiqqû in v. 13b, which seems pleonastic. ‘ in MT ‘im-’l should probably be omitted as a dittograph of ‘ in rš‘ notwithstanding ‘im meaning ‘from’ in Ugaritic, which Dahood considers (UHP, p. 32; Pope). In v. 13b the versions attest MT ‘arîÑîm, which we suspect after the sing. rš‘ in the parallel colon, and we assume a dittograph of nal m before miššadday. 1
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14. In v. 14a lemô-re (pausal), where the archaic form of the preposition may be noted, is a truncated form of the nominal sentence as the apodosis of a conditional sentence. 15. MT erîyw (Qere) bammwe yiqqrû (‘his survivors shall be buried by the death’) is highly suspect and various conjectures have been made. Stevenson’s conjecture š¿eim ymîû qer¿yw is not so far from MT as it seems and, if correct, would imply a man would have no kinsman to bury him, nor widows to mourn him (v. 15b) in his community since they too would be captured by raiders. The sword and famine having been listed as taking off a man’s family, it is natural to look for a third cause of death. This Dhorme found in pestilence, in which sense he took hammwe of MT, where the denite article excludes ‘death’. Dhorme cites this specic meaning of mûtu in the Tell el-Amarna Tablets (Knudtzon 1908–15: 244, 31f.), and mûtânu as the appellative of the plague in Ass. (so Buttenwieser and Mowinckel). Still, the statement ‘his survivors will be buried by the plague’ is strange, and we propose the emendation yiqqÑû for MT yiqqrû (‘[his survivors] will be gathered by the plague’), which recalls the passage in the Ugaritic Legend of Krt, 18 m¨mšt y’itÑp ršp (‘at ve years old Rešef gathered them to himself’); cf. Arab. qubia (lit. ‘he was gathered’, i.e. he died). The implication is that his wives will also be taken so that he will have no widows to mourn him nor, if he die childless, will his name and estate be perpetuated by levirate marriage. In support of this interpretation is the alternative of mwe and ere in Jer. 15.2; 43.11, where also, signicantly, mwe has the denite article. 16. For MT malbûš (‘clothing’) LXX read ‘gold’, which the parallelism would lead us to expect. But the sequel in v. 17 supports MT. Clothes, implying the wardrobe of a rich man, with which he is at pains to provide himself (y¤în) contrast the meagre shift of the poor. The equation wicked/rich, poor/righteous (Ñaddîq) reects the sentiment of the Plaint of the Sufferer in the Psalms, and the conception of the ‘righteous, falling heir to the possessions of the wicked’ recalls Prov. 13.22. h¤în (lit. ‘cause to be’) in the sense of ‘providing beforehand’ is attested in 1 Chron. 22.8, 14 (materials for the Temple), and in Job 39.41 (food for the ravens).We take ¿mer as a homonym of ¿mer (‘mud’), attested in the ‘piles’ (omrîm) of dead frogs in the plague in Egypt (Exod. 8.10); cf. the wordplay between the word in this sense and am¿r (‘ass’) in Samson’s exploit with the jaw-bone of an ass (Judg. 15.10). 18. On v. 18a LXX has a conation of two readings, MT ‘š (‘moth’) and ‘a¤îš (‘spider’); cf. 8.14, where ‘the house of the spider’ is the symbol of impermanence. The latter reading is supported by S (so Mowinckel, Fohrer, Terrien). It is suggested on the other hand that MT ‘š is cognate with Arab ‘aššu(n) (‘a bird’s nest’; so Schultens, Ehrlich, Dhorme); cf. Akk. asasu, which gives a better parallel with the hut of the watcher of the crops in v. 18b (sukkh ‘h n¿Ñr, cf. Arab. nÓiru[n]). 1
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19. For MT y’s (‘he will [not] be gathered’) LXX and S read yôsi (‘he will not do so again’). Taking the pronominal sufx in ’ênennû to refer to the man’s wealth (RSV) rather than to himself, we would nd an antecedent in ’s¿ (‘store’), and for MT wel¿’ y’s we suggest welô ’s¿ (‘he has a store’); cf. Neh. 12.25; 1 Chron. 26.15. 20. The parallel ‘by night’ in v. 20b indicates yômm (‘by day’) for MT kammayim (Wright, Budde, Ehrlich, Ball, Dhorme, Hölscher) or kayyôm. The feminine singular of the verb with the feminine plur., here ballhô (cf. še’al-n’ behmô we¿rekk, 12.7), is the regular agreement in Arab. when the verb precedes the subject. gna here has not so much the sense of removing stealthily as summarily, as in kidnapping in the Book of the Covenant (Exod. 21.16) and Deut. 24.7; cf. Gen. 40.15 (of Joseph being kidnapped and sent away summarily to Egypt). The verb has probably the same sense in the Decalogue (Exod. 20.15; Deut. 5.19) (Alt 1953). 21. qîm (‘the East wind’) is the sirocco, the blasting hot wind from the desert, and is so understood by Theod, and V, where it is rendered as ‘the burning wild’; cf. the sudden ruin of Job’s family (1.18). The Piel of ‘ar is a denominative verb from a‘ar, an orthographic variant of the more common sa‘ar (‘whirlwind’). The driving forth of the miscreant in vv. 20ff., every man’s hand against him (vv. 22-23), recalls the fate of Cain (Gen. 4.12-15) and of the murderer of Dn’il’s son in the Ras Shamra text (Gordon UT ’Aqht 152ff.), on whom Dn’il invokes a curse that he should be ’amd gr bt ’il Ever seeking sanctuary at the shrine of El, ‘nt br p‘lmh A fugitive now and for ever.
22. hišlî¤ ‘al (‘to throw a missile at’) without the direct object is found in Num. 35.20. The pronominal sufx in yô refers to the indenite subject of hišlîk (‘one’, i.e. persons). 23. The clapping of the hands, perhaps with a glancing blow of palm from palm, as in the Arab gesture to indicate that an affair is nished, is like whistling (cf. Lam. 2.15; Jer. 49.17; Zeph. 2.15), a gesture of mockery.
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Job 28 AN INDEPENDENT POEM ON THE TRANSCENDENCE OF WISDOM This is an independent poem on the transcendence of Wisdom. It is of uncertain authorship, possibly composed by one of the circle of the author. It may an independent composition by the author of the Book of Job himself, justly valued by his circle and included in the Book in appreciation of the master. Its insertion at this point was determined by the fact that the Dialogue with the friends ends with Job’s declaration in ch. 27 before his direct challenge to God in his apologia pro vita sua (ch. 29), culminating in his oath of purgation (ch. 31). As anticipating the theme of the Divine Declaration (38.1–40.14), the poem was probably not included by the author of the Book. As a sapiential poem on the transcendence of Wisdom it has a general literary afnity with the self-laudation of Wisdom in Proverbs 8 or the short hymn on Wisdom and its benets in Prov. 3.13-18. The poem is divided into three parts, possibly strophes, by the refrain ‘Where shall Wisdom be found…?’ (v. 12) and ‘Whence comes Wisdom?’ (v. 20). The omission of the question from the beginning of the poem indicates that it is a conclusion to vv. 1-11 and vv. 13-19, but as such it serves also as an introduction to vv. 13-19 and vv. 21-27 (v. 28 being an appendix), with a certain analogy to question and answer in the sapiential tradition (e.g. Prov. 23.29ff.; Eccl. 8.1ff.; so Westermann 1977: 104-107). Fohrer after Duhm divides the poem into four strophes: vv. 1-6, 7-11 + 24, 12-18 (19?), 20-27. Besides the interrogatory introduction at vv. 12 and 20, he conjectures its inclusion before vv. 1 and 7 (so also Lefèvre). This, however, has no support either in MT or any of the ancient versions. The subject-matter of vv. 1-11, the inaccessibility of Wisdom to humans who determinedly penetrate the furthest regions and ‘move mountains’(v. 9) in persistent prospecting for precious metals and gems, does not readily fall into two strophes. Nor does vv. 12-19, on the inestimable value of Wisdom, present such a strophe as Fohrer claims, opening as it does with the same theme as vv. 1-11, while vv. 21-27, where, after deliberate suspense, the answer is reached, is certainly a denite strophe, as Fohrer recognizes. On such considerations we propose to treat the poem as falling into three parts distinguished by the interrogatory refrain in vv. 12 and 20. 1
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The subject matter indicates that vv. 7-8 in have been displaced from between vv. 12 and 13, and v. 28 is probably an editorial gloss (see Commentary ad loc.). In admitting that wisdom is accessible to humans, except by the fear of God, v. 28 apparently contradicts, or at least modies, the main part of the poem on the transcendence of Wisdom. Another indication of the editorial gloss is the divine title ’a¿nay, which is unique in the Book. Chapter 28 l. 2. 3.
4.
5. 6. 9. 10. 11. 12. 7. 8. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.
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Surely there is a mine for silver, And a place for gold which humans rene. Iron is taken from the earth; And humans make stone to exude1 copper. Humanity2 has put an end to the darkness, Searching its furthest bounds For stones in gloom and darkness. They have opened shafts3 where no one lives; Let down4 without foothold, They have hung far from others; they have swayed to and fro. The earth from which food should come Is turned5 underneath6 into something like a re, A place the stones of which are lapis lazuli With its specks7 of gold. (Humanity) has put forth its hand on the inty rock, And overturned mountains by the roots. In the rocks they have cut channels, And their eyes have seen every precious thing. They have searched8 the sources9 of rivers, And brought hidden resources10 to light. But Wisdom—whence comes she?11 And where is the abode of understanding? The pathway the vulture knows not, Nor has the eye of the hawk descried it. Big game has not trodden it, Nor the lion passed over it. Humanity does not know the way to it,12 Nor is she found in the land of the living. The deep says, ‘She is not in me’, And the sea says, ‘She is not with me’. No ne gold may be given for her, Nor silver weighed out as her price. Not in gold of Ophir can she be valued, In precious onyx and lapis lazuli. Gold and glass are not to be valued with her, Jewels of ne gold cannot be exchanged for her. Speak not of coral or crystal; The possession of Wisdom is above rubies.
342 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.
Job 28. An Independent Poem on the Transcendence of Wisdom The topaz of Cush cannot compare with her, In pure gold she cannot be valued. But Wisdom—whence comes she? And where is the abode of understanding? She is hidden from the eyes of all living, She is concealed from the birds of the heavens. Perdition and Death declare, ‘With our ears have we heard a rumour of her’. God understands the way to her, And He knows her abode; For He looks to the ends of the earth; He sees all that is under the heavens.13 He who settled14 the force of the wind, And meted out the waters by measure, When he made a decree for the rain, And a course for the rumble of the thunder; Then did he consider and assess her, He studied her15 and explored her potentialities. And he said to humanity, “Behold! The fear of the Lord is Wisdom, And turning from wrong is understanding”.’
Textual Notes to Chapter 28 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
1
Reading yÑîq or yaÑÑîq for MT yÑûq. See Commentary ad loc. Inserting ’m after am as an antecedent to hû’ in v. 3b. Reading preÑû for MT praÑ assuming omission of w by haplography before n of nelîm and assuming haplography of m in MT naal. Assuming MT hanniškîm to be a corruption of hannišpîm (‘let down’). See Commentary ad loc. Reading nehpe¤h in agreement with ’ereÑ. Reading tatêh for MT weatêh, w being a dittograph of m in preceding word in the Old Heb. script. Understanding the plur. as ‘dust particles’. Reading ippš with LXX, Aq., Theod. and V for MT ibbš. See Commentary ad loc. Reading mibbe¤ê for mibbe¤î. See Commentary ad loc. Reading fem. sing. ending for MT possessive sufx. Reading tô’ with one Heb. MS, cf. v. 20, for MT timmÑ’. Alternatively tÑ’ may be read. Reading darkh with LXX for MT ‘erkh (‘comparison’), which is probably a secondary variant. Reading kol-taa-haššmayim metri causa with LXX and V for MT taa kolhaššmayim. Reading ha‘¿eh after LXX, A and V, where a perfect or a participle is suggested. Reading heînh for MT he¤înh with ve Heb. MSS.
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Commentary on Chapter 28 1. kî may be formally a conjunction, in which case it would indicate that the poem was introduced by the interrogative refrain (so Duhm, Fohrer). But, rejecting such an assumption, we regard it as the asseverative enclitic, as in Ugaritic, where it emphasizes the nal verb (e.g. Gordon, UT 51, II, 13f., hlk b‘l ‘trt kt‘n, ‘Atharat indeed eyed the going of Baal’), and in Heb. poetry introducing the nal verb (e.g. Ps. 118.10-12) or a nal statement (e.g. Deut. 32.9). The parallelism with lazzh yz¿qqû (‘for gold which they rene’) suggested to Dahood (1963c: 52) that môÑ’, from yÑ’, is cognate with Arab. wau’a (‘to be pure’, hence, ‘to rene’), or, as he suggested, ‘to smelt’. The parallelism with mqôm, however, indicates the meaning ‘source’ or ‘mine’. The verb zqaq, used of rened metal in 1 Chron. 28.18; 29.4; Ps. 12.7 and parallel to Óihar (‘to purify’) in Mal. 3.3, may be a cognate of Ass. zaqâqu (‘to blow violently’) as in the rening process. The verb describes distillation from the clouds in 36.27 and puried wine in Isa. 25.6, so that it may be no more than an incidental homonym of Ass. zaqâqu. 2. ’een, being fem., must be the object of the verb, the subject being indenite (‘one makes to exude…’). The verb may be either the Hiphil of Ñûq (cf. 29.6, Ñûr yÑûq…šmen, ‘the rock used to exude…olive oil’), in which case yÑîq or yaÑÑîq should be read for MT yÑaq, with the same meaning. Terrestrial iron as distinct from meteoric iron came into use in Palestine in the thirteenth century BCE, having been already worked by the Hittites in Asia Minor in the middle of the second millennium BCE, when it was still a precious metal in Egypt. In the rst millennium BCE it was mined in the Ajlun district of Transjordan (Glueck 1945–49: 336-50) and worked at Khirbet Deir Alla, possibly Sukkoth, in the Jordan Valley. 3. ta¤lî, as in 26.10, means the ‘limit’ or ‘outmost boundary’. In v. 3c ’een ’¿el weÑalmû (MT Ñalmwe) is taken by Hölscher as a gloss (so Fohrer). We have taken ’een as a collective sing., the object of the search, precious stones and ores which were set in gloom and darkness. Pope and Terrien apparently take it in opposition to ta¤lî as the ‘rock’ which is searched. The nal colon of a tricolon is always suspect to Hölscher, but an occasional tricolon was used to relieve the monotony of the prevailing bicola. If the colon v. 3c is original, ’een as the object of ôqr in v. 3b is suspended until the nal colon, a literary convention quite common in Heb. and Ugaritic poetry; see, for example, Gordon UT 127, 54f.: ybr rn ybn ybr rn r’išk ‘ttrt šm b‘l qdqdk
1
May Horon break, my son, May Horon break thy head, Athterat-name-of-Baal thy skull.
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A glossator would surely have used a much less poetic gure and form. It may be noted that v. 3c is omitted in LXX, which also omits vv. 4a, 5-9a, 14-19, 21b-22a, 26b-27a. This, however, indicates compassion in LXX rather than glosses to the original text, such compassion being a marked literary tendency in LXX. 4. In view of the 3rd plur. verbs dallû and n‘û, we would read MT praÑ in v. 4c as plur., either in scriptio defectiva or with the omission of nal w by haplography before the following n in the Old Heb. script. For MT naal the plur. should possibly be read. The word in Heb. and Arab. normally means ‘valley’ or ‘torrent’, but in Late Heb. it denotes the shaft or gallery of a mine, comparable possibly to a narrow valley. In MT hanniškîm minnî-reel (‘forgotten from/without foot’) is practically unintelligible. We would suggest that the verb is a scribal corruption of the verb ša in the square script. This verb, meaning ‘to pour’, may be understood in the context as ‘paying out’ a rope on which workers are ‘let down’ ‘without a foothold’ (minnî-reel). Heb. a has an Arab. cognate afaa with the same meaning, and the noun afau(n) (‘foot of mountain’) may derive from a homonym meaning ‘to lower’, but this we cannot attest. MT dallû is assumed to be from dlal, which has an Arab. cognate, dalla, used in the form tadaldala (‘to dangle’), the obvious sense of the verb in v. 4c. dlal seems a byform of the more usual dlh, which has this sense in Prov. 29.7. In v. 4a, reading praÑ nelîm ‘am gr (pausal gr) for MT praÑ naal m‘im-gr, Graetz renders ‘a strange people has bored galleries’ (so Giesebrecht, Dhorme, Hölscher, Fohrer), after V and S. This may be supported by the remoteness of the mining operations from where the Book of Job was written or to specialized industry of a miners’ and smiths’ caste, such as the Kenites, who might fairly be called ‘am gr as federates of Israel. Dhorme notes besides that Semitic foreigners were employed by the Egyptians in the mines of Sinai, as their grafti show. Similarly, condemned Christians were employed by the Romans in the copper mines of Punon (modern Feinn) and other mines in the escarpment east and west of the Arabah. gr may have already acquired the connotation of ‘slave’, as apparently in 1 Chron. 22.2 and 2 Chron. 2.16ff., where grîm (‘resident and protected aliens’) were conscripted by Solomon for public works (so Buttenwieser). m’enôš (‘far from men’), however, in v. 4c indicates that MT m‘im gr is parallel, and means ‘where no one lives’, min in both cases indicating remoteness or an uninhabited region. The operation, and indeed the whole verse, is reminiscent of Bedouin ventures in the quest for scroll fragments in the Dead Sea escarpments and the Wadi Murabba‘at. 5. The colon seems to point to the contrast, the natural production of food on the earth’s surface in cooperation with nature and the unnatural ‘riing the bowels of their mother earth’ which in consequence glows either with the miners’ torches or by reason of the breaking of rocks with re, a technique of mining known in ancient and modern times (so Hölscher after Löhr in 173ff.). 1
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6. mqôm sappîr ’anêh (ignoring the hyphen in MT) and taken in the sense ‘a place the stones of which are lapis lazuli’ may be suggested by the familiar description of the Promised Land in Deut. 8.9, ‘a land of stones of which are iron’. This may have occasioned the use of the fem. pronominal sufx in ’anêh, which is incongruous with the masc. pronominal sufx in lô and after the antecedent mqôm. ‘aer¿ zh (lit. ‘dust-grains of gold’) may refer to the shining specks of iron pyrites in lapis lazuli. 9. The poet selects the hardest stone ‘int’ (allmîš), Akk. elmešu, as the object of human effort, and the largest mass, ‘he has overturned mountains by the roots’. 10. ye’¿r with the denite article or dened as ye’¿r miÑrayim (Amos 8.8; cf. 9.5), is an Egyptian loanword, ‘the Nile’, and is taken here to denote guratively mine-galleries. We question if the meaning is not rather drainage channels near the source of a river (‘in the rocks’) for diverting the streams in search for folds in their beds, which seems to agree with a kindred operation in v. 11, the damming up of rivers to bring hidden treasures to light. 11. mibbe¤ê, or better mabbe¤ê, nehrôÓ may be preserved; cf. mbk nhrm (‘the sources of the rivers’), the seat of El in the Ras Shamra texts (Gordon UT 49.I, 5; 51, IV, 21; 2 Aqht VI, 47), where the variation nbk also occurs. For MT ibbš (‘he has bound up’) LXX, Aq., Theod. and V render ‘he has searched’, which suggests ippš, but the interchange of b and p might indicate an orthographic variant as frequently in Semitic languages. If ibbš is read meaning ‘binds up’, the reference might be to the diversion of a river to search its bed for alluvial gold by damming up (‘binding’) its source (so Weiser, Gordis and Fohrer). But the ‘searching’ of the sources gives a more natural parallel to the bringing of the secrets to light in v. 11b, and should be accepted (so Mowinckel, Pope). The sources of rivers may refer to subterranean depths, whence the rivers rose from the lower deep of Semitic cosmology, but it may also refer to the depth of the sea or ‘ocean currents’ (nehrîm), specically referring to pearl shing, as in the Persian Gulf. In MT ’ôr we understand the locative sense, the locative ending being omitted in scriptio defectiva. 7. ‘ayiÓ (pausal ‘yiÓ) is an unspecied bird of prey, such as those Abraham drove away from his sacrice (Gen. 15.11), probably the vulture, selected because of its strong ight and far sight, and ready location of prey from an apparently impossible distance. The word is probably an appellative, ‘screamer’, from a verb known in 1 Sam. 25.14 (of Nabal scolding David), with Syr. and Arab. cognates. ’ayyh may be cognate with Arab. yu’yu’u(n), a kind of hawk, possibly another onomatopoeic word ‘screecher’. 1
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The verb šza (‘to look upon’) is known only here and at 20.9 and in Song 1.6, šeššezanî haššemeš (‘because the sun has looked upon me’). 8. This is another pair of relative clauses qualifying nî (‘a path’). benêšaaÑ, a phrase used in the OT only here and in 41.26 possibly, is of uncertain signicance. In Job 28.8 it is parallel to šaal, which is usually taken as a lion (see on 4.10). We should probably take benê-šaaÑ in its general sense ‘great beasts’ after the Arab. cognate cited by BDB, ša¨iÑu(n) (‘bulky’ or ‘a man of great rank’), so ‘big game’. The usual phonetic correspondence of Heb. š to Arab. or t is here contravened because of the nal Ñ. ‘h (‘to pass’) is known only here in the Qal in the OT. It is very common in Aram., Syr. and Arab. in the sense of ‘passing on, away’. This passage, describing the remoteness and inaccessibility of the place where Wisdom is to be found, insofar as it interrupts the account of mining in vv. 1-6, 9-11, is probably displaced from between vv. 12 and 13, where it effects a bridge between the passages on the inaccessibility of Wisdom and its rare value. 13. The verb timmÑ’ (‘it is [not] attained’), in v. 13b supports the LXX reading darkh (‘the way to it’) for MT ‘erkh, which is probably a secondary variant which supplanted darkh after association with vv. 15ff. 14. tehôm is the subterranean water, Akk. tiamtu, the primordial power of Chaos subdued by Marduk; ym again denotes, as well as the sea conned to its proper place, the primordial power of chaos which menaced the power of Baal in the Canaanite myth of the New Year festival. In view of this association of the lower deep and the sea with the primordial conict at which ordered creation emerged, there may be a double reference to Wisdom as beyond human attainment now and as being with God ‘in the beginning’ and above Chaos; cf. Prov. 8.22-31, particularly v. 24, ‘when there were no depths (teh¿mô) I was brought forth’, and v. 29, ‘When he assigned to the sea its limit (…then I was beside him)’, also John 1.1, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God…’ 15. The incomparable value of Wisdom beyond that of precious stones, the theme of vv. 15-19, is the theme also of Prov. 8.10-11, 19. sûr for MT seôr, in full zhb sûr, found in 1 Kgs 6.20, is taken by Dhorme as ‘massive gold’, citing Ass. huraÑû sagru, and suggesting that the root of Heb. sûr is sar (‘to close’). The term, however, may be connected with Arab. ajara (‘to heat in an oven or crucible’), so meaning ‘to rene’. tatêh means lit. ‘in its place’, as in the succession of kings in the Books of Kings.
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16. l¿’-tesulleh means literally ‘it will not be balanced’, that is, weighed. The verb is found only here and at v. 19, again in the Pual, and as a variant form in Lam. 4.2. BDB connects it with sal (‘a basket’, Gen. 40.16, 17, 18; Exod. 29.3, 23, 32; Lev. 8.2, 26, 31; Num. 6.15, 17, 19; Judg. 6.19), in which grain was probably weighed, hence the meaning ‘to weigh’. keem is understood by all the ancient versions through its association with Ophir as ‘gold’. The word is possibly cognate with Ass. katâmu (‘to cover, or close up’); cf. Arab. katama (‘to conceal’). The term may have arisen through the careful concealment of gold in store or transit. A more probable explanation is given by Pope on the basis of Egyptian references to nb-n-ktm (‘gold of ktm’), ktm denoting the deserts of Upper Egypt and the Sudan from which gold (nb) was drawn, making Egypt the great source, or entrepot, of gold in the ancient Near East, as is indicated in the Tell el-Amarna tablets. The locality of Ophir is uncertain. In Gen. 10.29 it is located between Sheba and Havilah, thus in southern Arabia. The mention of apes and baboons among Solomon’s cargoes from Ophir (1 Kgs 9.28f.), however, suggests remoter regions, which have been sought in Africa and India. Since Solomon’s trading voyages lasted three years (1 Kgs 10.22) it has been suggested that Ophir must have been much further away than southern Arabia or Somaliland (Punt), which is known from Egyptian inscriptions as a source of gold. In favour of East Africa is the known Phoenician contact with the region between the Zambesi and the Limpopo. The Sanskrit word for ‘apes’, however, in 1 Kgs 10.22 suggests contacts with India. In view of the biblical tradition that Ophir was in Arabia, known to the Phoenicians as auriferous (Ezek. 27.22), Ophir may denote southern Arabia as an entrepot for merchandise from the farther East and also from east Africa. LXX renders Ophir with an initial S, which has suggested Sofala some 200 miles from the famous ruins of Zimbabwe in East Africa, and Supara on the Malabar coast. This spelling, however, has no basis in MT, and probably reects the seaborne trade with India in Ptolemaic times, when LXX was produced. š¿ham, noted with gold as a product of Havilah in Gen. 2.12, is mentioned as one of the semi-precious stones, usually taken as onyx, in the high priest’s pectoral (Exod. 25.7; 28.9; 20). 17. ze¤ô¤î is hapax legomenon in the OT, but is better known in Aram. zeôî and Arab. zajjatu(n), which had a scarcity value in antiquity. Blown glass was unknown until Roman times, where already Akka was famous for this industry by the middle of the rst century CE (Josephus, War 2.10.2). But it had been made in ancient Egypt since the second millennium BCE of a fusion of quartz sand containing calcium carbonate with natron or plant ashes and colouring, material such as manganese, copper, cobalt and iron compounds. Strips of this were built up round a sandy clay core, or, in the case of beads, around wire, which was later extracted, and the article was then re-fused and
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polished (Engelbach 1942: 133f.). Such glass was used largely for inlay, as on the throne of Tutankhamen. From the sixth century BCE until the Roman era it was sufcient of a rarity to be valued highly like gold temûrh, as in 20.18, is ‘exchange’, from hmîr. paz is known as the nest of gold, as indicated by LXX at 1 Kgs 10.18, where zh mûz (from pzaz) is rendered chrusos dokimos, ‘well-approved gold’. 18. r’mô, a substance in which the Edomites trafcked (Ezek. 27.16), hence reasonably associated with the Red Sea, is probably coral, and gîš, which is a hapax legomenon in the OT, suggests Ass. algameš, or rock-crystal. The context suggests that MT meše¤ may be emended to me¤e (‘price’; cf. mi¤sa h‘erke¤, ‘the price of your assessment’ in Lev. 27.23), but the consonants of MT may be retained and read me¿¤, cognate with Arab. maaka (‘to grasp, hold, contain’); cf. meše¤ zera‘ (Ps. 126.6), which L. Köhler (1945: 59-61) explains as ‘a bag of seed’ (so Tur-Sinai). penînîm are not pearls, as Rashi thought, since in Lam. 4.7 they are red; they are either ‘red coral’, the word possibly alluding to Arab. coral’s ‘branching’ growth (cf. Arab. fananu[n], ‘branch’) or ‘rubies’. 19. piÓea is always rendered ‘topaz’ in LXX. 21. The parallelism with ‘ô indicates that MT y should possibly be emended to ayyh (‘beasts’); cf. 37.8 and the more common ayya hadeh (‘the wild beasts’). 22. Note the personication of ’aaddôn and mwe. The latter is personied, and indeed deied, as the inveterate enemy of Baal in the highly dramatic Baal myth of Ras Shamra. 23. darkh (lit. ‘its way’) means here ‘the way to it’. 24. On text of v. 24b see Textual Note. 25. tikkn (‘he measured, adjusted’) and middh (‘measurement’), from ma, recalls the famous passage on creation in Isa. 40.12: mî-ma bešo‘alô mênym (so 4QIsa) wešmayim bazzere tikkn Who meted out the waters of the sea in the hollow of his hand, And measured out the heavens with a span?
26. The association of Wisdom with the divine control of the seasons in vv. 26-27 recalls the association of Wisdom with God’s ordering of the elements in Prov. 8.27-30. 1
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A decree for the rain may refer to the seasonal rains, the heavy rains of early winter (‘the former rain’ of the OT) and the light rain of late winter and early spring (‘the latter rain’). This has been taken to indicate the Palestinian origin of the Book of Job, but the high country of Edom also enjoys those rains and the Hejaz has at least the expectancy of rain at the same season as Palestine though it does not always materialize. In v. 26b dere¤, in parallelism with ¿q (‘decree, prescription’), may denote a xed or regular course (cf. on 24.4), but in the same phrase weere¤ laazîz q¿lô in 38.25, dere¤ means ‘way’. In 28.26 the ambiguous term ‘course’ may be preferred, with the implication of ‘regulation’. The meaning of azîz is uncertain. Here and at 35.25; Zech. 10.1; Ben Sira 35.26 it is associated with rain, but also with thunder (q¿lô). A connection with forked lightning (cf. Arab. azza, ‘to notch’) has been suggested (G.B. Gray 1921: I, 243; II, 197-98). If this were correct the association with rain would recall the saying of the modern Arab peasant al-baraq ‘almatu ’lmaÓar (‘the lightning is the announcement of the rain’). But azza in Arab. also means ‘to speak roughly’, hence azîz q¿lô may mean ‘the rumble of thunder’ (so Dhorme, Hölscher, Mowinckel). 27. r’h recalls God’s consideration of his creation at its various stages in Gen. 1.1–2.4. The Arab. nuance of considering as well as seeing in the Arab. cognate is present also here. sippar may have here the literal meaning ‘to count’ or ‘assess’. aqrh (lit. ‘searched her out’) means probably ‘examined her potentialities’, as one would do with a new instrument, which in effect Wisdom was in God’s creation (Prov. 8.23ff.). The parallelism with r’h indicates the emendation of MT he¤înh to e h înh (so Dhorme, Mowinckel, Pope). 28. This verse, which is markedly prosaic after the sublime poem on Wisdom, and incorporates a quotation, though not quite verbatim, from the sapiential tradition (Ps. 111.10; Prov. 1.7; 3.7; 16.6), has been taken as an editorial gloss. Actually the conception of o¤mh is quite different from that in the poem, connoting not the intelligent master-plan of the Creator, but, as is indicated by yir’aÓ ’a¿nay circumspect conduct, the objective of the a¤mîm in their practical task of education and the due response of all to God as nôr’ (‘one to be dreaded’ or ‘revered’). The verse may be an addition by a sage (¤m), conscious of the signicance of his profession, to counter any discouragement which the poem on the inaccessibility of God’s Wisdom might have caused, by stating that there was nevertheless a wisdom attainable by humans through reverential and conscientious response (yir’h) to God as nôr’. Lévêque in his excellent study of wisdom in all its connotations (1920: 607ff.) nds the connection between the two orders of wisdom in the poem and the addendum in v. 28 in that degree of the wisdom of the Creator that he reveals 1
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particularized in the Law as the denition of a practical response to God (pp. 648f.). The explicit identication of Wisdom with the Law, to be sure, is not made until Ben Sira (c. 190 BCE), after which it is familiar in Jewish Wisdom, but it is clearly implied in the postexilic Wisdom Psalms 19.8 (EVV 7) and 119.97ff. ’a¿ny for Yahweh, exceptional in the poetic part of Job, has been taken as evidence of a redactional addendum. This is possible, but it may well be by the author of the poem himself, rounding out his poem on Divine Wisdom by a sapiential citation expressing the conception of practical wisdom which the sages represented in their effort to commend social order. We would see also in the relation of social wisdom and conduct to cosmic Wisdom in vv. 24-27 reection of the culmination of creation in humanity and what is expected of it before its presumption in exceeding the limit of reverent response (yir’a ’el¿hîm, ‘fear of God’) in seeking to match God in ‘knowledge’ (to which we would relate bînh in v. 28b).
1
Job 29 JOB’S REVIEW OF HIS FORMER PROSPERITY Job’s challenge to God in his oath of purgation (ch. 31), preceded by his account of his enjoyment of the divine favour and the benets which his community had shared (ch. 29), which serves to emphasize by contrast his ruin (ch. 30), are to be taken as a unity. Chapters 29–30 particularly recall the picture of past prosperity in Ps. 44.2-9 (EVV 1-8) as a foil to the Plaint of the Community in vv. 10-20 (EVV 9-19) and the favour to the Davidic king in Ps. 89.20-38 (EVV 19-37) followed by the Plaint of the royal sufferer in vv. 39-52 (EVV 38-51). In the context of the forensic aspect of this appeal to God in vv. 29–31 the account of his great social potential (v. 29) nullied by his ruin (v. 30) is tantamount to an accusation of his divine adversary. Further, in the convention of the Plaint of the Sufferer an important element is the call for, or expectation of, a reassuring divine response in oracle or intervention (e.g. Ps. 44.24-26 [EVV 23-25]). To be sure, this is not voiced in Job’s plaint in ch. 30, though his wish for a restoration of his prosperity in 29.1-8 might amount to as much, and particularly his statement, ‘This is my ardent desire; let the Almighty answer me’ (31.35). Be this as it may, his oath of purgation invites, indeed demands, divine response, which in fact materializes in the Divine Declaration (38.1ff.), though in rebuke rather than in reassurance. The chapter may be divided according to its subject matter into six strophes of unequal length: vv. 1-6, 7-10, 21-25, 14-17, 11-13, 18-20. The rst, introduced as a wish, depicts the material and family blessings Job had enjoyed, the second (vv. 7-10) and the third (vv. 21-25) amplifying this by describing the social prestige he enjoyed and shared. The fourth strophe (vv. 14-17) sustains the gure of the king in v. 25 by the theme of righteousness (Ñeeq), and justice (mišpÓ) as Job’s distinctive roles (cf. the Royal Psalm 72.1ff.; see Caquot 1961) and describes how Job discharged responsibility to society. The fth strophe (vv. 11-13) continues this theme and depicts the popular approval of Job’s use of his inuence, and the chapter ends (vv. 18-20) with the hope Job had had of a continuance of God’s blessings. Other arrangements of the text have been proposed (e.g. vv. 1-10, 21-25, 11-20; so Dhorme, Mowinckel, Fohrer, Pope). But we submit that this fails to do justice to the signicance of the robe and turban of righteousness (v. 14) as reecting the technical language and imagery of the ideology of kingship (vv. 21-25), which seems to demand that vv. 14-17 should be read immediately 1
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after vv. 21-25, where Stevenson places them, though apparently not under this consideration. Chapter 29 1.
And Job represented his case afresh and said:
2.
‘Oh to be as in the months of old! As in the days when God watched over me, When he made his lamp shine1 over my head, And by his light I walked through the darkness, As I was in my autumn days, When God set a screen2 about my tent, When as yet the Almighty was with me, And my children stood3 around about me. Then my nomads had abundance of curds,4 And the rock (press) exuded rivers of oil.
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.
14. 15. 16. 17. 11. 12. 1
When I went out to the gate in honour, Or took my seat in the public place, The young men saw me and withdrew, The aged rose up and stood; Notables refrained from speaking, And laid their hand on their mouth. The voice of the nobles was tied up,5 And their tongue clave to the roof of their mouth. They listened to me and were in suspense, And kept silent for my counsel. After I spoke they did not speak again. My word fell upon them like raindrops, And they waited for me as for the rain, Open-mouthed as for the latter rain. If I smiled upon them then indeed6 they gained condence, If my face was bright7 they beamed.8 I chose their government and sat as chief, I lived like a king in prestige. 9Where I led them they let themselves be led.9 I put on righteousness and it clothed me, Justice10 like a robe and turban. I was eyes to the blind, And feet to the lame; I was a father to the poor, And I searched out the case11 of the stranger. But I shattered the fangs of the wicked, And rescued12 the prey from his teeth. Whenever the ear heard it blessed me, And when the eye saw it testied its approval of me, For I rescued the poor when he cried, Even the orphan and the helpless.
The Book of Job 13.
The blessing of him who was about to perish came upon me, And I made the widow’s heart to sing.
18.
So I thought, like a reed-cane13 will I thrive,14 Like a palm-tree15 multiply my days, My root spreading free to the water, And the dew settling at night on my branches. My dignity fresh within me, And my strength16 renewed in my hand.
19. 20.
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Textual Notes on Chapter 29 1. 2.
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
Reading bahillô with T for MT behillô. See Commentary ad loc. Reading bes¿¤ (cf. 1.10), with LXX, Sym. and S for bes¿, nal k being corrupted to d in the square script. MT so, however, may possibly be cognate with Arab. Ñadda (‘to protect’). See Commentary ad loc. Reading ‘meû metri causa, assuming displacement of ‘mdw to v. 6b, where it is superuous to the metre, with subsequent corruption to ‘immî. Reading beem’h with certain Heb. MSS, LXX, T and V for MT bemh. Reading nek’ for MT neb’û and omitting w as a dittograph. See Commentary ad loc. Reading the asseverative enclitic le for MT l¿’. See Commentary ad loc. Reading we’rû pnay for MT we’ôr pnay, assuming metathesis of r and w. Reading leyalîû for MT l¿’ yappîlû, assuming scribal misunderstanding of le enclitic, metathesis of l and y, and the corruption of g to w, w to n and b to p in the square script. Reading ba’ašer ’ôîlm yinnû, proposed by Herz, for MT ka’ašer ’alîm yenam. See Commentary ad loc. Reading mišpÓ with LXX and S for mišpÓî. Conjecturing rî for MT r. Conjecturing ’ešl¿ for MT ’ašlî¤. See Commentary ad loc. Reading qneh for MT qinnî, assuming corruption of h to y in the Old Heb. script. See Commentary ad loc. Reading ’egg¿a‘, from naa‘, for MT ’ew‘. See Commentary ad loc. Reading kenaal with LXX and V for MT wekôl, assuming corruption of k to w and n to k in the Old Heb. script. See Commentary ad loc. Reading ûqešûî for MT weqaštî.
Commentary on Chapter 29 1. It has been suggested (e.g. Hölscher) that the reading wayy¿se ’iyyôb e’ mešlô (‘and Job represented his case afresh’) instead of the customary ‘and Job answered’, or ‘spoke up and said’ is secondary, occasioned by misplacement of text in chs. 25–27, Job being the last speaker before the insertion of the poem on Wisdom (ch. 28). In chs. 29–31, however, Job, having nished his debate with his friends, makes a fresh statement of his situation, to which we refer the heading in MT. mšl means lit. ‘likeness’, hence generally an ‘example’, good or bad, which sets people talking and affords an illustration of 1
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moral principles. It is thus used of a parable, which reects reality, of a proverb, which by simile, metaphor or antithesis emphasizes certain features of the actual situation. In Job’s concluding monologue it is the representation of his actual situation brought into sharp focus. 2. ke is used pregnantly as a particle of comparison, but with reference to time attached to yareê-qeem and yemê… (GKC, §118u). The use of a construct before an adjectival clause in kîymê ’elôah yišmernî should be noted (cf. GKC, §130d). mî yittennî is tantamount to mî yittennî ’ehyeh (‘would that I were’). 3. For MT behillô we should probably read bahillô, contraction of behahillô, the innitive construct of the Hiphil of hlal (‘to shine’) with the preposition and pronominal sufx (so T, Beer, Duhm, Dhorme). The conception of the lamp as symbolizing the presence of God is known in the cult at Shiloh (1 Sam. 3.3) and possibly also in the Temple of Solomon, the free-standing pillars Jachin and Boaz supporting re-cressets (1 Kgs 7.15) according to W.R. Smith (1889: 287-89), W.F. Albright (1942: 18ff.), and H.G. May (ibidem: 88; 1942: 19ff.); cf. Isa. 60.2; Ps. 50.2 (EVV 1). It is used guratively for God’s abiding favour in the quotation of a proverb in 18.5 and in 2 Sam. 22.29 = Ps. 18.29 (EVV 28). h¿še¤ may be a circumstantial, or adverbial, accusative or a direct accusative of that through which one walks, which is unusual but attested; cf. Deut. 1.19, wannle¤ ’ kol-hammibr, and Deut. 2.7; 2 Sam. 2.9. 4. S in rendering MT orpî (‘my shame’) gives quite the opposite sense from that demanded by the context, obviously thinking of the more familiar erph (‘reproach’). Theod., Sym. and V render ‘my youth’, which has suggested the emendation pirî (‘my bloom’, so Volz, Budde, Hölscher). Fohrer translates ‘Frühzeit’ not, however, in the sense of ‘youth’, which does not accord with Job’s family all about him. He recognizes ¿re, well attested in the OT meaning ‘harvest’ or ‘harvest-time’, but takes it as a homonym, but without attesting the meaning he adopts (1963: 402). ‘Harvest-time’, guratively ‘maturity’, seems the obvious sense in view of Job’s family, his prosperity and his standing which even the notables respect. In v. 4b ‘alê ’oholî supports the emendation s¿¤ for MT sô (‘intimate council’). The reading s¿¤ in 1.10 and 3.23 further supports the emendation, which makes D.W. Thomas’s view that s¿ is a homonym of sô (‘council’) from a root sad cognate with Arab. Ñadda meaning in the IVth Form ‘to avert’ and in the VIIIth Form ‘to veil oneself’ unnecessary, though it remains interesting. 6. If halî¤ay means ‘goings’ or ‘steps’ (cf. Nah. 2.6; Ps. 68.25; Prov. 31.27; Hab. 3.6), and raÑ means ‘to wash’, the expression is very strange, though perhaps reminiscent of the Blessing of Asher in Deut. 33.24, who would ‘dip his foot in oil’. Dahood (UHP, p. 60) suggests that it may refer to a footsore traveller, and, reading 1
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bire¿Ñ halî¤ay beem’h wes¿rî Ñ¿q ‘amûay paleê šman,
he translates When my feet were bathed in cream and balsam, And rivers of oil owed over my legs.
We suggest that both raÑ and halî¤ay have been misunderstood, and take ras as cognate with Akk. ra¨âÑu (‘to overow’) or Arab. ra¨aÑa (‘to be cheap’ and so ‘plentiful’). halî¤h is used of a ‘caravan’ or ‘travelling company’ of merchants in 6.19. We suggest that it denotes Job’s nomad herdsmen wandering in search of pasture. In v. 6b we would see in ‘omeî (for MT ‘immî) a complementary parallel to halî¤ay, the noun denoting the chief’s headquarters as distinct from the scattered gratings of his herds during the season of pasture. This was envisaged as a settled land where the hills were terraced for olive trees and other fruits. em’h is the butter and buttermilk churned by the Bedouin women, whose constant occupation is rocking their skin containers. The conception of the rock pouring forth or exuding oil (see above on the verb Ñûq on 28.2) recalls Deut. 32.13, ‘and he gave him to suck honey out of the rock and oil out of the inty rock’, but Ñûr may rather denote the heavy stone olive press (see above on 24.11). 7. qere is used in the OT denoting city only in Prov. 8.3; 9.3, 14; 11.11, and possibly here, but is regularly used in the Ras Shamra texts. The gate above the city is dubious, notwithstanding Dhorme’s explanation of the main gate as a high fortication dominating the city, which would certainly be out of place in the home envisaged for Job. We would see ‘alê-qere as parallel to môšî, the latter denoting the place or posture of honour recognized by the old men, who stand up deferentially. Thus we take qere as the innitive construct of yqar (‘to be honourable’), as probably in the Ras Shamra text Gordon UT 52.3, ytnm qrt l‘lyn(m) (‘let them give honour to the exalted ones’). reô is the broad, relatively empty space about the main gate, still the place of business and gossip and occasional markets in the Arab towns. 8. neb’û might mean ‘hid themselves’, but here means ‘made themselves inconspicuous, withdrew’; cf. Isa. 26.20 where the Qal of the verb is used parallel to b¿’ baarê¤ (‘go into your chambers’). On yšîš see on 12.12. 9. rîm is used of local notables; cf. those of the Israelite town of Succoth in Transjordan in the time of Gideon (Judg. 8.6, 14). ‘Ñerû bemillîm, lit. ‘they set restraint upon words’, with be of the object restrained, is analogous to the expression ‘Ñar be‘a kol-reem (‘he set a restraint on all wombs’) in Gen. 20.18. 1
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In v. 9b the putting of the hand to the mouth (cf. 21.5; 40.4; Judg. 18.19; Mic. 7.16; Prov. 30.32) might denote silence, but it might also be a gesture of deference; cf. the attitude of the worshipper, or listener, before the god, for example in the Hammurabi stele, or of a person at court; cf. a passage in the Ras Shamra Legend of King Krt (Gordon UT 125, 41-42): q ’apk byd (‘Hold thy hand over thy nose’, lit. ‘take thy nose in thy hand’); (b)r(l)tk bm ymn (‘Thy right hand over thy throat’, lit. thy throat in thy right hand). It also indicated in Egyptian legal convention that one had no further argument (Couroyer 1960). 10. MT neb’û in qôl-neîîm neb’û is suspect, partly because the verb in its known sense of ‘hide’ or ‘withdraw’ does not suit the subject qôl, and partly because a poet with the wealth of diction of the author of Job would not have repeated the verb so soon after v. 3. Hence we propose the emendation nek’, with a word-play with ikkh (‘palate) in v. 10b. ¤’ is not attested in Heb., but it is well known in Arab. (aka’a) meaning ‘to tie’, or ‘tighten a knot’. 21-25. Verses 21-25, continuing the theme of the deference of even the notables to Job, is displaced in MT. 21. In weyillû the verb is yal (‘to wait’), being used in the Piel; the daghesh in l is daghesh forte affectuosum, to preserve and emphasize the quantity of the vowel in the principal pause (GKC, §20i). 22. For MT derî some commentators (e.g. Merx, Budde, Duhm, Hölscher), read dabberî, as in 21.3, but this is not necessary. šnh is a denominative verb from šenayim, and means ‘to double, repeat, do again’; cf. Mishnah, the re-application of the Law. nÓa signies the dropping of rain (cf. 36.27), introducing the gure of the expectancy of rain in v. 23. 23. This apt gure reects the intense expectancy of the early rains (Deut. 11.14; Jer. 5.24) about October or November after the long summer drought, which rell the cisterns and soften the hard crust of the dry earth and make cultivation possible again. Verse 23b refers to the light rains (malqôš), ‘the latter rains’ at the end of winter and early spring, which fall when the corn is forming the ear. It is important that the latter rains come at this stage of the growth before the siroccos of late April and May nally check the growth. The opening (p‘ar) of the mouth denotes eager expectancy; cf. Ps. 119.131. 24. Verse 24a and b are conditional sentences, introduced respectively by the imperfect and perfect without the conditional particle in the protasis. In MT the negative l¿’ ya’amînû has excited the suspicion of some commentators (e.g. 1
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Budde, Bickell, Beer, Duhm, Peake, Hölscher, Stevenson, Mowinckel). Retaining the negative, others translate ‘If I smiled on them they would not believe it’, that is, they were transported beyond belief; cf. 9.16 (so Ball, Dhorme, Peters, Pope, Terrien). But Stevenson rightly observes that this would imply that Job’s favour was something unusual, which is quite the opposite of what the context conveys. G.B. Gray takes l¿’ ya’amînû as the imperfect of attendant circumstances, rendering ‘I laughed at them when they believed not’, and goes on to interpret v. 24b as meaning that general despondency never affected Job’s cheerfulness; though grammatically possible, this interpretation is somewhat forced, especially in v. 24a. Kissane takes v. 24a to mean that Job laughed the people out of false counsel and false condence, while he interprets v. 24b to mean that they did not fail to respond to his cheerfulness, which is again possible if even more forced. Duhm, Budde, Steuernagel, Mowinckel and Fohrer omit l¿’ in v. 24a as a dittograph of the negative in v. 24b, with a similar interpretation to Kissane’s in v. 24b. Those interpretations ignore the phenomenon of the proclitic le with asseverative force, which has also escaped the notice of the Masoretes, by whose time it had fallen obsolete. It is, however, well known in Ugarit, and commonly introduced the apodosis of a conditional sentence, as here. Regularly the Masoretes, expecting Classical Hebrew, assume that l with the nite verb in the consonantal text is the negative l¿’, possibly because the Canaanite enclitic was vocalized lo. Thus in v. 24a we would read ’eaq ’elêhem leya’amînû (‘If I smiled to them then indeed they gained condence’). We take ’ôr in v. 24b, emending to we’rû, as the verb in the protasis of a conditional sentence without the conditional particle. But MT might be retained as the innitive absolute with the force of the perfect. yappîlû may be a corruption of yalîû, resulting in the reading we’rû nay leyalîû (‘and if my face shone they fairly beamed’); cf. 9.27; 10.10. G.R. Driver (1955: 88) would preserve the consonants of MT l¿’ yappîlû, taking the latter word as a scribal misunderstanding of a hapax legomenon ya’aîlû (‘grow dark’), rendering ‘their darkness was dispelled’, hence NEB ‘lost their gloomy looks’. l¿’ he would understand as introducing a rhetorical question without the interrogative particle. For the conception of the light of the face signifying favour; cf. Num. 6.2, 5; Ps. 4.7 and particularly Prov. 16.15a, ‘For the light of a king’s face is life’. 25. In v. 25a darkm means ‘their government’ as in Ugaritic (see on 26.14). On the Ben Asher pointing of ’ear, with hateph pathah under b before the guttural, see GKC, §10g. In this particular context we have taken s¤an in the familiar sense ‘to dwell’, but understanding the pregnant sense of being rmly established; we admit that it may reect the status of Ass. zukanu, a provincial governor, familiar in Palestine in the Babylonian and Persian periods. ‘Among the troop’ (MT baggeû) in conjunction with the ‘swelling’ or ‘abiding’ of a king is suspect, and we propose that geû is cognate with Arab. jaddu(n) (‘excellence’ or ‘prestige’). A third colon, like v. 25c, is always suspect as a 1
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gloss or a displacement unless it obviously ends a passage and may readily be connected in sense with the preceding two cola. So in v. 25c MT ’ablîm yenam was taken to have been displaced from after we’ôr pnay in v. 24b, which was then translated ‘and the light of my face comforted mourners’(so Budde, Bickell, Beer, Duhm, Peake, Richter, Stevenson). G.B. Gray, Mowinckel and Fohrer omit v. 25c as a gloss. But we submit that it is the last colon of a tricolon which ends the passage on Job’s status among the elders and notables (vv. 8-10, 21-25) before the passage on his protection of the destitute (vv. 14-17, 11-13), thus punctuating the strophe, which it ends as it does often in the Ras Shamra myths. The agreement of v. 25c and v. 25a and b is secured by Herz’s plausible emendation of MT ka’ašer ’alîm yenam to ka’ašer ’¿îlm yinnû (1900: 163), or, we consider, better, ba’ašer ’¿îlm yinnû, which the reading of Sym. supports (so Dhorme). 14-17, 11-13. These two strophes follow the reference to Job’s kingly prestige in v. 25, and reect the Israelite tradition of the responsibilities of royalty; cf. Ps. 72.1-4; Isa. 11.3-5 (see Introduction to ch. 29). 14. Ñeeq is ‘right’, with here a moral connotation, which is properly secondary to the word, which means primarily that which is ‘proper’, ‘right’ rather than ‘righteousness’. mišpÓ is also primarily a neutral word, the regular ‘government’ or ‘rule’ which is imposed and upheld by a šôÓ, the Ugaritic cognate of which, pÓ, in the Ras Shamra texts is parallel to mlk (‘king’). Hence mišpÓ denotes primarily ‘order’ and secondarily ‘judgment’. The meaning of such words is to be determined from the context, though in Israel, which admitted the rule of Yahweh, whose nature and will was revealed in the Covenant and its religious and social obligations, the words had usually a moral connotation. In the present context, which after the prototype of the royal ideology emphasizes the responsibility of Job in society, both words have certainly the moral connotation. The conception of being ‘clothed in right’ is familiar in Ps. 132.9. ‘Clothing’ and ‘clothed’ may denote being in uniform, as Ahab and Jehoshaphat at the gate of Samaria on the eve of their expedition to Ramoth-Gilead (1 Kgs 22.10), or it may denote the clothes of men of standing as distinct from the stripped workman or half-clad pauper. In any case it denotes the characteristic of Job, from which he was known plainly to the people and which he proud to exhibit; cf. Arab. m’ahara ’innu(n) (‘what a man shows undisguisedly’, lit. ‘what a man has on his back’, as distinct from ‘what he has in his belly’, i.e. conceals, m’abÓana). me’îl is the overcloak (Arab. ‘abbyatu[n]) that is worn by men of status or in leisure. Ñnî is the headdress of a king (Isa. 62.3) or of the high priest (Zech. 3.5); cf. miÑnee of the priest’s turban in Exod. 28.4ff., where the insignia proper was a golden ower fastened on it (Exod. 28.36-38). The nature of Ñnî as a 1
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turban is clear from its derivation from the verb Ñna (‘to wind’, or ‘wrap’; Lev. 16.4; Isa. 22.18). Again the turban carefully wound is a status symbol, as in Islam today. 15. pissa denotes ‘limping’, as of the lame Mephibosheth (2 Sam. 19.27). The association of the verb with the Arab. cognate fasaa (‘to be dislocated’) expresses the use of the verb to describe the jerky ritual dance of the prophets of Baal round the altar on Carmel (1 Kgs 18.21), perhaps on half-bent knees (‘al-šetê hasse‘ippîm) (de Vaux 1941: 9). The association of this verb with pesa (‘Passover’) is doubtful. 16. The description or Job as ‘father to the poor’ recalls the claim of Hammurabi in the epilogue to his famous Code (ANET, 178). The usage of l¿’-ya‘tî, which is properly a relative clause with the antecedent and the relative particle omitted, describes either a gr, or resident alien in the community, who depended upon such as Job for his rights, or one who was not a kinsman (cf. môa‘ [Qere], ‘kinsman’, in Ruth 2.1). In this case Job’s sense of justice was not conned to those whom convention strictly bound him to vindicate. 17. mealle‘ô, from tla‘ (‘to gnaw’), denotes the incisor teeth, particularly of an animal (Joel 1.6; Ps. 58.7), and, as here, is parallel to šinnayim (‘teeth’) in Joel 1.6 and Prov. 30.14. The conception of the wicked devouring persons as prey (Óere) is familiar in the Psalms; cf. Ps. 124.6 and Job 4.10. The gure of the breaking of the teeth of the oppressor is peculiarly at home in the declaration of faith in the Plaint of the Sufferer (e.g. Ps. 3.8). If MT of v. 17b is correct this would be the one instance in the OT of hišlî¤ in the sense of ‘to deliver’, hence ’ešl¿ is suggested, the verb meaning ‘to draw out’, as of a sword from its sheath. G.R. Driver, however (1955: 35) defends MT, citing Arab. alaka (‘to save oneself’, which also in the IInd Form means ‘to draw a sword from the sheath’). The verb has possibly a Phoenician cognate. 11. kî has a temporal signicance, here ‘whenever’, as in 1.5; it also introduces v. 11b. In v. 11b the verb h‘î (‘to attest call to witness’) with the direct object is rare, but intelligible, the person being the object of testimony. The verb is so used of evidence against in 1 Kgs 21.10, 13, where the more common usage would be h‘î be. 12. The succour of the widow and orphan was the peculiar concern of the king in the legends of the Canaanite kings Dn’il and Krt in the Ras Shamra texts Gordon UT 1 Aqht 31, 160, and UT, 127, 46-49: 1
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ltdn dn ’almnt ltpÓ qÑr npš ltdy šm ‘l dl lpnk ltšlm ytm b‘d kslk ’almnt
Thou dost not judge the case of the widow, Nor decide the suit of the oppressed. Thou dost not drive away those who prey upon the poor, Before thee thou dost not feed the fatherless; The widow is behind thy back.
LXX has an interesting reading of v. 12a: ‘For I delivered the poor man from the potentate’, reading miššôa‘. This word means generally ‘noble’ (cf. 34.19), with the nuance of ‘generous’, which may be connected with Ugaritic ‘y (‘to give’); cf. Isa. 32.5, where šôa‘ is parallel to nî with the same connotation. In the Royal Psalm 72.12 in a bicolon of the same purport and with close verbal correspondence LXX, S and Jerome read miššôa‘ for MT mešawwa‘. MT in both cases, however, is to be preferred, with the familiar motif of hearing the cry (ša‘wh) of the oppressed.
18. The rendering of MT might be: ‘And I said, “I will expire with my nest and my days will be as numerous as the sand” ’. ‘im-qinnî in the rst colon has been taken to mean ‘with my nestlings’, a somewhat unlikely expression, which is not attested of a human family elsewhere in the OT. LXX renders v. 18a as ‘But I said, My life will reach old age’, which suggests that MT qinnî is the end of zeqûnay (‘my old age’). Dhorme read ‘immî, which he construed with w’¿mer (‘I said to myself’; cf. this use of ‘im with the pronominal sufx in 10.13, where ‘imme¤ is parallel to billee¤), reading w’¿mer ‘immî zqn ’ewa‘ (so Saydon 1961: 252; Pope). It must be admitted that this gives an excellent parallel to v. 18b (MT), ‘And my days will be as numerous as the sand’, though in view of the gure of a growing plant in the following verse we have some reserve. Herz (1913: 345) proposed that qn was an Egyptian loanword meaning ‘strength’, which was accepted by G.R. Driver (1955: 85) and Terrien (1963). Actually if this is the meaning of 18a there is no need to invoke Egyptian, since qn is attested in the Ras Shamra texts (e.g. Gordon UT 62, 4 and 67 VI, 20), where it signies, as has been recognized in Job 31.22, the shoulder socket which might well, like ‘arm’ (zerôa‘), signify ‘strength’. ‘im-qnî might then be read, meaning ‘with my strength unimpaired’. If MT of v. 18b is correct then Dhorme’s reading of 18a or our proposed modication of Herz’s interpretation would be acceptable. This, however, depends on the connection of v. 18 with the gure in v. 19, and on the reliability of the MT reading kaôl in v. 18b. There was a Rabbinic reading kaûl, ‘like the phoenix’, b. Sanh. 108b), with an allusion to the legendary phoenix, which has been adopted by certain later commentators (e.g. Hitzig, Ewald, Dillmann, Friedrich Delitzsch, Budde, Duhm, Peake, Hölscher, Stevenson, Mowinckel, Terrien, Fohrer). This would, if genuine, support MT ‘im-qinnî. But it is suspiciously like a secondary tradition derived from the LXX translation of v. 18b, ‘like a palm-stem (phoinix) I shall live a long time’. This indicates a Heb. original kenaal (‘like a palm-tree’; cf. Arab. na¨lu[n]). This reading was known to Jerome, as is evident from his commentary and the Vulgate and is 1
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adopted by Ball and Kissane. We consider that it may represent a genuine preMasoretic variant and perhaps even the original text. The fact that na¨lu(n) is the regular Arab. word for ‘palm-tree’, which is regularly tmr in Heb., is no objection, since it is actually attested in the OT, though only once more (Num. 24.6). We consider this reading, which is not far from MT, more natural in view of the sequel, which refers to the roots and branches of a tree, which has so far not been mentioned in MT. In v. 18a S retains a double reading, translating ‘I will deliver the poor people’, implying a reading ‘am ‘nî ’ôšîa‘ for MT ‘im-qinnî ’ewa‘ (‘and will nish as a reed’), rendering a Hebrew text we‘im qneh ’ewa‘, and this affords a clue to the restoration of the couplet. If we read kenaal (‘like a palm-tree’) in v. 18b, ‘im in v. 18a would naturally be the comparative preposition, a sense which is attested for ‘im in Proverbs. The standard of comparison would naturally be a plant, like a palm-tree, and from v. 19a, one which throve in water. This would suggest the reading qneh for MT qinnî, with which S was familiar. The problem then remains is MT ’ewa‘. As a pure conjecture we might suggest qneh g¿m’ (‘a reed which sucks up water’; cf. Gen. 24.17, hami’înî n’ me’aÓ-mayim, ‘let me drink a little water’), but there is nothing in this reading to correspond to the distinctive letter ‘ in MT ’ewa‘. On the hint of the rst variant of S we might read ’iwwša‘ (‘will spread myself’), the verb yša‘ being cognate with Arab. wai‘a (‘to be wide’), but š is too distinctive to be readily corrupted to w or g. Our conclusion is that for MT ’ewa‘ we should retain the consonants, but read ’eggôa‘ from na‘, a cognate of Arab. naja‘a (‘to thrive’ as beasts on pasture, manja‘u[n]). So in v. 18a we read ‘im-qneh ’eggôa‘ (‘I shall thrive like the reed-cane’). 19. The use of the passive Qal pûa is interesting, meaning ‘let go free’; cf. Gen. 24.32 (Piel) of camels loosed at the end of a journey. ylîn (lit. ‘shall spend the night’) is very apt in the case of dew. 20. This bicolon is full of ambiguity. qaštî in v. 20b immediately suggests ‘my bow’, which has suggested the emendation of MT keôî in v. 20a to kîônî (‘my javelin’, so Hoffmann). The sense of aš as parallel to taalî (‘to be renewed’, or ‘ever fresh’), does not suit kî¿n, nor yet keî (‘my bow handle’), which was proposed by G.R. Driver (1955: 85-86), citing Arab. kabidu(n) (‘the centre-piece, or handle of a bow’). The Hiphil of la is found in 14.7 of a tree renewing itself in fresh shoots, but while it would be expected that the gure of the tree should be continued from v. 19, this does not seem possible in the text. We claim that after the gure of the reed cane and the palm-tree the poet returns to the actual subject of his dignity (keôî) and his strength (reading qešûî for MT qaštî, lit. ‘hardness’). There is probably a similar misunderstanding of qšt in Gen. 49.24: wattše beên qaštô wayy¿zzû zer¿‘ê yyw 1
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Here qešûî (‘my strength’) is a better parallel to zer¿‘ê yy. Though the poet has returned to literalism in keôî, he bridges the gulf of the gures by using aš and taalî, which might refer either to renewal of dignity and strength or of vegetation.
1
Job 30 JOB’S PLAINT With various components of the Plaint of the Sufferer Job voices his lamentation. The distinctive elements of the prototype, however, are scrambled because of the contrast with the prosperity and status he had enjoyed by God’s favour. Thus in the rst strophe (vv. 1-2, 9-10) Job’s contempt for those who are alienated by his suffering (vv. 1-2, 9-10), probably secondarily amplied by an independent poem in vv. 3-8 (so Fohrer, who includes v. 2), points the contrast to Job’s status among the notables in 29.7-11, which the sufferer felt so keenly. Having struck this note, Job continues in the second strophe (vv. 11-14) with the theme of the alienation of those who too readily conclude that his suffering betokens sin. Their estrangement is described in the gure of military assault (vv. 12-14; cf. Ps. 62.4f. [EVV 3f.]). In the third strophe (vv. 15-19) Job laments his fall from high standing, neîh (v. 15b) to dust and ashes (v. 19), noting his bodily afiction (vv. 17f. in the language of the Plaint of the Sufferer with particular reference to his own actual afiction; cf. 2.7f.). The fourth strophe (vv. 20-23) opens with the cry of the sufferer to God (v. 20), but only to elaborate on his sufferings and his hopeless end, which he imputes to God (vv. 21-23) in contrast to his free acknowledgment of the divine favour in 29.2-5. In the context of Job’s oath of purgation, to which chs. 29 and 30 are the prelude, this is an accusation. In the second part of Job’s statement (vv. 24-31), the rst strophe (vv. 2427) emphasizes his unmerited suffering in language that reects Pss. 35.13f. and 7.5f. (EVV 4f.), where it is the declaration of the innocent sufferer. In its present context in the forensic convention it anticipates Job’s oath of purgation (ch. 31). The nal strophe (vv. 28-31) is in the convention and gure of the Plaint of the Sufferer. Verses 3-8, which with Fohrer we take to be a secondary poetic insertion with the same antecedents as 24.5ff., describes miscreants who, for some reason, have been scourged out of the land (vv. 5-8) and must live as pariahs beyond the settled land on which they prey stealthily as brigands (vv. 5-7). This seems obviously a digression in Job’s statement in vv. 1, 9-10, which justies Fohrer’s opinion that it is a citation, with v. 2 also possibly secondary.
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Chapter 30 1.
2. 3
4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
1
‘But now I am mocked by men Younger in years than myself, Whose fathers I should have disdained To set with the dogs of my ocks. Of what signicance to me would the strength of their hands have been, Men whose strength even for their own sakes had perished?
… Through want and hard hunger. They gnaw the roots1 of the dry ground, The land of the wastes2 of the wilderness. They pick the salt-wort and the leaves3 of bushes, And roots of wild broom to warm themselves.4 They are driven out from the body of the community;5 Men shout at them as at a thief. On the slopes6 of the wadis they live, Among the caves of the earth and rocks; Among bushes they bray, Where thistles grow they are banded together, Sons of a churl, without repute, Who have been scourged out of the land. But now I have become something for them to sing about, Even a byword7 for them. They abhor me; they withdraw far from me; And do not refrain from spitting in my face. Since God has loosened my tent-cord8 and humbled me, They have cast off restraint even in my presence. They raise9 places for battering-rams10 against me,11 They raise12 their destructive siege-causeways. They break up my path to make me fall;13 They attack;14 no one restrains them.15 As through a wide breach they come; At the place they make the rain they roll on. Terrors are turned16 upon me, My honour is driven away17 as by the wind, And my wellbeing has passed away like a cloud. 18My life within me is poured out; Days of afiction have taken hold of me. At night my bones are hotter19 than a cauldron;20 And my veins21 have no rest. With great violence afiction grips me as22 my garment, Constricting me about like the collar of my tunic. It has sent me down23 into the mire and confusion,24 And I am made like dust and ashes. I cry to you but you answer me not; I stand, and you do not heed25 me.
The Book of Job 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.
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You turn cruel to me, With all your strength you wreak your animosity against me, You lift me up and make me ride the wind, And you dissolve me in a rainstorm.26 For I know certainly that you will bring me to death, Even to the place certainly appointed for all living. But to any who made a request27 I would put out my hand,28 If one cried in his calamity to me.29 Did I not weep for him whose day was hard? Did not my soul grieve for the needy? 30 If I looked for good evil came, And if I expected light darkness came. My inside is made to boil without remission, Days of afiction confront me. I have gone about black, but not with the sun, I have stood up in the assembly, calling for help. I have been brother to the jackals, And the companion of ostriches. My skin is black with scorching,31 And my bones are burnt with fever. So my lyre is turned to mourning, And my pipe to the voice of mourners.
Textual Notes to Chapter 30 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 1
Inserting ‘iqqerê, possibly omitted after ‘¿reqîm. See Commentary ad loc. Reading ’m šô’h for MT ’emeš šô’h. See Commentary ad loc. Reading ‘alê as plural of ‘leh. Reading leummm for MT lamm. Adding ’anšîm metri causa, omitted through haplography before ye¿ršû (pausal) in the Old Heb. script. See Commentary ad loc. Reading ba‘arûÑê for MT be‘rûÑ. See Commentary ad loc. Reading lemšl for MT lemillh. Reading yirî (Qere) with S and T for MT yirô. Reading yqîmû for MT yqûmû, y being corrupted to w in the stage of the script represented by the Qumran MSS. Reading mid¿ for MT pir. See Commentary ad loc. Reading ‘lay for MT ‘al-ymîn. See Commentary ad loc. Omitting MT ralay šillû. See Commentary ad loc. Reading lehaww¿î for MT lehawwî. See Commentary ad loc. Reading ya‘alû for MT y¿‘îlû. Reading ‘¿Ñr for MT ‘¿zr. Reading hohpe¤û for MT hohpa¤. Reading tinn after LXX for MT tird¿, with corruption of n to r in the Old Heb. script. Omitting we‘atth as a dittograph after yešu‘î. Reading niqqeû for MT niqqar, with corruption of d to r in the square script and omission of nal w by haplography before m in the Old Heb. script.
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20. Reading m‘alî, for MT m‘ly. See Commentary ad loc. 21. Reading ‘aqray with LXX for MT ‘¿reqay. 22. Reading yip¿ kileûšî with LXX for MT yiapp leûšî, understanding the object as the pronominal sufx of the parallel verb in v. 18b doing double duty, as regularly in Ugaritic poetry, with omission of k after s in the Old Heb. script. 23. Reading h¿rînî for MT h¿rnî. 24. Reading le¿mer ûlehomrî metri causa. See Commentary ad loc. 25. Reading wel¿’ tib¿nn with one Heb. MSS and V for MT wattib¿nen. 26. Reading tešû’h for MT tûšiyyh (Qere). 27. Reading le’ay b¿‘eh for MT l¿’-e‘î. See Commentary ad loc. 28. Reading ’ešla for MT yišla, ’ being corrupted to y in the Old Heb. script. 29. Reading lî yesawwa‘ for MT lhen šûa‘, y of lî being corrupted to h in the Old Heb. script, and y to n in the last stage of the script. 30. Omitting MT kî with LXX, S and V metri causa. 31. Reading m‘alî for MT m‘ly. See Commentary ad loc.
Commentary on Chapter 30 1-8. It has been maintained that vv. 2-8 (introduced by v. 1, which, it is claimed, is editorial) is part of another passage in Job, perhaps really belonging to Job’s speech in ch. 24, which is fragmentary (so Duhm, Bickell, TurSinai). Fohrer treats vv. 2-8 as a later insertion which breaks the sequence of thought between vv. 1 and 9ff. The passage is indeed an embarrassing interruption of the argument, and may well be part of a citation of part of a Plaint of the Sufferer, from which such adaptations are regularly made in the Book of Job, often at greater length than is strictly necessary for the argument. We would admit v. 2, and take vv. 3-8 as one of those extended quotations, perhaps secondary to the Book of Job. 1. The reference in v. 1c and d may be to the order of preference at a Bedouin guest-meal, where the honoured guests and as many male adults as can sit at meat are rst served, then poorer tribesmen and juniors, then servants and women, the remains being gnawed by the dogs. 2. Dhorme rightly in our opinion defends MT lmmh llî, emphasizing lî which refers to Job at the height of his prestige when he was independent of the support of such people, even if they had been strong, to say nothing of them in such an enfeebled state. This suggests that the pronominal sufx in ‘lêmô is also emphatic, in antithesis to lî, ‘their strength, even for their own sakes (‘lêmô) is perished’. For this use of ‘al with the pronominal sufx, cf. v. 16; 10.1; Pss. 42.6, 12; 43.5. On kela, Syr. kela, see on 5.26. 3. kn is Aram., ‘hunger, famine’. galmû, which means ‘sterile’ in 3.7 and 15.34, is best taken here in its Arab. nuance as ‘hard’. 1
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beeser we¤n galmû may be the rst colon of a tricolon, but is probably the second colon of a bicolon, of which the rst colon has dropped out (so Hölscher, Mowinckel). LXX takes ‘¿reqîm as the Aram. verb ‘they ee’, but it is cognate rather of the Syr. ‘araq (‘to gnaw’). The colon is short of a beat, which may be restored by the inclusion of ‘iqqerê (‘roots’, so Dhorme, Ball, Hölscher, Mowinckel, Fohrer), which may well have been omitted by haplography after h‘¿reqîm. Alternatively the missing object of ‘¿reqîm may be Ñe’eÑ’ê (‘growth’), which might be omitted by haplography before Ñiyyh. We prefer the former solution, reading ‘iqqerê, a conscious word-play with ‘¿reqîm. In ’emeš šô’h ûmeš¿’h (‘Evening’ [or ‘yesterday’], ‘ruin and desolation’) the simplest solution is to assume a dittograph of š and read ’m šô’h ûmeš¿’h (lit. ‘mother of the waste and wilderness’), a description of Ñiyyh. For a similar description of localities, cf. Umm Lakî (‘Mother of Itch’) near Gaza and Umm Fam (‘Mother of Charcoal’) near Megiddo. 4. The verb qÓa (‘to pluck’) is found again in 8.12 and 24.24. mallûa, rendered halima in LXX, Aq. and Theod., is ‘salt-wort’ (so Bochart, Dhorme, Fohrer, Pope). If v. 4b is taken in strict parallelism with v. 4a, lamm might denote ‘their food’ (so G.B. Gray, Dhorme, Kissane, Weiser, Terrien). There is no evidence, however, that the roots of desert broom (reem) were edible, but they were known to be used to produce charcoal (Ps. 120.4), so for lamm we should read leummm (‘to warm themselves’; so Köhler, Hölscher, Tur-Sinai, Mowinckel, Fohrer, Gordis, Pope, Lindblom). 5. Dahood’s suggestion that min-gw is a corruption of gm, known in Ugaritic as ‘with a shout’, that is, ‘aloud’ (1957: 318ff.), certainly gives a parallel to yrî‘û in v. 5b, but it would be more convincing in an archaic passage in the Psalms than in a relatively late sapiential passage that shows Aramaic inuence. It is in any case unnecessary. For the problematic gw Bochart proposed g¿yî, but there is no need to emend, since gw is attested in Phoenician (Cooke 1903: 33.2), Aram. and Syr., meaning ‘community’ (so Hoffmann, Budde, G.B. Gray, Dhorme, Hölscher, Kissane, Dhorme, Mowinckel, Fohrer, Pope, Terrien). Another beat is required in this colon, and ‘anšîm may be read, having been omitted by haplography before yeg¿ršû in the Old Heb. script. 6. The parallelism with ¿rê ‘r (‘holes of the earth’) supports the meaning ‘slopes of the wadis’ (‘arûÑê nelîm; cf. Arab. ‘iru[n], ‘the slope of a hill’; so Michaelis, Wetzstein, Dhorme, Hölscher, Mowinckel, Fohrer, Pope, Terrien). kîm (‘rocks’) is found in Jer. 14.29 and in Ass. kapû, and is familiar in Aram. 1
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7. On nhaq (‘to bray’) see on 6.5. The people utter their cries to keep in touch with one another. rûl denotes not ‘nettles’, but rather ‘thistles’, which grow over three feet high (Dalman 1932: II, 318). The reference is possibly to the outcasts stalking up to the settlement under cover of the thistles and bushes of the waste, where they keep in touch by animal noises, preparatory to making a petty raid. 8. On nl see above on 2.10. n¤’ is an Aram. form of Heb. n¤h (Hiphil and Hophal), found only here and in Isa. 16.7; Prov. 15.13; 17.22; 18.14; cf. Tur-Sinai, who proposes to emend to ni¤reû (‘they are cut off’, so Dhorme). 9. neînh is primarily the accompaniment of psalms on a stringed instrument and secondarily music or singing in general. Here, as in Lam. 3.14, where neînh is parallel to e¿q (‘laughingstock’), it means the theme of a song, possibly improvised in jest in idle entertainment, as in the Plaint of the Sufferer in Ps. 69.13 (EVV 12), where the word denotes drinking songs, in which, as here, the innocent sufferer is mocked. As a parallel to neîn¿ in this context millh (‘word’) should probably be emended to mšl (‘byword’); cf. 17.6. 10. Note the assonance raqû and r¿q. On the spitting in the face in the familiar imagery of the Plaint of the Sufferer, cf. Isa. 50.6 and Job 17.6. 11. This is another ambiguous verse. Kethib yirô (‘his cord’) is read by LXX and V, while Qere yirî (‘my cord’) is the reading followed by S and T, which we adopt. yeer is taken by Dhorme as a tether, which would be a tting parallel to resen (‘halter’), but the sense is rather ‘bowstring’ (cf. Judg. 16.7-9) or ‘tent-cord’ (cf. Jer. 10.20, where the form is mêr). We prefer the latter. pa (here intensive) is used of loosening (the knots of) bonds (12.18; 38.31; 39.5) or of the thongs of armour (1 Kgs 20.11). The passage might possibly refer to the loosening of the bowstring, that is, the disarming of a defeated enemy (so G.B. Gray, Terrien, Fohrer). The verb militates against Mowinckel’s interpretation of God unloosing his bowstring to shoot at the victim and against Kissane’s view that the phrase means ‘he stripped off my excellency’, a meaning which yirî has in other contexts. We regard the reference to the loosening of the tent-peg to denote the condition of a homeless castaway. This interpretation is possibly supported by the cliché in the Ras Shamra Baal myth referring to the discomture of a party as the up-rooting of his tent-pegs (Gordon UT 129.17; 49.VI, 27-28). Here in the phrase lys‘ ’alt btk it is doubtful whether ’alt is ’ahl (‘tent’) with the h elided or a cognate of Arab. ’latu(n) (‘a spear’, as the symbol of royalty). In v. 11b resen (‘bridle’; cf. Ps. 32.9; Isa. 30.28), signies ‘restraint’. We should emphasize mippnay in this context as meaning ‘even in my presence’. 1
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12. This verse is greatly overloaded in MT, and should probably be reduced to a bicolon of three beats in each colon rather than treated as a defective tricolon. ‘al-ymîn (‘on the right hand’) is suspect in the absence of ‘on the left hand’ in v. 12b, unless it means that Job’s enemies dared to attack him on the right hand, the sword hand, hence the side not protected by the shield. In view of the military gure in the parallel colon it is unlikely that v. 12a refers to the right hand as the place where the accuser stood (so Dhorme, citing Zech. 3.1 and Ps. 109.6), as in the Shari‘a courts in Saudi Arabia today, where plaintiff and defendant stand side by side before the judge to symbolize the impartiality of justice. Hence with Budde, Beer, Peake, Duhm, G.B. Gray, Hölscher, Stevenson and Fohrer we read ‘lay for MT ‘al-ymîn. To account for m and n in MT ymîn we conjecture m as the preformative of the following word. Hence we propose to get rid of the embarrassing pira, which, even if it meant ‘brood’, is quite out of place in a military metaphor, by emending it to mid, the instrument for making a fracture (Arab. fada¨a), a battering-ram, or the ramp for its use; cf. the reference to the breach of a wall (pereÑ) in v. 14a. MT yqûmû must then be emended to yqîmû (‘they mount a battering ram against me’, or ‘they raise places for battering-rams against me’). The second in pira is a simple dittograph, or perhaps the corruption of nal t in an original midô to . If MT ralay šillû is not the remnant of a defective colon referring to the sending in of infantry (reading ralî), the phrase may be eliminated as a dittograph of šillû in v. 11b. ‘lay in v. 12b should almost certainly be eliminated, leaving the couplet to read: ‘lay midô yqîmû weys¿llû ’oreô ’êm They raise places for battering-rams against me, They raise their destructive siege-causeways.
Here we follow Hölscher and Fohrer. s¿lelh is used literally as a siege-mound in 2 Sam. 20.15; 2 Kgs 19.32 = Isa. 37.33; Jer. 6.8; Ezek. 4.2; 17.17; etc., and the verb from which it is derived is used guratively in the imagery of the Plaint of the Sufferer in 19.12. It must be admitted ’oreôÓ in the sense of siege-causeways is strange, unprecedented to our knowledge and even suspect, but nevertheless intelligible. 13. nÓesû, a hapax legomenon, is a late orthographic variant for nÓeÑû. Dhorme has, in our opinion, rightly interpreted ‘the breaking up of the path’ as destruction of the escape route. Such a way out of a city under siege is depicted in the exit from a postern through which people escape with what they can salvage down the steep glaçis of Lachish on the reliefs of Sennacherib’s siege from his palace at Nineveh (ANEP, pl. 373). The sing. in MT lehawwÓî (‘for my ruin’) is attested only once, at Job 6.2 (Qere); cf. Pss. 5.10; 1
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38.13; 52.4; 55.12; 57.2; 91.3; Prov. 19.13; etc., where the plural is used. Here we may read lehaww¿Óî (‘to cause me to fall’), from hwh cognate with Arab. hawa(y) (‘to fall’). The military metaphor is sustained in y‘alû (‘they attack’; cf. Num. 13.31; Judg. 1.1; 12.3; etc.), for MT y¿‘îlû (‘they prot’), which yields no feasible sense in the context. For MT ‘¿zr (elsewhere in the OT ‘helper’) ‘¿Ñr (‘one who refrains’) is generally read after Dillmann, which is supported by the direct object lmô, with l as the nota accusativa. G.R. Driver would defend MT, citing Arab. ‘azara (‘to rebuke’) and, with the preposition ‘an (‘from’), ‘to hinder’ (1936: 163); cf. Akk. ezeru (‘to scold’). This is not supported by ‘zar in any other passage in the OT and in the present passage there is no word-play to occasion the citation of a less familiar homonym. 14. ’Óh in the OT is poetic and generally late, with regular Aram. and Arab. cognates, but it is the regular verb ‘to come’ in Ugaritic. For taat (‘the place of’) cf. Gordon, UT 1 Aqht 21; 2 Aqht V,6-9: ytš’û yÓb b’ap Ó?r tt ’adrm dbgrn
He rose to take his seat at the entrance of the gate In the place of the notables who are in the public place.
15. A tricolon is more usual among prevailing bicola at the end of a strophe rather than the beginning, and v. 16a may well be a late addition. If MT hohpa¤ is correct it would be a case of the passive of the suppressed agent. But it is probably a case of simple haplography, nal w being omitted after k in the Old Heb. script. For MT tird¿ we may read tr¦ (so Siegfried, Beer, Hontheim, Peters, Hölscher, Fohrer) or tinnd (so Graetz, Duhm, Budde, Tur-Sinai, G.B. Gray). We prefer the latter, the same verb being used of chaff driven away by the wind in Ps. 1.4 or of smoke blown away by the wind in Ps. 68.3, and of a driven leaf in Job 13.25. yešu‘tî is used here in its primary sense of freedom from cramping circumstances; cf. Arab. wai‘a (‘to be wide’). wi‘ (generous’) as an epithet of Allah in the Qur’an suggests that in Job’s complaint of the impairing of his social potential yešu‘î may mean ‘my largesse’. 16. we‘atth gives an extra beat in the rst colon, and is probably to be omitted as a dittograph after the end of yešu‘Óî. ‘lay (‘on my account’) indicates the object of Job’s lament; cf. 10.1; Ps. 42.6, 12; 43.5. 17. Dahood (1966: 230) has, in our opinion, solved the problem of this difcult text in seeing that MT ‘lay is ‘alî, a cognate of Arab. ?ala(y) (‘to boil’; cf. ?alayatu[n], ‘cooking-pot’), but we consider that he is wrong in assuming without evidence a root qrr or qrh. We propose rather the emendation of MT niqqar to niqqe¦û in scriptio defectiva, from yqa¦ (‘to be kindled, 1
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burn’; cf. Arab. waqada, ‘to be hot, glow’). Dahood has noticed that m in MT m‘lay is the comparative min with m‘alî (‘than a cauldron’). For MT ‘¿reqay in v. 17b LXX read ‘my nerves’ (‘arqay), rightly apprehending that a part of the body was denoted, parallel to ‘aÑmay (‘my bones’). Actually Saadya, Ibn Ezra, Qimi and Rashi took the word as cognate with Arab. ‘urq (‘veins’). This is a good description of the symptoms of fever; cf. Mowinckel, who translates ‘feverish pulse’. 18. For MT yiÓapp (‘it is sought out’ or ‘it is disguised’) we read yiÓp¿ (‘it seizes’) (so LXX, Houbigant, Siegfried, Beer, Dhorme, Hölscher, Mowinckel, Fohrer, Terrien, Pope). The subject in the 3rd person cannot be God, as Dhorme asserts, since Job appeals to God in vv. 20ff. in the 2nd person. We take the subject therefore as ‘¿nî (‘my afiction’) in v. 16. 19. For MT h¿rnî (‘it shot me’) Duhm proposed the emendation h¿rî¦nî (‘it brought me down’). The colon is still short and an introductory hn may have been omitted through haplography. Alternatively we might propose a similar assonance to ke‘r w’er in v. 19b in le¿mer ûlehomrî (‘to mire and confusion’). This is suggested by the reference to the city of Mot the god of death in the Ras Shamra texts as hmry (‘Ruin, Dissolution’), cognate with the Arab. hamratu(n) (‘confusion’). The texts in question are Gordon UT 51 VII,12 and 67 II,15, on which see J. Gray 1965: 55 n. 56f., where we nd a cognate of Ugaritic mhmrt with the same signicance in Ps. 140.11 (cf. Gordon UT 67 I,7-8). 20. ‘ma¦tî (‘I stand’, or ‘have taken my stand’) is possibly a forensic term, indicating that Job has come to the bar and expects God to do likewise (e.g. Deut. 19.17; Ps. 109.6; Zech. 3.1). But it may also denote the attitude of prayer (Jer. 15.1); cf. Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the temple, standing before the altar with his open hands s