Text -- Job 34:20 (NET)

34:20 In a moment they die, in the middle of the night, people are shaken and they pass away. The mighty are removed effortlessly.

Commentary -- Verse Notes / Footnotes

NET Notes: Job 34:20

¹ tn Dhorme transposes “in the middle of the night” with “they pass away” to get a smoother reading. But the MT emphasizes the suddenness by putting both temporal ideas first. E. F. Sutcliffe leaves the order as it stands in the text, but adds a verb “they expire” after “in the middle of the night” (“Notes on Job, textual and exegetical,” Bib 30 [1949]: 79ff.).

² tn R. Gordis (Job, 389) thinks “people” here mean the people who count, the upper class.

³ tn The verb means “to be violently agitated.” There is no problem with the word in this context, but commentators have made suggestions for improving the idea. The proposal that has the most to commend it, if one were inclined to choose a new word, is the change to יִגְוָעוּ (yigva’u, “they expire”; so Ball, Holscher, Fohrer, and others).

⁴ tn Heb “not by hand.” This means without having to use force.