16:18 “O earth, do not cover my blood, 1
nor let there be a secret 2 place for my cry.
16:19 Even now my witness 3 is in heaven;
my advocate 4 is on high.
1 sn Job knows that he will die, and that his death, signified here by blood on the ground, will cry out for vindication.
2 tn The word is simply “a place,” but in the context it surely means a hidden place, a secret place that would never be discovered (see 18:21).
3 sn The witness in heaven must be God, to whom the cries and prayers come. Job’s dilemma is serious, but common to the human experience: the hostility of God toward him is baffling, but he is conscious of his innocence and can call on God to be his witness.
4 tn The parallelism now uses the Aramaic word “my advocate” – the one who testifies on my behalf. The word again appears in Gen 31:47 for Laban’s naming of the “heap of witness” in Aramaic – “Sahadutha.”