Job 16:2

16:2 “I have heard many things like these before.

What miserable comforters ¹  are you all!

Job 19:21-22

19:21 Have pity on me, my friends, have pity on me,

for the hand of God has struck me.

19:22 Why do you pursue me like God does? ² 

Will you never be satiated with my flesh? ³ 

Matthew 26:56

26:56 But this has happened so that ⁴  the scriptures of the prophets would be fulfilled.” Then all the disciples left him and fled.

¹ tn The expression uses the Piel participle in construct: מְנַחֲמֵי עָמָל (mÿnahame ’amal, “comforters of trouble”), i.e., comforters who increase trouble instead of relieving it. D. W. Thomas translates this “breathers out of trouble” (“A Note on the Hebrew Root naham,” ExpTim 44 [1932/33]: 192).

² sn Strahan comments, “The whole tragedy of the book is packed into these extraordinary words.”

³ sn The idiom of eating the pieces of someone means “slander” in Aramaic (see Dan 3:8), Arabic and Akkadian.

⁴ tn Grk “But so that”; the verb “has happened” is implied.