Job 2:1-2

Satan’s Additional Charge

2:1 Again the day came when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also arrived among them to present himself before the Lord. ¹  2:2 And the Lord said to Satan, “Where do you come from?” Satan answered the Lord, ²  “From roving about on the earth, and from walking back and forth across it.” ³ 

Job 42:9-10

42:9 So they went, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite, and did just as the Lord had told them; and the Lord had respect for Job. ⁴ 

42:10 So the Lord ⁵  restored what Job had lost ⁶  after he prayed for his friends, ⁷  and the Lord doubled ⁸  all that had belonged to Job.

¹ tc This last purpose clause has been omitted in some Greek versions.

² tn Heb “answered the Lord and said” (also in v. 4). The words “and said” here and in v. 9 have not been included in the translation for stylistic reasons.

³ tn See the note on this phrase in 1:7.

³ tn The expression “had respect for Job” means God answered his prayer.

⁴ tn The paragraph begins with the disjunctive vav, “Now as for the Lord, he….”

⁵ sn The expression here is interesting: “he returned the captivity of Job,” a clause used elsewhere in the Bible of Israel (see e.g., Ps 126). Here it must mean “the fortunes of Job,” i.e., what he had lost. There is a good deal of literature on this; for example, see R. Borger, “Zu sub sb(i)t,” ZAW 25 (1954): 315-16; and E. Baumann, ZAW 6 (1929): 17ff.

⁶ tn This is a temporal clause, using the infinitive construct with the subject genitive suffix. By this it seems that this act of Job was also something of a prerequisite for restoration – to pray for them.

⁷ tn The construction uses the verb “and he added” with the word “repeat” (or “twice”).