30:22 You pick me up on the wind and make me ride on it; 1
you toss me about 2 in the storm. 3
30:2 Moreover, the strength of their 4 hands –
what use was it to me?
Men whose strength 5 had perished;
3:11 “Why did I not 7 die 8 at birth, 9
and why did I not expire
as 10 I came out of the womb?
1 sn Here Job changes the metaphor again, to the driving storm. God has sent his storms, and Job is blown away.
2 tn The verb means “to melt.” The imagery would suggest softening the ground with the showers (see Ps 65:10 [11]). The translation “toss…about” comes from the Arabic cognate that is used for the surging of the sea.
3 tc The Qere is תּוּשִׁיָּה (tushiyyah, “counsel”), which makes no sense here. The Kethib is a variant orthography for תְּשֻׁאָה (tÿshu’ah, “storm”).
4 tn The reference is to the fathers of the scorners, who are here regarded as weak and worthless.
5 tn The word כֶּלַח (kelakh) only occurs in Job 5:26; but the Arabic cognate gives this meaning “strength.” Others suggest כָּלַח (kalakh, “old age”), ֹכּל־חַיִל (kol-khayil, “all vigor”), כֹּל־לֵחַ (kol-leakh, “all freshness”), and the like. But there is no reason for such emendation.
6 sn Job follows his initial cry with a series of rhetorical questions. His argument runs along these lines: since he was born (v. 10), the next chance he had of escaping this life of misery would have been to be still born (vv. 11-12, 16). In vv. 13-19 Job considers death as falling into a peaceful sleep in a place where there is no trouble. The high frequency of rhetorical questions in series is a characteristic of the Book of Job that sets it off from all other portions of the OT. The effect is primarily dramatic, creating a tension that requires resolution. See W. Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry, 340-41.
7 tn The negative only occurs with the first clause, but it extends its influence to the parallel second clause (GKC 483 §152.z).
8 tn The two verbs in this verse are both prefix conjugations; they are clearly referring to the past and should be classified as preterites. E. Dhorme (Job, 32) notes that the verb “I came out” is in the perfect to mark its priority in time in relation to the other verbs.
9 tn The translation “at birth” is very smooth, but catches the meaning and avoids the tautology in the verse. The line literally reads “from the womb.” The second half of the verse has the verb “I came out/forth” which does double duty for both parallel lines. The second half uses “belly” for the womb.
10 tn The two halves of the verse use the prepositional phrases (“from the womb” and “from the belly I went out”) in the temporal sense of “on emerging from the womb.”