4:7 Call to mind now: 1
Who, 2 being innocent, ever perished? 3
And where were upright people 4 ever destroyed? 5
7:7 Remember 6 that my life is but a breath,
that 7 my eyes will never again 8 see happiness.
14:13 “O that 9 you would hide me in Sheol, 10
and conceal me till your anger has passed! 11
O that you would set me a time 12
and then remember me! 13
24:20 The womb 14 forgets him,
the worm feasts on him,
no longer will he be remembered.
Like a tree, wickedness will be broken down.
1 sn Eliphaz will put his thesis forward first negatively and then positively (vv. 8ff). He will argue that the suffering of the righteous is disciplinary and not for their destruction. He next will argue that it is the wicked who deserve judgment.
2 tn The use of the independent personal pronoun is emphatic, almost as an enclitic to emphasize interrogatives: “who indeed….” (GKC 442 §136.c).
3 tn The perfect verb in this line has the nuance of the past tense to express the unique past – the uniqueness of the action is expressed with “ever” (“who has ever perished”).
4 tn The adjective is used here substantivally. Without the article the word stresses the meaning of “uprightness.” Job will use “innocent” and “upright” together in 17:8.
5 tn The Niphal means “to be hidden” (see the Piel in 6:10; 15:18; and 27:11); the connotation here is “destroyed” or “annihilated.”
6 sn Job is probably turning here to God, as is clear from v. 11 on. The NIV supplies the word “God” for clarification. It was God who breathed breath into man’s nostrils (Gen 2:7), and so God is called to remember that man is but a breath.
7 tn The word “that” is supplied in the translation.
8 tn The verb with the infinitive serves as a verbal hendiadys: “return to see” means “see again.”
11 tn The optative mood is introduced here again with מִי יִתֵּן (mi yitten), literally, “who will give?”
12 sn Sheol in the Bible refers to the place where the dead go. But it can have different categories of meaning: death in general, the grave, or the realm of the departed spirits [hell]. A. Heidel shows that in the Bible when hell is in view the righteous are not there – it is the realm of the departed spirits of the wicked. When the righteous go to Sheol, the meaning is usually the grave or death. See chapter 3 in A. Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and the Old Testament Parallels.
13 tn The construction used here is the preposition followed by the infinitive construct followed by the subjective genitive, forming an adverbial clause of time.
14 tn This is the same word used in v. 5 for “limit.”
15 tn The verb זָכַר (zakhar) means more than simply “to remember.” In many cases, including this one, it means “to act on what is remembered,” i.e., deliver or rescue (see Gen 8:1, “and God remembered Noah”). In this sense, a prayer “remember me” is a prayer for God to act upon his covenant promises.
16 tn Here “womb” is synecdoche, representing one’s mother.