Job 18:12-13

18:12 Calamity is ¹  hungry for him, ² 

and misfortune is ready at his side. ³ 

18:13 It eats away parts of his skin; ⁴ 

the most terrible death ⁵  devours his limbs.

Zechariah 5:4

5:4 “I will send it out,” says the Lord who rules over all, “and it will enter the house of the thief and of the person who swears falsely in my name. It will land in the middle of his house and destroy both timber and stones.”

[18:12]  ¹ tn The jussive is occasionally used without its normal sense and only as an imperfect (see GKC 323 §109.k).

[18:12]  ² tn There are a number of suggestions for אֹנוֹ (’ono). Some take it as “vigor”: thus “his strength is hungry.” Others take it as “iniquity”: thus “his iniquity/trouble is hungry.”

[18:12]  ³ tn The expression means that misfortune is right there to destroy him whenever there is the opportunity.

[18:13]  ⁴ tn The expression “the limbs of his skin” makes no sense, unless a poetic meaning of “parts” (or perhaps “layers”) is taken. The parallelism has “his skin” in the first colon, and “his limbs” in the second. One plausible suggestion is to take בַּדֵּי (badde, “limbs of”) in the first part to be בִּדְוָי (bidvay, “by a disease”; Dhorme, Wright, RSV). The verb has to be made passive, however. The versions have different things: The LXX has “let the branches of his feet be eaten”; the Syriac has “his cities will be swallowed up by force”; the Vulgate reads “let it devour the beauty of his skin”; and Targum Job has “it will devour the linen garments that cover his skin.”

[18:13]  ⁵ tn The “firstborn of death” is the strongest child of death (Gen 49:3), or the deadliest death (like the “firstborn of the poor, the poorest). The phrase means the most terrible death (A. B. Davidson, Job, 134).