Job 22:15-18

22:15 Will you keep to the old path ¹ 

that evil men have walked –

22:16 men ²  who were carried off ³  before their time, ⁴ 

when the flood ⁵  was poured out ⁶ 

on their foundations? ⁷ 

22:17 They were saying to God, ‘Turn away from us,’

and ‘What can the Almighty do to us?’ ⁸ 

22:18 But it was he ⁹  who filled their houses

with good things –

yet the counsel of the wicked ¹⁰ 

was far from me. ¹¹ 

[22:15]  ¹ tn The “old path” here is the way of defiance to God. The text in these two verses is no doubt making reference to the flood in Genesis, one of the perennial examples of divine judgment.

[22:16]  ² tn The word “men” is not in the Hebrew text, but has been supplied to clarify the relative pronoun “who.”

[22:16]  ³ tn The verb קָמַט (qamat) basically means “to seize; to tie together to make a bundle.” So the Pual will mean “to be bundled away; to be carried off.”

[22:16]  ⁴ tn The clause has “and [it was] not the time.” It may be used adverbially here.

[22:16]  ⁵ tn The word is נָהַר (nahar, “river” or “current”); it is taken here in its broadest sense of the waters on the earth that formed the current of the flood (Gen 7:6, 10).

[22:16]  ⁶ tn The verb יָצַק (yatsaq) means “to pour out; to shed; to spill; to flow.” The Pual means “to be poured out” (as in Lev 21:10 and Ps 45:3).

[22:16]  ⁷ tn This word is then to be taken as an adverbial accusative of place. Another way to look at this verse is what A. B. Davidson (Job, 165) proposes “whose foundation was poured away and became a flood.” This would mean that that on which they stood sank away.

[22:17]  ⁸ tn The form in the text is “to them.” The LXX and the Syriac versions have “to us.”

[22:18]  ⁹ tn The pronoun is added for this emphasis; it has “but he” before the verb.

[22:18]  ¹⁰ tn See Job 10:3.

[22:18]  ¹¹ tc The LXX has “from him,” and this is followed by several commentators. But the MT is to be retained, for Eliphaz is recalling the words of Job. Verses 17 and 18 are deleted by a number of commentators as a gloss because they have many similarities to 21:14-16. But Eliphaz is recalling what Job said, in order to say that the prosperity to which Job alluded was only the prelude to a disaster he denied (H. H. Rowley, Job [NCBC], 156).