Job 31:11

31:11 For I would have committed ¹  a shameful act, ² 

an iniquity to be judged. ³ 

Job 32:8

32:8 But it is a spirit in people,

the breath ⁴  of the Almighty,

that makes them understand.

Job 5:27

5:27 Look, we have investigated this, so it is true.

Hear it, ⁵  and apply it for your own ⁶  good.” ⁷ 

Job 9:22

Accusation of God’s Justice

9:22 “It is all one! ⁸  That is why I say, ⁹ 

‘He destroys the blameless and the guilty.’

Job 28:14

28:14 The deep ¹⁰  says, ‘It is not with ¹¹  me.’

And the sea says, ‘It is not with me.’

Job 28:28

28:28 And he said to mankind,

‘The fear of the Lord ¹²  – that is wisdom,

and to turn away from evil is understanding.’” ¹³ 

Job 31:12

31:12 For it is a fire that devours even to Destruction, ¹⁴ 

and it would uproot ¹⁵  all my harvest.

[31:11]  ¹ tn Heb “for that [would be].” In order to clarify the referent of “that,” which refers to v. 9 rather than v. 10, the words “I have committed” have been supplied in the translation.

[31:11]  ² tn The word for “shameful act” is used especially for sexual offenses (cf. Lev 18:27).

[31:11]  ³ tc Some have deleted this verse as being short and irrelevant, not to mention problematic. But the difficulties are not insurmountable, and there is no reason to delete it. There is a Kethib-Qere reading in each half verse; in the first the Kethib is masculine for the subject but the Qere is feminine going with “shameless deed.” In the second colon the Kethib is the feminine agreeing with the preceding noun, but the Qere is masculine agreeing with “iniquity.”

[32:8]  ⁴ tn This is the word נְשָׁמָה (nÿshamah, “breath”); according to Gen 2:7 it was breathed into Adam to make him a living person (“soul”). With that divine impartation came this spiritual understanding. Some commentators identify the רוּחַ (ruakh) in the first line as the Spirit of God; this “breath” would then be the human spirit. Whether Elihu knew that much, however, is hard to prove.

[5:27]  ⁷ tn To make a better parallelism, some commentators have replaced the imperative with another finite verb, “we have found it.”

[5:27]  ⁸ tn The preposition with the suffix (referred to as the ethical dative) strengthens the imperative. An emphatic personal pronoun also precedes the imperative. The resulting force would be something like “and you had better apply it for your own good!”

[5:27]  ⁹ sn With this the speech by Eliphaz comes to a close. His two mistakes with it are: (1) that the tone was too cold and (2) the argument did not fit Job’s case (see further, A. B. Davidson, Job, 42).

[9:22]  ¹⁰ tc The LXX omits the phrase “It is all one.” Modern scholars either omit it or transpose it for clarity.

[9:22]  ¹¹ tn The relationships of these clauses is in some question. Some think that the poet has inverted the first two, and so they should read, “That is why I have said: ‘It is all one.’” Others would take the third clause to be what was said.

[28:14]  ¹³ sn The תְּהוֹם (tÿhom) is the “deep” of Gen 1:2, the abyss or primordial sea. It was always understood to be a place of darkness and danger. As remote as it is, it asserts that wisdom is not found there (personification). So here we have the abyss and the sea, then death and destruction – but they are not the places that wisdom resides.

[28:14]  ¹⁴ tn The בּ (bet) preposition is taken here to mean “with” in the light of the parallel preposition.

[28:28]  ¹⁶ tc A number of medieval Hebrew manuscripts have YHWH (“Lord”); BHS has אֲדֹנָי (’adonay, “Lord”). As J. E. Hartley (Job [NICOT], 383) points out, this is the only occurrence of אֲדֹנָי (’adonay, “Lord”) in the book of Job, creating doubt for retaining it. Normally, YHWH is avoided in the book. “Fear of” (יִרְאַת, yir’at) is followed by שַׁדַּי (shadday, “Almighty”) in 6:14 – the only other occurrence of this term for “fear” in construct with a divine title.

[28:28]  ¹⁷ tc Many commentators delete this verse because (1) many read the divine name Yahweh (translated “Lord”) here, and (2) it is not consistent with the argument that precedes it. But as H. H. Rowley (Job [NCBC], 185) points out, there is inconsistency in this reasoning, for many of the critics have already said that this chapter is an interpolation. Following that line of thought, then, one would not expect it to conform to the rest of the book in this matter of the divine name. And concerning the second difficulty, the point of this chapter is that wisdom is beyond human comprehension and control. It belongs to God alone. So the conclusion that the fear of the Lord is wisdom is the necessary conclusion. Rowley concludes: “It is a pity to rob the poem of its climax and turn it into the expression of unrelieved agnosticism.”

[31:12]  ¹⁹ tn Heb “to Abaddon.”

[31:12]  ²⁰ tn The verb means “to root out,” but this does not fit the parallelism with fire. Wright changed two letters and the vowels in the verb to get the root צָרַף (tsaraf, “to burn”). The NRSV has “burn to the root.”