Job 4:7

4:7 Call to mind now: ¹ 

Who, ²  being innocent, ever perished? ³ 

And where were upright people ⁴  ever destroyed? ⁵ 

Job 8:20

8:20 “Surely, God does not reject a blameless man, ⁶ 

nor does he grasp the hand ⁷ 

of the evildoers.

Job 8:2

8:2 “How long will you speak these things, ⁸ 

seeing ⁹  that the words of your mouth

are like a great ¹⁰  wind? ¹¹ 

Job 14:15

14:15 You will call ¹²  and I ¹³  – I will answer you;

you will long for ¹⁴  the creature you have made. ¹⁵ 

Job 14:17

14:17 My offenses would be sealed up ¹⁶  in a bag; ¹⁷ 

you would cover over ¹⁸  my sin.

Psalms 44:22

44:22 Yet because of you ¹⁹  we are killed all day long;

we are treated like ²⁰  sheep at the slaughtering block. ²¹ 

Ezekiel 14:19-21

14:19 “Or suppose I were to send a plague into that land, and pour out my rage on it with bloodshed, killing both people and animals. 14:20 Even if Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, as surely as I live, declares the sovereign Lord, they could not save their own son or daughter; they would save only their own lives by their righteousness.

14:21 “For this is what the sovereign Lord says: How much worse will it be when I send my four terrible judgments – sword, famine, wild animals, and plague – to Jerusalem ²²  to kill both people and animals!

Ezekiel 21:13

21:13 “‘For testing will come, and what will happen when the scepter, which the sword despises, is no more? ²³  declares the sovereign Lord.’

Hebrews 11:36-37

11:36 And others experienced mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. 11:37 They were stoned, sawed apart, ²⁴  murdered with the sword; they went about in sheepskins and goatskins; they were destitute, afflicted, ill-treated

[4:7]  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.

[4:7]  ² tn The use of the independent personal pronoun is emphatic, almost as an enclitic to emphasize interrogatives: “who indeed….” (GKC 442 §136.c).

[4:7]  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”).

[4:7]  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.

[4:7]  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.”

[8:20]  ⁶ sn This is the description that the book gave to Job at the outset, a description that he deserved according to God’s revelation. The theme “God will not reject the blameless man” becomes Job’s main point (see 9:20,21; 10:3).

[8:20]  ⁷ sn The idiom “to grasp the hand” of someone means to support or help the person.

[8:2]  ⁸ sn “These things” refers to all of Job’s speech, the general drift of which seems to Bildad to question the justice of God.

[8:2]  ⁹ tn The second colon of the verse simply says “and a strong wind the words of your mouth.” The simplest way to treat this is to make it an independent nominal sentence: “the words of your mouth are a strong wind.” Some have made it parallel to the first by apposition, understanding “how long” to do double duty. The line beginning with the ו (vav) can also be subordinated as a circumstantial clause, as here.

[8:2]  ¹⁰ tn The word כַּבִּיר (kabbir, “great”) implies both abundance and greatness. Here the word modifies “wind”; the point of the analogy is that Job’s words are full of sound but without solid content.

[8:2]  ¹¹ tn See, however, G. R. Driver’s translation, “the breath of one who is mighty are the words of your mouth” (“Hebrew Studies,” JRAS 1948: 170).

[14:15]  ¹² sn The idea would be that God would sometime in the future call Job into his fellowship again when he longed for the work of his hands (cf. Job 10:3).

[14:15]  ¹³ tn The independent personal pronoun is emphatic, as if to say, “and I on my part will answer.”

[14:15]  ¹⁴ tn The word כָּסַף (kasaf) originally meant “to turn pale.” It expresses the sentiment that causes pallor of face, and so is used for desire ardently, covet. The object of the desire is always introduced with the ל (lamed) preposition (see E. Dhorme, Job, 202).

[14:15]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “long for the work of your hands.”

[14:17]  ¹⁶ tn The passive participle חָתֻם (khatum), from חָתַם (khatam, “seal”), which is used frequently in the Bible, means “sealed up.” The image of sealing sins in a bag is another of the many poetic ways of expressing the removal of sin from the individual (see 1 Sam 25:29). Since the term most frequently describes sealed documents, the idea here may be more that of sealing in a bag the record of Job’s sins (see D. J. A. Clines, Job [WBC], 334).

[14:17]  ¹⁷ tn The idea has been presented that the background of putting tally stones in a bag is intended (see A. L. Oppenheim, “On an Operational Device in Mesopotamian Bureaucracy,” JNES 18 [1959]: 121-28).

[14:17]  ¹⁸ tn This verb was used in Job 13:4 for “plasterers of lies.” The idea is probably that God coats or paints over the sins so that they are forgotten (see Isa 1:18). A. B. Davidson (Job, 105) suggests that the sins are preserved until full punishment is exacted. But the verse still seems to be continuing the thought of how the sins would be forgotten in the next life.

[44:22]  ¹⁹ tn The statement “because of you” (1) may simply indicate that God is the cause of the Israelites’ defeat (see vv. 9-14, where the nation’s situation is attributed directly to God’s activity, and cf. NEB, NRSV), or (2) it may suggest they suffer because of their allegiance to God (see Ps 69:7 and Jer 15:15). In this case one should translate, “for your sake” (cf. NASB, NIV). The citation of this verse in Rom 8:36 follows the LXX (Ps 43:23 LXX), where the Greek term ἕνεκεν (Jeneken; LXX ἕνεκα) may likewise mean “because of” or “for the sake of” (BDAG 334 s.v. ἕνεκα 1).

[44:22]  ²⁰ tn Or “regarded as.”

[44:22]  ²¹ tn Heb “like sheep of slaughtering,” that is, sheep destined for slaughter.

[14:21]  ²² map For location see Map5 B1; Map6 F3; Map7 E2; Map8 F2; Map10 B3; JP1 F4; JP2 F4; JP3 F4; JP4 F4.

[21:13]  ²³ tn Heb “For testing (will come) and what if also a scepter, it despises, will not be?” The translation understands the subject of the verb “despises,” which is a feminine form in the Hebrew text, to be the sword (which is a feminine noun) mentioned in the previous verses. The text is very difficult and any rendering is uncertain.

[11:37]  ²⁴ tc The reading ἐπρίσθησαν (ejprisqhsan, “they were sawed apart”) is found in some important witnesses (Ì⁴⁶ [D* twice reads ἐπίρσθησαν, “they were burned”?] pc sy^p sa Or^pt Eus). Other mss have ἐπειράσθησαν (ejpeirasqhsan, “they were tempted”), either before “sawed apart” ([א] L P [048] 33 81 326 1505 pc sy^h), after “sawed apart” (Ì^13vid A D¹ Ψ 1739 1881 Ï lat bo Or^pt), or altogether in place of “sawed apart” (0150 vg^mss Cl). Since the two words ἐπρίσθησαν and ἐπειράσθησαν are so much alike in sight and sound, and since the position of “they were tempted” varies in the mss, it seems best to say that ἐπειράσθησαν is an accidental corruption of ἐπρίσθησαν or an intentional change to a more common word (the root of ἐπρίσθησαν [πρίζω, prizw] occurs only here in the NT, while the root of ἐπειράσθησαν [πειράζω, peirazw] occurs 38 times). The best reading here seems to be “sawed apart” without any addition before or after. (See TCGNT 603-4, for a discussion of emendations that scholars have proposed for this difficult problem.)