Job 7:5

7:5 My body ¹  is clothed ²  with worms ³  and dirty scabs; ⁴ 

my skin is broken ⁵  and festering.

Job 13:28

13:28 So I ⁶  waste away like something rotten, ⁷ 

like a garment eaten by moths.

Job 14:20

14:20 You overpower him once for all, ⁸ 

and he departs;

you change ⁹  his appearance

and send him away.

Job 14:22

14:22 Only his flesh has pain for himself, ¹⁰ 

and he mourns for himself.” ¹¹ 

Job 19:20

19:20 My bones stick to my skin and my flesh; ¹² 

I have escaped ¹³  alive ¹⁴  with only the skin of my teeth.

Psalms 32:3-4

32:3 When I refused to confess my sin, ¹⁵ 

my whole body wasted away, ¹⁶ 

while I groaned in pain all day long.

32:4 For day and night you tormented me; ¹⁷ 

you tried to destroy me ¹⁸  in the intense heat ¹⁹  of summer. ²⁰  (Selah)

Psalms 39:11

39:11 You severely discipline people for their sins; ²¹ 

like a moth you slowly devour their strength. ²² 

Surely all people are a mere vapor. (Selah)

Psalms 102:3-5

102:3 For my days go up in smoke, ²³ 

and my bones are charred like a fireplace. ²⁴ 

102:4 My heart is parched ²⁵  and withered like grass,

for I am unable ²⁶  to eat food. ²⁷ 

102:5 Because of the anxiety that makes me groan,

my bones protrude from my skin. ²⁸ 

Proverbs 5:11

5:11 And at the end of your life ²⁹  you will groan ³⁰ 

when your flesh and your body are wasted away. ³¹ 

[7:5]  ¹ tn Heb “my flesh.”

[7:5]  ² tn The implied comparison is vivid: the dirty scabs cover his entire body like a garment – so he is clothed with them.

[7:5]  ³ sn The word for “worms” (רִמָּה, rimmah, a collective noun), is usually connected with rotten food (Exod 16:24), or the grave (Isa 14:11). Job’s disease is a malignant ulcer of some kind that causes the rotting of the flesh. One may recall that both Antiochus Epiphanes (2 Macc 9:9) and Herod Agrippa (Acts 12:23) were devoured by such worms in their diseases.

[7:5]  ⁴ tn The text has “clods of dust.” The word גִּישׁ (gish, “dirty scabs”) is a hapax legomenon from גּוּשׁ (gush, “clod”). Driver suggests the word has a medical sense, like “pustules” (G. R. Driver, “Problems in the Hebrew text of Job,” VTSup 3 [1955]: 73) or “scabs” (JB, NEB, NAB, NIV). Driver thinks “clods of dust” is wrong; he repoints “dust” to make a new verb “to cover,” cognate to Arabic, and reads “my flesh is clothed with worms, and scab covers my skin.” This refers to the dirty scabs that crusted over the sores all over his body. The LXX links this with the second half of the verse: “And my body has been covered with loathsome worms, and I waste away, scraping off clods of dirt from my eruption.”

[7:5]  ⁵ tn The meaning of רָגַע (raga’) is also debated here. D. J. A. Clines (Job [WBC], 163) does not think the word can mean “cracked” because scabs show evidence of the sores healing. But E. Dhorme (Job, 100) argues that the usage of the word shows the idea of “splitting, separating, making a break,” or the like. Here then it would mean “my skin splits” and as a result festers. This need not be a reference to the scabs, but to new places. Or it could mean that the scabbing never heals, but is always splitting open.

[13:28]  ⁶ tn Heb “and he.” Some of the commentators move the verse and put it after Job 14:2, 3 or 6.

[13:28]  ⁷ tn The word רָקָב (raqav) is used elsewhere in the Bible of dry rot in a house, or rotting bones in a grave. It is used in parallelism with “moth” both here and in Hos 5:12. The LXX has “like a wineskin.” This would be from רֹקֶב (roqev, “wineskin”). This word does not occur in the Hebrew Bible, but is attested in Sir 43:20 and in Aramaic. The change is not necessary.

[14:20]  ⁸ tn D. W. Thomas took נֵצַח (netsakh) here to have a superlative meaning: “You prevail utterly against him” (“Use of netsach as a superlative in Hebrew,” JSS 1 [1956]: 107). Death would be God’s complete victory over him.

[14:20]  ⁹ tn The subject of the participle is most likely God in this context. Some take it to be man, saying “his face changes.” Others emend the text to read an imperfect verb, but this is not necessary.

[14:22]  ¹⁰ tn The prepositional phrases using עָלָיו (’alayv, “for him[self]”) express the object of the suffering. It is for himself that the dead man “grieves.” So this has to be joined with אַךְ (’akh), yielding “only for himself.” Then, “flesh” and “soul/person” form the parallelism for the subjects of the verbs.

[14:22]  ¹¹ sn In this verse Job is expressing the common view of life beyond death, namely, that in Sheol there is no contact with the living, only separation, but in Sheol there is a conscious awareness of the dreary existence.

[19:20]  ¹² tn The meaning would be “I am nothing but skin and bones” in current English idiom. Both lines of this verse need attention. The first half seems to say, “My skin and my flesh sticks to my bones.” Some think that this is too long, and that the bones can stick to the skin, or the flesh, but not both. Dhorme proposes “in my skin my flesh has rotted away” (רָקַב, raqav). This involves several changes in the line, however. He then changes the second line to read “and I have gnawed my bone with my teeth” (transferring “bone” from the first half and omitting “skin”). There are numerous other renderings of this; some of the more notable are: “I escape, my bones in my teeth” (Merx); “my teeth fall out” (Duhm); “my teeth fall from my gums” (Pope); “my bones protrude in sharp points” (Kissane). A. B. Davidson retains “the skin of my teeth,” meaning “gums. This is about the last thing that Job has, or he would not be able to speak. For a detailed study of this verse, D. J. A. Clines devotes two full pages of textual notes (Job [WBC], 430-31). He concludes with “My bones hang from my skin and my flesh, I am left with only the skin of my teeth.”

[19:20]  ¹³ tn Or “I am left.”

[19:20]  ¹⁴ tn The word “alive” is not in the Hebrew text, but is supplied in the translation for clarity.

[32:3]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “when I was silent.”

[32:3]  ¹⁶ tn Heb “my bones became brittle.” The psalmist pictures himself as aging and growing physically weak. Trying to cover up his sin brought severe physical consequences.

[32:4]  ¹⁷ tn Heb “your hand was heavy upon me.”

[32:4]  ¹⁸ tc Heb “my [?] was turned.” The meaning of the Hebrew term לְשַׁד (lÿshad) is uncertain. A noun לָשָׁד (lashad, “cake”) is attested in Num 11:8, but it would make no sense to understand that word in this context. It is better to emend the form to לְשֻׁדִּי (lÿshuddiy, “to my destruction”) and understand “your hand” as the subject of the verb “was turned.” In this case the text reads, “[your hand] was turned to my destruction.” In Lam 3:3 the author laments that God’s “hand” was “turned” (הָפַךְ, hafakh) against him in a hostile sense.

[32:4]  ¹⁹ tn The translation assumes that the plural form indicates degree. If one understands the form as a true plural, then one might translate, “in the times of drought.”

[32:4]  ²⁰ sn Summer. Perhaps the psalmist suffered during the hot season and perceived the very weather as being an instrument of divine judgment. Another option is that he compares his time of suffering to the uncomfortable and oppressive heat of summer.

[39:11]  ²¹ tn “with punishments on account of sin you discipline a man.”

[39:11]  ²² tc Heb “you cause to dissolve, like a moth, his desired [thing].” The translation assumes an emendation of חֲמוּדוֹ (khamudo, “his desirable [thing]”) to חֶמְדוֹ (khemdo, “his loveliness” [or “beauty”]), a reading that is supported by a few medieval Hebrew mss.

[102:3]  ²³ tn Heb “for my days come to an end in smoke.”

[102:3]  ²⁴ tn The Hebrew noun מוֹ־קֵד (mo-qed, “fireplace”) occurs only here, in Isa 33:14 (where it refers to the fire itself), and perhaps in Lev 6:2.

[102:4]  ²⁵ tn Heb “struck, attacked.”

[102:4]  ²⁶ tn Heb “I forget.”

[102:4]  ²⁷ sn I am unable to eat food. During his time of mourning, the psalmist refrained from eating. In the following verse he describes metaphorically the physical effects of fasting.

[102:5]  ²⁸ tn Heb “from the sound of my groaning my bone[s] stick to my flesh.” The preposition at the beginning of the verse is causal; the phrase “sound of my groaning” is metonymic for the anxiety that causes the groaning. The point seems to be this: Anxiety (which causes the psalmist to groan) keeps him from eating (v. 4). This physical deprivation in turn makes him emaciated – he is turned to “skin and bones,” so to speak.

[5:11]  ²⁹ tn Heb “at your end.”

[5:11]  ³⁰ tn The form is the perfect tense with the vav consecutive; it is equal to a specific future within this context.

[5:11]  ³¹ tn Heb “in the finishing of your flesh and your body.” The construction uses the Qal infinitive construct of כָּלָה (calah) in a temporal clause; the verb means “be complete, at an end, finished, spent.”