Psalms 22:2

22:2 My God, I cry out during the day,

but you do not answer,

and during the night my prayers do not let up. ¹ 

Psalms 77:4

77:4 You held my eyelids open; ² 

I was troubled and could not speak. ³ 

Psalms 130:6

130:6 I yearn for the Lord, ⁴ 

more than watchmen do for the morning,

yes, more than watchmen do for the morning. ⁵ 

Deuteronomy 28:66-67

28:66 Your life will hang in doubt before you; you will be terrified by night and day and will have no certainty of surviving from one day to the next. ⁶  28:67 In the morning you will say, ‘If only it were evening!’ And in the evening you will say, ‘I wish it were morning!’ because of the things you will fear and the things you will see.

Job 7:13-16

7:13 If ⁷  I say, ⁸  “My bed will comfort me, ⁹ 

my couch will ease ¹⁰  my complaint,”

7:14 then you scare me ¹¹  with dreams

and terrify ¹²  me with ¹³  visions,

7:15 so that I ¹⁴  would prefer ¹⁵  strangling, ¹⁶ 

and ¹⁷  death ¹⁸  more ¹⁹  than life. ²⁰ 

7:16 I loathe ²¹  it; ²²  I do not want to live forever;

leave me alone, ²³  for my days are a vapor! ²⁴ 

Mark 14:33-37

14:33 He took Peter, James, ²⁵  and John with him, and became very troubled and distressed. 14:34 He said to them, “My soul is deeply grieved, even to the point of death. Remain here and stay alert.” 14:35 Going a little farther, he threw himself to the ground and prayed that if it were possible the hour would pass from him. 14:36 He said, “Abba, ²⁶  Father, all things are possible for you. Take this cup ²⁷  away from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” 14:37 Then ²⁸  he came and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, “Simon, are you sleeping? Couldn’t you stay awake for one hour?

[22:2]  ¹ tn Heb “there is no silence to me.”

[77:4]  ² tn Heb “you held fast the guards of my eyes.” The “guards of the eyes” apparently refers to his eyelids. The psalmist seems to be saying that God would not bring him relief, which would have allowed him to shut his eyes and get some sleep (see v. 2).

[77:4]  ³ tn The imperfect is used in the second clause to emphasize that this was an ongoing condition in the past.

[130:6]  ⁴ tn Heb “my soul for the master.”

[130:6]  ⁵ tn Heb “more than watchmen for the morning, watchmen for the morning.” The words “yes, more” are supplied in the translation for stylistic reasons.

[28:66]  ⁶ tn Heb “you will not be confident in your life.” The phrase “from one day to the next” is implied by the following verse.

[7:13]  ⁷ tn The particle כִּי (ki) could also be translated “when,” but “if” might work better to introduce the conditional clause and to parallel the earlier reasoning of Job in v. 4 (using אִם, ’im). See GKC 336-37 §112.hh.

[7:13]  ⁸ tn The verb literally means “say,” but here the connotation must be “think” or “say to oneself” – “when I think my bed….”

[7:13]  ⁹ sn Sleep is the recourse of the troubled and unhappy. Here “bed” is metonymical for sleep. Job expects sleep to give him the comfort that his friends have not.

[7:13]  ¹⁰ tn The verb means “to lift up; to take away” (נָשָׂא, nasa’). When followed by the preposition בּ (bet) with the complement of the verb, the idea is “to bear a part; to take a share,” or “to share in the burden” (cf. Num 11:7). The idea then would be that the sleep would ease the complaint. It would not end the illness, but the complaining for a while.

[7:14]  ¹¹ tn The Piel of חָתַת (khatat) occurs only here and in Jer 51:56 (where it is doubtful). The meaning is clearly “startle, scare.” The perfect verb with the ו (vav) is fitting in the apodosis of the conditional sentence.

[7:14]  ¹² tn The Piel of בָּעַת (ba’at, “terrify”) is one of the characteristic words in the book of Job; it occurs in 3:5; 9:34; 13:11, 21; 15:24; 18:11; and 33:7.

[7:14]  ¹³ tn The prepositions בּ (bet) and מִן (min) interchange here; they express the instrument of causality. See N. Sarna, “The Interchange of the Prepositions bet and min in Biblical Hebrew,” JBL 78 (1959): 310-16. Emphasis on the instruments of terror in this verse is highlighted by the use of chiasm in which the prepositional phrases comprise the central elements (ab//b’a’). Verse 18 contains another example.

[7:15]  ¹⁴ tn The word נֶפֶשׁ (nefesh) is often translated “soul.” But since Hebrew thought does not make such a distinction between body and soul, it is usually better to translate it with “person.” When a suffix is added to the word, then that pronoun would serve as the better translation, as here with “my soul” = “I” (meaning with every fiber of my being).

[7:15]  ¹⁵ tn The verb בָּחַר (bakhar, “choose”) followed by the preposition בּ (bet) can have the sense of “prefer.”

[7:15]  ¹⁶ tn The meaning of the term מַחֲנָק (makhanaq, “strangling”), a hapax legomenon, is clear enough; the verb חָנַק (khanaq) in the Piel means “to strangle” (Nah 2:13), and in the Niphal “to strangle oneself” (2 Sam 17:23). This word has tempted some commentators to take נֶפֶשׁ (nefesh) in a very restricted sense of “throat.”

[7:15]  ¹⁷ tn The conjunction “and” is supplied in the translation. “Death” could also be taken in apposition to “strangling,” providing the outcome of the strangling.

[7:15]  ¹⁸ tn This is one of the few words recognizable in the LXX: “You will separate life from my spirit, and yet keep my bones from death.”

[7:15]  ¹⁹ tn The comparative min (מִן) after the verb “choose” will here have the idea of preferring something before another (see GKC 429-30 §133.b).

[7:15]  ²⁰ tn The word מֵעַצְמוֹתָי (me’atsmotay) means “more than my bones” (= life or being). The line is poetic; “bones” is often used in scripture metonymically for the whole living person, so there is no need here for conjectural emendation. Nevertheless, there have been several suggestions made. The simplest and most appealing for those who desire a change is the repointing to מֵעַצְּבוֹתָי (me’atsÿvotay, “my sufferings,” adopted by NAB, JB, Moffatt, Driver-Gray, E. Dhorme, H. H. Rowley, and others). Driver obtains this idea by positing a new word based on Arabic without changing the letters; it means “great” – but he has to supply the word “sufferings.”

[7:16]  ²¹ tn E. Dhorme (Job, 107-8) thinks the idea of loathing or despising is problematic since there is no immediate object. He notes that the verb מָאַס (ma’as, “loathe”) is parallel to מָסַס (masas, “melt”) in the sense of “flow, drip” (Job 42:6). This would give the idea “I am fading away” or “I grow weaker,” or as Dhorme chooses, “I am pining away.”

[7:16]  ²² tn There is no object for the verb in the text. But the most likely object would be “my life” from the last verse, especially since in this verse Job will talk about not living forever. Some have thought the object should be “death,” meaning that Job despised death more than the pains. But that is a forced meaning; besides, as H. H. Rowley points out, the word here means to despise something, to reject it. Job wanted death.

[7:16]  ²³ tn Heb “cease from me.” This construction means essentially “leave me in peace.”

[7:16]  ²⁴ tn This word הֶבֶל (hevel) is difficult to translate. It means “breath; puff of air; vapor” and then figuratively, “vanity.” Job is saying that his life is but a breath – it is brief and fleeting. Compare Ps 144:4 for a similar idea.

[14:33]  ²⁵ tn Grk “and James,” but καί (kai) has not been translated since English normally uses a coordinating conjunction only between the last two elements in a series of three or more.

[14:36]  ²⁶ tn The word means “Father” in Aramaic.

[14:36]  ²⁷ sn This cup alludes to the wrath of God that Jesus would experience (in the form of suffering and death) for us. See Ps 11:6; 75:8-9; Isa 51:17, 19, 22 for this figure.

[14:37]  ²⁸ tn Here καί (kai) has been translated as “then” to indicate the implied sequence of events within the narrative.