12:7 “But now, ask the animals and they 2 will teach you,
or the birds of the sky and they will tell you.
24:13 There are those 3 who rebel against the light;
they do not know its ways
and they do not stay on its paths.
24:16 In the dark the robber 4 breaks into houses, 5
but by day they shut themselves in; 6
they do not know the light. 7
29:24 If I smiled at them, they hardly believed it; 8
and they did not cause the light of my face to darken. 9
34:20 In a moment they die, in the middle of the night, 10
people 11 are shaken 12 and they pass away.
The mighty are removed effortlessly. 13
1 sn As J. E. Hartley (Job [NICOT], 216) observes, in this section Job argues that respected tradition “must not be accepted uncritically.”
2 tn The singular verb is used here with the plural collective subject (see GKC 464 §145.k).
3 tn Heb “They are among those who.”
4 tn The phrase “the robber” has been supplied in the English translation for clarification.
5 tc This is not the idea of the adulterer, but of the thief. So some commentators reverse the order and put this verse after v. 14.
6 tc The verb חִתְּמוּ (khittÿmu) is the Piel from the verb חָתַם (khatam, “to seal”). The verb is now in the plural, covering all the groups mentioned that work under the cover of darkness. The suggestion that they “seal,” i.e., “mark” the house they will rob, goes against the meaning of the word “seal.”
7 tc Some commentators join this very short colon to the beginning of v. 17: “they do not know the light. For together…” becomes “for together they have not known the light.”
8 tn The connection of this clause with the verse is difficult. The line simply reads: “[if] I would smile at them, they would not believe.” Obviously something has to be supplied to make sense out of this. The view adopted here makes the most sense, namely, that when he smiled at people, they could hardly believe their good fortune. Other interpretations are strained, such as Kissane’s, “If I laughed at them, they believed not,” meaning, people rejected the views that Job laughed at.
9 tn The meaning, according to Gordis, is that they did nothing to provoke Job’s displeasure.
10 tn Dhorme transposes “in the middle of the night” with “they pass away” to get a smoother reading. But the MT emphasizes the suddenness by putting both temporal ideas first. E. F. Sutcliffe leaves the order as it stands in the text, but adds a verb “they expire” after “in the middle of the night” (“Notes on Job, textual and exegetical,” Bib 30 [1949]: 79ff.).
11 tn R. Gordis (Job, 389) thinks “people” here mean the people who count, the upper class.
12 tn The verb means “to be violently agitated.” There is no problem with the word in this context, but commentators have made suggestions for improving the idea. The proposal that has the most to commend it, if one were inclined to choose a new word, is the change to יִגְוָעוּ (yigva’u, “they expire”; so Ball, Holscher, Fohrer, and others).
13 tn Heb “not by hand.” This means without having to use force.