16:19 Even now my witness 1 is in heaven;
my advocate 2 is on high.
22:12 “Is not God on high in heaven? 3
And see 4 the lofty stars, 5 how high they are!
41:11 (Who has confronted 6 me that I should repay? 7
Everything under heaven belongs to me!) 8
1 sn The witness in heaven must be God, to whom the cries and prayers come. Job’s dilemma is serious, but common to the human experience: the hostility of God toward him is baffling, but he is conscious of his innocence and can call on God to be his witness.
2 tn The parallelism now uses the Aramaic word “my advocate” – the one who testifies on my behalf. The word again appears in Gen 31:47 for Laban’s naming of the “heap of witness” in Aramaic – “Sahadutha.”
3 tn This reading preserves the text as it is. The nouns “high” and “heavens” would then be taken as adverbial accusatives of place (see GKC 373-74 §118.g).
4 tn The parallel passage in Isa 40:26-27, as well as the context here, shows that the imperative is to be retained here. The LXX has “he sees.”
5 tn Heb “head of the stars.”
6 tn The verb קָדַם (qadam) means “to come to meet; to come before; to confront” to the face.
7 sn The verse seems an intrusion (and so E. Dhorme, H. H. Rowley, and many others change the pronouns to make it refer to the animal). But what the text is saying is that it is more dangerous to confront God than to confront this animal.
8 tn This line also focuses on the sovereign God rather than Leviathan. H. H. Rowley, however, wants to change לִי־חוּא (li-hu’, “it [belongs] to me”) into לֹא הוּא (lo’ hu’, “there is no one”). So it would say that there is no one under the whole heaven who could challenge Leviathan and live, rather than saying it is more dangerous to challenge God to make him repay.