19:24 that with an iron chisel and with lead 1
they were engraved in a rock forever!
28:2 Iron is taken from the ground, 2
and rock is poured out 3 as copper.
41:24 Its heart 4 is hard as rock,
hard as a lower millstone.
1 sn There is some question concerning the use of the lead. It surely cannot be a second description of the tool, for a lead tool would be of no use in chiseling words into a rock. It was Rashi’s idea, followed by Dillmann and Duhm, that lead was run into the cut-out letters. The suggestion that they wrote on lead tablets does not seem to fit the verse (cf. NIV). See further A. Baker, “The Strange Case of Job’s Chisel,” CBQ 31 (1969): 370-79.
2 tn Heb “from dust.”
3 tn The verb יָצוּק (yatsuq) is usually translated as a passive participle “is smelted” (from יָצַק [yatsaq, “to melt”]): “copper is smelted from the ore” (ESV) or “from the stone, copper is poured out” (as an imperfect from צוּק [tsuq]). But the rock becomes the metal in the process. So according to R. Gordis (Job, 304) the translation should be: “the rock is poured out as copper.” E. Dhorme (Job, 400), however, defines the form in the text as “hard,” and simply has it “hard stone becomes copper.”
4 tn The description of his heart being “hard” means that he is cruel and fearless. The word for “hard” is the word encountered before for molten or cast metal.