4:12 “Now a word was secretly 1 brought 2 to me,
and my ear caught 3 a whisper 4 of it.
5:27 Look, we have investigated this, so it is true.
Hear it, 5 and apply it for your own 6 good.” 7
8:15 He leans against his house but it does not hold up, 8
he takes hold 9 of it but it does not stand.
11:11 For he 10 knows deceitful 11 men;
when he sees evil, will he not 12 consider it? 13
27:22 It hurls itself against him without pity 14
as he flees headlong from its power.
34:9 For he says, ‘It does not profit a man
when he makes his delight with God.’ 15
41:12 I will not keep silent about its limbs,
and the extent of its might,
and the grace of its arrangement. 16
1 tn The LXX of this verse offers special problems. It reads, “But if there had been any truth in your words, none of these evils would have fallen upon you; shall not my ear receive excellent [information] from him?” The major error involves a dittography from the word for “secret,” yielding “truth.”
2 tn The verb גָּנַב (ganav) means “to steal.” The Pual form in this verse is probably to be taken as a preterite since it requires a past tense translation: “it was stolen for me” meaning it was brought to me stealthily (see 2 Sam 19:3).
3 tn Heb “received.”
4 tn The word שֵׁמֶץ (shemets, “whisper”) is found only here and in Job 26:14. A cognate form שִׁמְצָה (shimtsah) is found in Exod 32:25 with the sense of “a whisper.” In postbiblical Hebrew the word comes to mean “a little.” The point is that Eliphaz caught just a bit, just a whisper of it, and will recount it to Job.
5 tn To make a better parallelism, some commentators have replaced the imperative with another finite verb, “we have found it.”
6 tn The preposition with the suffix (referred to as the ethical dative) strengthens the imperative. An emphatic personal pronoun also precedes the imperative. The resulting force would be something like “and you had better apply it for your own good!”
7 sn With this the speech by Eliphaz comes to a close. His two mistakes with it are: (1) that the tone was too cold and (2) the argument did not fit Job’s case (see further, A. B. Davidson, Job, 42).
8 tn The verb עָמַד (’amad, “to stand”) is almost synonymous with the parallel קוּם (qum, “to rise; to stand”). The distinction is that the former means “to remain standing” (so it is translated here “hold up”), and the latter “rise, stand up.”
9 sn The idea is that he grabs hold of the house, not to hold it up, but to hold himself up or support himself. But it cannot support him. This idea applies to both the spider’s web and the false security of the pagan.
10 tn The pronoun is emphatic implying that Zophar indicates that God indeed knows Job’s sin even if Job does not.
11 tn The expression is literally “men of emptiness” (see Ps 26:4). These are false men, for שָׁוְא (shavÿ’) can mean “vain, empty, or false, deceitful.”
12 tn E. Dhorme (Job, 162) reads the prepositional phrase “to him” rather than the negative; he translates the line as “he sees iniquity and observes it closely.”
13 tn Some commentators do not take this last clause as a question, but simply as a statement, namely, that when God sees evil he does not need to ponder or consider it – he knows it instantly. In that case it would be a circumstantial clause: “without considering it.” D. J. A. Clines lists quite an array of other interpretations for the line (Job [WBC], 255); for example, “and he is himself unobserved”; taking the word לֹא (lo’) as an emphatic; taking the negative as a noun, “considering them as nothing”; and others that change the verb to “they do not understand it.” But none of these are compelling; they offer no major improvement.
14 tn The verb is once again functioning in an adverbial sense. The text has “it hurls itself against him and shows no mercy.”
15 tn Gordis, however, takes this expression in the sense of “being in favor with God.”
16 tn Dhorme changes the noun into a verb, “I will tell,” and the last two words into אֵין עֶרֶךְ (’en ’erekh, “there is no comparison”). The result is “I will tell of his incomparable might.”