Discovery BoxJob 12:4 
Context12:4 I am 1 a laughingstock 2 to my friends, 3
I, who called on God and whom he answered 4 –
a righteous and blameless 5 man
is a laughingstock!
Job 32:3
Context32:3 With Job’s 6 three friends he was also angry, because they could not find 7 an answer, and so declared Job guilty. 8
Job 42:10
Context42:10 So the Lord 9 restored what Job had lost 10 after he prayed for his friends, 11 and the Lord doubled 12 all that had belonged to Job.
1 tn Some are troubled by the disharmony with “I am” and “to his friend.” Even though the difficulty is not insurmountable, some have emended the text. Some simply changed the verb to “he is,” which was not very compelling. C. D. Isbell argued that אֶהְיֶה (’ehyeh, “I am”) is an orthographic variant of יִהְיֶה (yihyeh, “he will”) – “a person who does not know these things would be a laughingstock” (JANESCU 37 [1978]: 227-36). G. R. Driver suggests the meaning of the MT is something like “(One that is) a mockery to his friend I am to be.”
2 tn The word simply means “laughter”; but it can also mean the object of laughter (see Jer 20:7). The LXX jumps from one “laughter” to the next, eliminating everything in between, presumably due to haplography.
3 tn Heb “his friend.” A number of English versions (e.g., NASB, NIV, NRSV, NLT) take this collectively, “to my friends.”
4 tn Heb “one calling to God and he answered him.” H. H. Rowley (Job [NCBC], 92) contends that because Job has been saying that God is not answering him, these words must be part of the derisive words of his friends.
5 tn The two words, צַדִּיק תָּמִים (tsadiq tamim), could be understood as a hendiadys (= “blamelessly just”) following W. G. E. Watson (Classical Hebrew Poetry, 327).
6 tn Heb “his”; the referent (Job) has been specified in the translation to indicate whose friends they were.
7 tn The perfect verb should be given the category of potential perfect here.
8 tc This is one of the eighteen “corrections of the scribes” (tiqqune sopherim); it originally read, “and they declared God [in the wrong].” The thought was that in abandoning the debate they had conceded Job’s point.
9 tn The paragraph begins with the disjunctive vav, “Now as for the
10 sn The expression here is interesting: “he returned the captivity of Job,” a clause used elsewhere in the Bible of Israel (see e.g., Ps 126). Here it must mean “the fortunes of Job,” i.e., what he had lost. There is a good deal of literature on this; for example, see R. Borger, “Zu sub sb(i)t,” ZAW 25 (1954): 315-16; and E. Baumann, ZAW 6 (1929): 17ff.
11 tn This is a temporal clause, using the infinitive construct with the subject genitive suffix. By this it seems that this act of Job was also something of a prerequisite for restoration – to pray for them.
12 tn The construction uses the verb “and he added” with the word “repeat” (or “twice”).
