Translation

a[And Zophar the Naamathite answered and said:]

7May my enemy be likeb the wicked,

may my assailantc be like the wrongdoer!

8For what is the hope of the godless when he is cut off,a

when God requiresb his life?

9Will God hear his cry

when trouble comes upon him?

10Willa he delight himselfb in the Almighty,

and call uponc God at every moment? d

11–12 a[transferred to follow 27:6, as part of Job’s Ninth Speech]

13aThis is the portion of the wickedb fromc God,

the heritage of oppressorsd thate they receivef from the Almighty.g

14Though theira children be many,b they are destined for the sword; c

their offspring will never have enough to eat.

15Those who survivea will be brought to their graveb by plague,c

and their widowsd will be unable to bewail them.e

16Though they heap up silver like dust,

lay up fine clothing like piles of clay,

17they may lay it up, but the righteous will wear it,

and the innocent will divide their silver.

24:18aThe wickedb are a fleckc on the face ofd the waters,e

their portionf in the land is accursed,

gand no one turnsh to their vineyards.i

19aAs droughtb andc heat snatch awayd the snow waters,e

sof Sheolg snatches away sinners.h

20aThe wombb forgets them,

the worm sucksc on them;

they are no longer remembered,

dand wickedness is shatterede like a tree.

21aThey wrongb the barren woman,c

and do no goodd to their widows.e

22aGodb drags awayc the mightyd by his power;

even whene they are prosperousf they can have no assurance of life.g

23He allowsa them to restb in security,c

butd his eyese keep watch over their ways.f

24They are exalteda for a moment, and then are gone; b

they are brought low,c and shriveld like mallows; e

they witherf like the heads of grain.

27:18The house they build is like a bird’s nest,a

like a booth made by a watchman.b

19They go to bed rich,a but for the last time; b

when theyc open their eyes, their wealthd is all gone.

20The Terrors overtakea them like a flood; b

in the night a tempest carries them off.c

21The east wind seizes them, and they are gone; a

it whirls them away, out of their place.

22aIt hurls itselfb against them without mercy;

they flee headlongc from its force.

23aIt clapsb its handsc at themd in derision,

and hissese at them fromf itsg place.h

Notes

7.a. The line is conjecturally restored on the basis of 20:1, the opening of Zophar’s previous speech.

7.b. There is no call to follow Gordis in taking the kaph here and in the next colon as kaph asseverative.

7.c. Habel translates “my adversary at law,” taking this to be Job speaking of God, his legal opponent (so too Good). But it makes little sense to wish that God’s offspring should die and that God should not be heard when he prays to God.

8.a. As the text stands, God must be the subj of “cuts off.” But in the sense of “cut off” seems to be always piel, so Budde, Beer (BHK), and Hölscher emend to “he cuts off” (so RSV and perhaps Habel “Eloah drains his life away”) or “is cut off” (so too Driver-Gray, NEB, NAB, NIV; NJPS “is cut down”). Gordis (followed by Hartley) strains after interpreting the qal as meaning “he is cut off,” but Joel 2:8 is not a helpful parallel. The qal sense, “gain by violence,” is not very suitable (as KJV “though he hath gained,” JPS “though he get him gain”), for concessive (“although”) is not well attested (but cf. BDB, 473b, §2c); similarly Gerleman (BHS), understanding it as “he finishes [his life]”; and so too Fohrer, reading the piel . G. R. Driver takes qal as meaning “he comes to an end” (“Problems in Job,” AJSL 52 [1936] 160–70 [162]); so too Kissane, and apparently Gerleman (BHS), who identifies it as “finish [life].” An interesting but conjectural emendation was made by S. Mandelkern (Veteris Testamenti concordantiae hebraicae et chaldaicae, 2d ed. [Leipzig: Margolin, 1925] 228b), and followed by Dhorme, JB, and Rowley (apparently): “when he prays,” which fits well with v 9; but why should a “godless” ( “impious”) man be praying? It is presumably when adversity smites him. Duhm, Strahan, Moffatt, Fohrer, Fedrizzi, and de Wilde omit the clause .

8.b. has been variously understood. (1) According to BDB, 1017b (with some support from Gordis), it is from II “draw out, extract” (not otherwise attested in Heb.; it is not acknowledged by HALOT); hence RSV “takes away” (similarly KJV, JPS, NJPS, NIV, Fedrizzi). (2) Others take it from II “spoil, plunder” (BDB, 1021b; HALOT, 4:1531a); Dillmann (followed by Kissane, Gerleman [BHS prp], Sicre Díaz, Hartley “despoils,” Good) proposes “carries off [his life] as booty.” (3) The most favored emendation, adopted in the Translation above, is that of Siegfried, Budde, Duhm, Strahan, Driver-Gray, Beer (BHK), Gordis, Moffatt, and GNB (“demands”); NEB (Brockington, Hebrew Text) and NAB to “requires.”

Less probable are the following suggestions: (4) Perles, Hölscher, Rowley, and de Wilde emend to “when he lifts up his soul to God” (de Wilde ); so too HALOT, 4:1504a, translating “if his soul longs after God.” Rowley quotes Confucius, Analects 3.13: “he who offends against Heaven has none to whom he can pray.” (5) Fohrer reads “[when] God takes away [his life].” (6) A. Guillaume (“The Arabic Background of the Book of Job,” in Promise and Fulfilment, FS S. H. Hooke, ed. F. F. Bruce [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1963] 106–27 [117]; Studies, 109) finds a new Heb. word, cognate with Arab. yisalu (= yisʿalu) “draw out, take away.” (7) Strauss derives the form from I “have rest, be at ease” (BDB, 1017a; HALOT, 4:1503b), which has occurred at 3:26; 12:6. He translates “[when God] brings [his life] to rest”; but qal means “be at rest,” niph apparently “give oneself up to rest,” and hiph “set at ease, lead to false hope,” so it is hard to see how it could be “bring to rest.” It is also strange to have the cutting off of the life of the wicked being referred to as bringing the life “to rest.”

10.a. The introduces the second question, as at 6:12 (cf. GKC, §150c; DCH, 1:304b §3b). Strangely, NJPS makes vv 9–10 into a single complex question: “Will God hear his cry when trouble comes upon him, when he seeks the favor of Shaddai, calls upon God at all times?” (similarly Habel). JB puts the second question into the past, “Did he make Shaddai all his delight?” but this is not very likely.

10.b. On hithp “delight oneself,” but perhaps better “implore,” see Note 22:26.c. Here the parallelism with “call upon” would support the sense “implore.”

10.c. Though it is not normal, “call upon” can have a direct obj (as also in Isa 43:22; Ps 14:4). Some MSS indeed have a more expected phrase, “upon God” (which Beer [BHK], Hölscher, and de Wilde read). Beer (BH ² vel) and NAB read “to him” (corresponding to LXX). Ehrlich (and apparently Good “meet”) reads “does he approach God?”

Gordis translates “Is he free to implore the Almighty—can he call upon God at any time?” meaning “is God accessible to him at all times and not merely at specially propitious hours?” But it is hard to see that the question here should be whether God is accessible; it is rather whether God is going to respond to him.

10.d. For “God at every moment,” Duhm read “will he welcome him?” He took his lead (cf. also Strahan) from LXX, making the verse consist of further questions about the unlikelihood of the wicked being heard by God. Thus LXX has μὴ ἔχει τινὰ παρρησίαν ἔναντι αὐτοῦ; ἢ ὡς ἐπικαλεσαμένου αὐτοῦ είσακούσεται αὐτοῦ; “has he any confidence before him? or will Job hear him when he calls upon him?” Also following the LXX, Beer (BHK) and Hölscher emended to “[when he calls upon God] will he allow himself to be supplicated by him?”

13.a. V 13 is deleted by Hölscher.

13.b. “wicked person,” having no specific gender reference. Good, translating “this lot of evil humankind,” seems to be the only commentator who recognizes the proper force of . Duhm deletes it as a gloss to ensure that the following word is pronounced “wicked” and not “wickedness” (as also in 20:29; cf. Beer [BHK]).

13.c. , lit. “with,” not here in the sense of “in the purpose of” (as in v 11) but rather as “in the presence of, laid up with” (cf. in Deut 32:34); cf. the sense “in the custody or care of” (BDB, 768a §3c). M. Dahood (review of Ugaritica VI, Or 41 [1972] 135) argued that here actually means “from,” on the basis of Ugar. ʿmn; so also Pope and Hartley, though the Ugar. can be well explained in accord with the Heb. usage. Driver-Gray, Dhorme, Beer (BHK), Fohrer, Rowley (perhaps), Fedrizzi, Gerleman (BHS prp), and NAB emend “with God” to “from God,” on the basis of the parallel in 20:29.

13.d. The pl “oppressors” is parallel to the sg “the wicked (person)” in the first colon; there is no need to emend the text (as Duhm, Peake, Strahan, Beer [BHK]; Stevenson to “oppressor” and to “will receive”), since the sg and the pl are alike generic. For other cases of parallelism of a sg in the first colon with a pl in the second, cf. 16:11; 24:24; Isa 5:23 (for the reverse, cf. Isa 53:9).

13.e. The relative pronoun “that” is understood after the phrase “the heritage of oppressors.”

13.f. “they receive” is omitted by Hartley as overloading the line (and there is no verb in the parallel 20:29). Beer (BHK) reads the sg “he receives” in order to harmonize with the sg “the oppressor” emended earlier in the colon.

13.g. Dhorme and Rowley follow this verse with 24:18–24, de Wilde with 24:18b–19.

14.a. Here and throughout vv 14–23 the sg is used of the wicked person (, following the use of that term in v 13); but in order to preserve the gender-free language of “person,” I have used the pl, in conformity with the pl of “oppressors.” Habel and GNB also have the pl throughout, though whether for the same reason is not apparent.

14.b. is “be many” rather than “become great,” “grow up” (as Moffatt), as at 39:4.

14.c. The last clause in the translation is in the Heb. simply “for the sword.”

15.a. K is “his survivor”; Q “his survivors” (followed by Hartley). K is to be preferred since its suff corresponds to that of “his widows”; the sg is of course generic or distributive (cf. GKC, §145l–m).

15.b. , lit. “will be buried.” Merx, Beer (BHK frt), Pope, NAB read “they will not be buried,” which would explain why their widows cannot mourn them. But see Comment for the idea that being “buried” by plague effectively means not being buried properly; in fact it would make no sense to say they are “not buried by plague” (by what are they buried, then?). Fedrizzi, sensing something amiss in the idea of death “burying” the wicked, emends to “they will die in battle”—which does at least form a parallel to v 14a; but the image of pestilence burying them (see next Note) is more striking.

15.c. Most agree that here does not have its usual sense of “death” (as KJV, Fohrer), but the specific sense of “plague” or “pestilence” (as in Jer 15:2; 18:21; 43:11; so JPS, Moffatt, NJPS, RSV, JB, NEB, NIV, GNB [“disease”], and Habel [“death”], but in the sense of plague, as in “the Black Death,” Good “[buried with] Mot”); cf. NJPS “will be buried in a plague.” W. F. Albright, following S. Iwry, wanted to read “(in) burial mounds,” which he understood as “in pagan graves” (“The High Place in Ancient Palestine,” in Volume du Congrès, Strasbourg 1956, VTSup 4 [Leiden: Brill, 1957] 242–58 [246]); so too Pope “will not be buried in a tomb.”

15.d. “his widows” is not likely to mean that he is polygamous (see Comment); more probably it refers to each individual of the “survivors” (; cf. GKC, §145m). The same form occurs in the parallel text at Ps 78:64, where also “their widows” is expected. Alternatively, we might emend to “and their widows” (as Duhm [], Strahan, Driver-Gray, Beer [BHK], Kissane, Fedrizzi, de Wilde [wrongly ]; LXX has χήρας δὲ αὐτῶν “and their widows,” admittedly “not decisive as to the translator’s reading” [Driver-Gray]).

15.e. NAB, following Beer (BH ²), reads “will not be mourned.”

24:18.a. On the place of vv 18–24 in Zophar’s last speech, see Comment. Among other suggestions, de Wilde moves vv 18b, 18c, and 19 to follow 27:13. Hölscher moves the colon to follow v 16a, while Duhm attaches v 18a to the end of v 17. NAB simply deletes v 18a.

18.b. Lit. “he.” Those spoken of in this strophe (vv 18–24) are sometimes in the sg (vv 18a, 18c [?], 20a, c, 21a, b, 22b, 23a, 24aβ), sometimes in the pl (vv 18b, 22a, 23b, 24aα, b, c). I have used “they” consistently in the translation, but I do not think it is necessary to emend the text in order to create only pl forms. The subject “the wicked” is supplied in the Translation (as also at v 9), since the strophe is concerned with wicked persons in general and not just those types of the wicked (murderer, adulterer, thief) mentioned in the previous strophe. Good strangely thinks “he” refers to God, translating “He, on the contrary, is swift across the waters”—like the divine wind of Gen 1:2; and for him the whole of vv 18–24 is about this god of chaos.

18.c. , lit. “he is light.” usually implies “swift” (see Comment), so many see here a picture of a light object being carried off “swiftly” by water (so RSV “They are swiftly carried away,” Moffatt “swept off by the flood,” GNB “swept away by floods”), or of something skimming over the water (RV, JPS “he is swift upon the face of the waters”; similarly Sicre Díaz), or of something swift like water (KJV “he is swift as the waters”). But it is more likely that the image is rather of a light and insubstantial object floating on the water (NJB “a straw floating on the water,” NIV “foam on the surface of the water,” NJPS “flotsam,” perhaps even NEB “scum,” since the idea of something contemptible is also present). Gordis’s “perish” is too loose. Some of course want to read “are light” for the sake of harmony with the pl of (so Budde, Beer [BHK prps], Fohrer, Gerleman [BHS prp]), while others read “they come to an end” (Beer [BHK al]).

18.d. Gordis wants to mean “like,” as occasionally does, but such an idiom is unparalleled.

18.e. Beer (BHK prps) and Fohrer read “before their day,” i.e. (apparently), “in their day,” instead of “upon the face of the waters.” Kissane suggests “upon them,” but translates “upon the face of the waters.” Fedrizzi has “before the day,” and moves the colon to follow v 16a.

18.f. Duhm, Beer (BH ² frt), and de Wilde, want to keep the wrongdoer as sg, so emend to “his portion.”

18.g. NAB deletes this colon.

18.h. Duhm and Beer (BH ² prps) read (it should be ) “[drought and heat] consume it [their portion]” for “does not turn” and delete “to their vineyard.”

18.i. Lit. “he does not turn by way of the vineyards” (similarly JPS). NJPS “may none turn aside by way of their vineyards” sounds as if no one will take a shortcut through their vineyards—a strained rendering.

As it stands, the text seems to have the “light” man as the subj (so KJV, JPS, Davidson; GNB “he no longer goes to work in his vineyards”); most, however, think the subj is “one, anyone” (so RSV, NJPS, NJB “nobody goes near his vineyard”). can also mean “look,” hence KJV “he beholdeth not the way of the vineyards”; but it is hard to see what such a statement would signify.

Peake, Beer (BH ²; in BHK seems to be a mistake), Driver-Gray, Dhorme, Hölscher, Fohrer, Fedrizzi, Gordis, Habel, Strauss read “no treader [of grapes] will turn toward their vineyard” (so too presumably NEB “no labourer will go near their vineyards”). Ehrlich protests that one cannot “tread” a vineyard, but “vineyard” is connected with “turn,” not with “tread.” LXX, with its τὰ φυτὰ αὐτῶν “their plants,” seems to support the 3 masc pl suff of . De Wilde has “treader . . . towards his vineyard.” Kissane proposes “their vineyard would not bear fruit because of drought.”

19.a. NAB deletes the whole line as corrupt.

19.b. Pope omits “drought,” while Kissane removes it to the end of the previous colon.

19.c. , lit. “also,” but merely “and” here (Dhorme). Good tries to represent the with “dryness, like heat, seizes snow waters,” but the English is not very intelligible. Kissane makes the ingenious proposal that for “also heat” we read “their garden(s) the snow-waters would sweep away,” parallel to v 18c in his rendering.

19.d. Dhorme moves to follow and reads “[the drought and the heat carry away the snow waters, and] Sheol carries away the sinner.” Duhm and Beer (BH ² prps) emend to “[snow waters] snatch it [the portion] away”; hence NJB “so does Sheol anyone who has sinned.” Hölscher proposes “May drought and heat despoil them, and may snow-waters lower (them) into the underworld.” Guillaume (“Arabic Background,” 116–17; Studies, 108) finds in a new word “be large” (cognate with Arab. jazula) and in not “Sheol” but a verb “flow” (cf. Arab. sāla) or a noun “watercourse, torrent” (cf. Arab. sayl), thus “When drought and heat are great, the snow waters fail to flow.” But, quite apart from the doubtfulness of these linguistic proposals, we expect something of the fate of sinners, not of jejune meteorological observation.

19.e. De Wilde reads “his water” as obj of , and “brings destruction to his wheat,” more ingeniously than convincingly. Peake, Beer (BHK frt), Fohrer, Pope, and O. Loretz (“Philologische und textologische Probleme in Hi 24, 1–25,” UF 12 [1980] 261–66 [265]) omit , as overloading the colon. NEB reverses the order of and and translates “so the waters of Sheol make away with the sinner.”

19.f. The clauses are comparative clauses, unusually without waw (GKC, §161a).

19.g. Instead of “Sheol,” Kissane proposes “[if] God examined the sinner.” Beer (BH ² frt) deleted .

19.h. Lit. “those who have sinned,” the relative pronoun being understood before . LXX ἀνεμνήσθη αὐτοῦ ἡ ἁμαρτία “his sin is remembered” seems to have understood the Heb. as “his sin is asked for.” Driver-Gray suggested “Sheol snatches away sinners” (cf. Ps 10:9) (so too Beer [BHK prps]) or “sinners go down to Sheol.” Along similar lines, Beer (BH ² prps) has , understanding the second colon as “snow waters go down.” Good offers the strained rendering “[snow waters,] which never flow down to Sheol,” understanding as “miss,” i.e., having evaporated, the water cannot reach down as far as Sheol. Kissane emends to “the sinner,” NEB to “the sinner.”

20.a. NAB deletes v 20a–c.

20.b. Duhm, Beer (BH ²), Budde², Strahan, Driver-Gray, Beer (BHK frt), Hölscher, Fohrer, Rowley, de Wilde, KBL, 583b, and HALOT, 2:655b, emend “the womb, [the worm] feasts” to (or ) “the square of his place,” i.e., native place (as Ruth 4:10 “the gate of his [native] place”); hence RSV “the squares of the town” (but NRSV “the womb forgets them”), Moffatt “the streets of his native place [forget him],” and J. B. Burns, “Support for the Emendation r^eḥōb m^eqōmô in Job xxiv 19–20,” VT 39 [1989] 480–85. But Sicre Díaz justly complains that this trivializes the image, and it is certainly more prosaic; J. B. Geyer, “Mythological Sequence in Job xxiv 19–20,” VT 42 [1992] 118–20, also defends the MT.

20.c. “the worm feasts on (?) him” has a fem subj and masc verb, which is anomalous but by no means unparalleled (cf. GKC, §145o). is also a problem since it is usually “be sweet” (as in 21:33), but here it would have to mean “suck” (like in Aram.); so BDB, who think the sense dubious nevertheless. It is no doubt best to suppose two distinct verbs, I “be sweet” and II “suck” (as DCH, 5:573b). NJPS “may he be sweet to the worms” and NRSV “the worm finds them sweet” favor the former, while NIV “feasts” and NEB “the worm sucks him dry” prefer the latter (as also in the Translation above); KJV “shall feed sweetly on him” combines the two senses in one verb. Terrien understands as “his sweetness” (? reading ), and takes together as “the womb of his sweetheart, lover,” i.e., his wife or concubine, not his mother; but there are no parallels to such a meaning for or “sweetness,” and the suggestion is improbable. It is tempting to see some connection with Job’s speech in 21:33, where the earth that covers the wicked man is “sweet” (, as here), but it is hard to see what the significance of the verbal parallel can be.

Dhorme proposes emending to “[that] formed him,” assuming a new Heb. root cognate with Akk. patâqu “make, create, form”; hence JB “the womb that shaped him.” Bickell, Budde, Duhm, Strahan, Beer (BH ²; BHK al). Kissane connected with the previous phrase and read “his height is not remembered,” a curious subj for “remember” (Dhorme) and altogether an emendation that cannot be counted a great success compared with MT, if it has been correctly understood. Driver-Gray, followed by Dhorme, Beer (BHK ), Hölscher, Fohrer, Terrien, Rowley, de Wilde, and Burns (“Support for the Emendation,” 482), preferred “his name”; hence RSV, JB “his name is recalled no longer.” Kissane read “and he would be plucked out and,” but the principle of lectio difficilior suggests we should keep to the MT.

20.d. Fohrer moves the colon to follow v 18a, NAB to follow v 18b, Hölscher and NEB to follow v 24a. Davidson interestingly attaches it closely to the following verse, rendering “And wickedness shall be broken like a tree—even he that devoureth . . . And doeth no good.”

20.e. niph is unproblematically “be broken,” but it may not seem a natural word to use of a tree. However, in Exod 9:25 hail “shatters” () every tree (an allusion to the same event in Ps 105:33, with the same language), so the traditional understanding is acceptable. NEB “iniquity is snapped like a stick” attempts to overcome the perceived difficulty, but is not a natural word for “snapping” a stick ( is used of a “rod” [] in Isa 14:5 and Jer 48:17, but a translation “is broken, shattered” is appropriate). NAB “is splintered” is too precise a term.

Good translates “is bought like wood,” deriving the verb from II “sell.” But II is used only of buying food (grain, Gen 41:57; food, 42:7; wine and milk, Isa 55:1), and it is not used in the niph. Duhm rewrites the colon as “like a rotten tree he is uprooted,” following LXX ἴσα ξύλῳ ἀνιάτῳ “like an incurable [!] tree.”

21.a. NAB omits this verse as too obscure for translation.

21.b. is properly “he grazes on”; the verb may occasionally be used in a pejorative sense of enemies “depasturing” (Mic 5:6 [5], though RSV has “rule”; and the wind can be said to “feed” on people [Jer 22:22, RSV “shepherd”], and so can fire [Job 20:26]). Hence RV, JPS “devoureth,” RSV “feed on,” NIV “prey on,” Habel “feed on,” Good “he pastures on.” But a simple emendation to “ill treat, wrong” (Budde, Dhorme, Beer [BHK], Hölscher, Kissane, Rowley, de Wilde) is attractive also; so KJV “He evil entreateth,” NEB “He may have wronged,” NJB “He used to ill-treat”; so too the Translation above. Does this verse perhaps give the reason why he has come to such an end—as GNB: “That happens because he ill-treated widows and showed no kindness to childless women”?

NJPS “may he consort with” derives the word from II “associate with” (similarly Fohrer, Fedrizzi, Terrien; cf. Prov 13:20 “one who associates with fools”; 28:7; 29:3), but in all these cases it is a group of people whom one associates with, not an individual (though hithp is used in Prov 22:24 with a sg). Andersen takes as “female companion” (like in Ps 45:14 [15]), and Hartley follows this lead, reading and understanding “let his female companion be barren.” Gordis thinks is a hitherto unrecognized verb, a byform of II “break, crush” (also at Mic 5:5).

21.c. Lit. “the barren woman [who] does not give birth.” Avoiding the apparent redundancy, Gordis interestingly proposes “the barren woman so that she cannot give birth,” but the presence of “barren” () is no less strictly unnecessary. The phrase is, however, paralleled in Isa 54:1: “the barren woman, who did not give birth.” Fedrizzi thinks this a quasi-proverbial expression of evildoing: he associates with prostitutes. Duhm offers an emendation to “and he did not have pity on her child,” incorporating from the end of v 20.

21.d. On the unusual form , see GKC, §70c; some recommend to read the normal (Driver-Gray). On the ptcp followed by a finite verb, see GKC, §116x.

21.e. Not to widows in general, but to the wrongdoer’s own widow (see Comment).

22.a. NAB rearranges vv 22–23 in the order vv 22b, 23a, 22a, 23b.

22.b. The subj is supplied in the Translation above. For other cases where the name of God is to be supplied (often as the subj), cf. 3:20; 12:13; 16:7; 20:23; 22:21; 25:2; 30:17 (perhaps), 19. Budde² and Beer (BHK frt) want to emend the name of God into the text, and propose “and God, the mighty one, prolongs by his power.” Duhm, following LXX ἀδυνάτους “the powerless” and Bickell, suggests “and he (the wicked) snatches away the (financially) ruined by his might”; cf. Driver-Gray. Gordis too thinks the evildoer is still the subj, translating “The mighty man may continue in his strength” (similarly Habel), but is not used absolutely except in the sense of “walk, go” (21:33; Judg 4:6; 20:37), and Gordis needs to explain away the pl suff of as an enclitic or a dittogr. De Wilde also takes the wicked as the subj but finds an obj in (see Note 22.d on “mighty”). NJPS also takes the wicked as the subj but understands differently (see next Note).

22.c. The verb has a very wide range of meanings (cf. DCH, 5:522a). There are two that have been favored to explain this passage: (1) “prolong”; thus BDB, 604b, “prolong the life of” (hence RSV and Davidson “continueth,” Driver-Gray “maketh the mighty to continue,” NAB “sustains the mighty”). However, there are no parallels with persons as the subj; in Isa 13:22 days are “prolonged,” in Ezek 12:25, 28 the word of Yahweh (i.e., its execution) will not be “delayed,” and in Jos 6:5 the priests “prolong” with the sound of the ram’s horn. And in this meaning of “draw out, prolong, continue,” usually has as its direct obj the thing prolonged (except in Neh 9:30). Kissane creates such an obj with the proposed reading “the tyrant [prolongeth] his days.” (2) “draw, drag off,” more common a sense. Hence KJV “draweth,” JPS “draweth away,” NIV “drags away,” NEB “carries off,” Good “draws out.” This is the sense adopted in the Translation above, but with some misgiving since we might expect the text to say what the mighty are dragged away from. Pope has “He lures the mighty with his power,” and Hartley “allure,” but there is no evidence for this sense, and it is hard to see what it could refer to in the context.

Possibly we should connect the passage with a new verb II “seize” (cf. Arab. masaka; DCH, 5:525a). So Dhorme, Hölscher, NJPS, emending to “seizing,” and translating “He who by His power seizes the mighty”; hence JB “he who lays mighty hold on tyrants.” But again we should expect something more explicit about the purpose or result of this seizing. Terrien goes further, with “he has the power to tame [bulls],” but there is no evidence that means “tame.”

22.d. Terrien takes from “bull” and translates “he has the power to tame bulls”; NJPS also finds “bulls” here: “Though he has the strength to seize bulls.” De Wilde and Strauss () emend “the mighty” to “the poor,” and Duhm and Beer (BH ²) to “those who are perishing,” claiming the support of LXX ἀδυνάτους. But that is probably an inner-Greek corruption of δυνάτους = (Dhorme). Beer (BHK) reads, with some MSS, the sg “the mighty one.”

22.e. A circumstantial clause (cf. 42:3; GKC, §156f). Others see a contrast here; so Gordis “he may survive, but has no faith in life” (similarly Habel).

22.f. “he rises up,” which is presumably a case of sg for pl since the subj is “the mighty.” Driver-Gray are inclined to emend to the pl, “they rise up.” Dhorme makes the subj God (“he rises up”), but then the subj of the next verb has to be the wicked and the whole rendering becomes too convoluted. JB, following Dhorme, does a good job of smoothing the sentence: “rises up to take away that life which seemed secure,” but the underlying interpretation is still awkward. LXX has “when he [the wicked] has arisen, a man will not feel secure of his own life” (ἀναστὰς τοιγαροῦν, οὐ μὴ πιστεύῃ κατὰ τῆς ἑαυτοῦ ζωῆς)—which makes an attractive sense but also is convoluted, having different subjs for the verbs and . NJPS “May he live with no assurance of survival” strains the meaning of “he arises” to make it mean “he lives” (and the sequence of thought in vv 22–23 in NJPS is hard to explain). NAB has “to him who rises [? from his bed] without assurance of his life he gives safety and support”; but there is no call here to mention those lacking in assurance since the focus is exclusively upon the wealthy wicked. Terrien tries hard with “but [one fine morning] he arises with no confidence in life!” Duhm wants the sequence of verbs to be passive, so he reads “he is made to arise,” and in v 23 “he is broken down” for . Beer (BH ² frt) reads ( niph) “he rots, moulders away,” which at least creates a parallelism with the remainder of the colon.

22.g. , lit. “believe in life,” i.e., have assurance of life, is a phrase found also in Deut 28:66. Driver-Gray are inclined to read the pl, “they do [not] rely.” Pope omits the “not,” or else regards it as an asseverative. would be an Aramaizing pl (GKC, §86e), but many read “his life” (so LXX, some MSS, Duhm, Driver-Gray, Dhorme, Beer [BHK], Hölscher, Kissane, Fedrizzi, de Wilde, and Hartley).

23.a. The subj must be God, especially in view of v 23. But Terrien translates “who will lend him support?” supposing that the verse is a question. Rather than “he gives, grants, [to him],” Beer (BH ²) reads “he [the mighty] is broken down” (from ), which conceivably represents LXX μαλακισθείς or, less probably, “is crushed” (from ).

23.b. , lit. “lean.”

23.c. is a little odd, lit. “[he gives him] in security [and he leans].” We could understand “[he grants him] to be in security” (or “to dwell in safety” [Gordis]), or emend to “to trust, feel secure” (so Beer [BHK], Gerleman [BHS prp]; is abs also at Isa 12:2). But Dhorme’s interpretation is surely correct: belongs with , thus “he allows him to rest in security.” An excellent parallel is 19:23 “who will grant that they should be inscribed in a book?” lit. “who will grant in a book that they should be inscribed?” Rearrangement of the verse to (Hölscher) is unnecessary. Duhm and Beer (BH ²) have “he does not trust,” which seems supported by LXX. De Wilde arbitrarily suggests “he congratulates himself on his good fortune.”

23.d. Most take the two cola as parallel, but KJV has attractively “yet his eyes are upon his ways” (similarly JPS, JB, NEB, NIV, GNB), Dhorme “but His eyes were watching.”

23.e. is an unusual form of the 3 masc suff (see GKC, §91l). Rather than accept that “non-form,” Duhm reads “his oppressor,” i.e., God. Beer’s proposal (BHK), wisely qualified with a question mark, to read “the eyes of Yahu (Yahweh),” may be discounted ( does not appear in the Hebrew Bible as an independent form).

23.f. Lit. “their ways” (). Dhorme wants the references to the wicked to be in the sg (though he accepted in v 22), so he emends “their ways” to “his ways” (so too Beer [BHK], Hölscher, Fedrizzi, Sicre Díaz). De Wilde would like to read “and his misfortune is already upon his path.”

24.a. is a strange form, perhaps a qal passive, “they are exalted” (GKC, §67m)—a grim pun on “maggot” (v 20), thinks Good. Because is sg, Duhm (), Beer (BH ²), Hölscher, de Wilde read “his exaltation,” which is perhaps supported by LXX. Dhorme reads “he was high, exalted”; and Beer (BHK), Fohrer, and NEB have “they were high.” Gordis claims that is the impv of a II “wait” (so “wait just a little”), which he thinks occurs also in Isa 30:18 in parallel to piel; so too Moffatt “Have patience! they will soon be gone.” But the rendering seems forced. Ehrlich’s proposal that God’s eyes are the subject of is no better.

24.b. is sg, whereas was pl; most versions use the pl (KJV, JPS, etc.), and Beer (BHK), Kissane, Fohrer, Gerleman (BHS prp), Hartley, NEB actually emend to “they are not, i.e., they are gone.” Davidson translated “in a moment they are not,” but belongs rather with .

24.c. “be low, humiliated,” elsewhere only at Ps 106:43; Eccl 10:18. On the so-called Aramaizing form , cf. GKC, §67y. Dhorme, wanting all the verbs about the wicked to be in the sg, reads “and he has collapsed” (so too Duhm, Beer [BH ²], Hölscher). But it is not abnormal to find a sg in the first colon parallel to a pl in the second (cf. 16:11; 27:13).

24.d. is “draw together, shut,” of hand (Deut 15:7) or mouth (Job 5:16); this will hardly refer to “contraction in death” (cf. BDB, 891b), but perhaps will justify “shrivel” (NJPS, Hartley). Olshausen (with one MS) proposed “are gathered [for burial]”; cf. NAB, NIV “are gathered up.” Siegfried read (so too Beer [BHK; BH ² prps], Fohrer, Gerleman [BHS prp]) “are plucked off” (in 8:12 of papyrus and reeds; in 30:4 of mallows, interestingly enough). Dhorme, reading the qal , lamely translates “[he has collapsed like the orach] that one gathers” (similarly Hölscher). RSV “fade” seems to have reversed the positions of and . Duhm and Beer (BH ²) want the sg .

L. Kopf (“Arabische Etymologien und Parallelen zum Bibelworterbuch,” VT 8 [1958] 161–215 [200]) proposed a II “snatch away” (cf. Arab. qubida [Lane, 2482a]; cf. HALOT, 3:1118a). Guillaume (Lexicography, 3:7; Studies, 109) compares rather Arab. qabaṣa “pluck,” but somewhat strangely translates “are taken out of the way.”

24.e. “like the totality” does not fit here (KJV “as all other”; similarly JPS, Moffatt, NAB, NIV, Fohrer, Fedrizzi). RSV and JB have “mallow,” JPS “mallows,” NEB “mallow-flower,” NJB “saltwort,” and GNB “a weed,” but it is hard to tell what they are reading. The possibilities are:

(1) is the name of a plant, as Ehrlich supposes and J. Reider argues (“the umbel of a plant, the melilot or honey-lotus,” in “Contributions to the Hebrew Lexicon,” ZAW 53 [1935] 270–77 [273–75], comparing Aram. כלילא; cf. also Grabbe, 88–89; and Gordis, proposing a “grass,” parallel to Arab. kaʾlun “forage, herbage”; cf. also DCH, 4:413b).

(2) We should emend, following the lead of LXX ὥσπερ μολοχή and reading “like mallows, saltwort” (BDB, 572a; HALOT, 2:587b; DCH, 5:291b; so too Beer [BH ² ; BHK], Hölscher, Kissane [], Terrien [], Pope, Habel), a desert plant (genus Malva) growing in salt marshes, with edible fruit, leaves, and seed. Dhorme insists that is the orach (Atriplex halimus), a plant related to spinach, protein rich, and used as animal feed (see R. K. Harrison, ISBE, 3:230; J. C. Trever, IDB, 3:233). On another word for “mallows” (), see Note 6:6.c.

(3) The Qumran Tg has “like dog grass” (Pope), which Hartley follows to restore “like grass” to the Heb. (for “produce,” cf. BDB, 385a; DCH, 4:73a).

(4) De Wilde reads for the colon “and his riches shrivel like beans” (a marvelous image, he says). Good leaves a gap in his translation, wanting reference to a plant but being unsatisfied by the emendation to .

24.f. from “languish, wither, fade,” NEB “droop,” NAB “shrivel” (BDB, 576b [ III]; HALOT, 2:593b [ I]; DCH, 5:327b [ I]). RSV, NIV “cut off” is hard to justify; there is another verb “cut” (BDB, 576b [ IV]), a byform of , but it seems restricted to the meaning “circumcise” (though it may be simply “cut” in 14:2; Ps 58:8; see DCH, 5:328a [ IV]). Duhm, Beer (BH ²), Dhorme, Hölscher read the sg “he fades.”

27:18.a. is apparently “like a moth,” as in 4:19; 13:28. This is odd, since moths are not elsewhere spoken of as building, but it is the rendering of KJV, JPS, Sicre Díaz, Good. NIV “like a moth’s cocoon” attempts to explain the metaphor. Schultens, Ehrlich, Dhorme, Fedrizzi, and Gordis, however, find a different “bird’s nest” (comparing Arab. ʿuššun; cf. also Akk. ašāšu A “a bowerlike reed cover used by water fowl” (CAD, 1.2:422b); so too G. R. Driver (“Difficult Words in the Hebrew Prophets,” in Studies in Old Testament Prophecy, FS T. H. Robinson, ed. H. H. Rowley [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1950] 52–72 [67]), NEB, NJPS; mentioned by Barr (Comparative Philology, 333; cf. DCH, vol. 6, s.v.); Ehrlich finds the word also at 4:19. Pope doubts that can be cognate with the Akk., and proposes as a cognate Arab. ʿāš “night watchman” (ptcp of ʿass “keep night-watch”); he is followed by Habel. This proposal creates a very close parallel with in the second colon, but it would be odd to have a comparison with a watchman in the first colon and with a hut in the second.

LXX translates the term twice over, ἀπέβη δὲ ὁ οἶκος αὐτοῦ ὥσπερ σῆτες καὶ ὥσπερ ἀραχνή “his house has gone away like moths and like a spider.” The latter translation suggests to many an emendation to “like a spider” (as in 8:14; Isa 59:5); so Merx, Budde, Duhm, Peake, Strahan, Driver-Gray, Beer (BHK), Hölscher, Fohrer, Terrien, Rowley, Gerleman (BHS prp), Andersen, de Wilde; and thus “like a spider’s web” (RSV, JB, GNB, Hartley), “as of cobwebs” (NAB). But does not mean “spider’s web,” and it would be very awkward if the verse were to mean “he builds, like a spider, his house, and [it is] like a booth [that] a watchman makes”; it is more natural if “like a booth” is parallel to some flimsily built object represented by . See also the full discussion in Grabbe, 89–91.

18.b. Lit. “like a booth [that] a watchman makes,” the relative pronoun being understood.

19.a. “rich” is acc of state and in emphatic position (as “naked” in 1:21).

19.b. “and he shall not be gathered” (so KJV; cf. JPS, Davidson) is not very plausible in the context. Some have explained it as gathered for proper burial (as in Jer 8:2; Ezek 29:5), but it would be strange to read of the death of the wicked before, in the next colon (v 19a), they open their eyes. Good “but has no harvest” apparently reads “he gathers.” Most, including the Translation above, accept an emendation (or perhaps just the recognition of an “aberrant vocalization and orthography” [Gordis]) to (perhaps written as ) “and he does not add,” i.e., to do so again (so RSV, NIV “but will do so no more,” NAB, GNB “one last time,” JB, NEB “but never again”); so too (with the support of LXX, Pesh) Duhm, Strahan, Driver-Gray, Beer (BHK), Dhorme, Hölscher, Fohrer, Pope, Rowley, Fedrizzi, Gerleman (BHS prp), de Wilde, Sicre Díaz, Habel, Hartley. The idiom “and [he] does not add” can be seen also at 20:9; 34:32; 40:5. The proposal of M. Dahood (review of Job et son Dieu: Essai d’exégèse et de théologie biblique, by J. Leveque, Bib 52 [1971] 436–38 [438]) and Blommerde, that is a divine title, “the Mighty One,” and that means “snatch away,” suffers from the same difficulty as the MT, that v 19a cannot easily refer to death if v 19b speaks of them opening their eyes. For other supposed examples of “the Victor, Mighty One,” see Note 21:16.a.

19.c. Some have thought that the subj is impersonal (“when one opens one’s eyes, the wicked is gone,” i.e., is dead). But it is more probable that the subj is the same as in the first colon.

19.d. The subject is implied (as RSV, JB, NEB, NAB, NJPS, NIV, GNB), though a noun for “wealth” has not been previously used (it is the adj “rich” in the first colon). “and he/it is not” could mean, at a pinch, that when the wrongdoer wakes up he is dead (cf. 2 Kgs 19:35 || Isa 37:36), but that is most unlikely.

20.a. Sg verb with pl subj (GKC, §145k); for other examples, cf. Note 22:9.a. Duhm however thought it would be better to vocalize as a pl, “they overtake.”

20.b. is really “like water,” a phrase that usually refers to the availability or cheapness or drinkability or pourability of water (as in 3:24; 15:16; 34:7), and not to water as a destructive force. RSV, NEB, NJPS, NIV, and GNB (“sudden flood”) hope with the translation “flood” to make water into a sufficiently powerful parallel to “tempest” in the second colon, but there are few, if any, real analogies to this sense, not even Job 22:11 and Isa 28:2 with a “flood [, ] of waters,” 2 Sam 5:20 with the “bursting forth [] of waters,” Ps 66:12 “through fire and water,” or Ps 32:6 “the rush [] of great waters.” Perhaps the best analogy is Isa 28:17, where “waters” () “sweep away [] a shelter.” And it is a question whether “overtake” ( hiph) can be thought of as something water can do. Nevertheless, “like waters” is accepted by Driver-Gray and de Wilde; in the absence of a better solution, perhaps we should stay with this translation.

However, because the parallel to is “by night,” many propose reading “by day” (Merx, Graetz, Beer [BHK vel], Gerleman [BHS prp]) or (Wright, Budde, Strahan, Beer [BHK vel], Dhorme, Hölscher, Pope, Gerleman [BHS vel], Sicre Díaz, NAB; so too Moffatt, NAB, JB “in broad daylight”). But this emendation does not commend itself unequivocally, for the context of vv 19–20 seems rather to be of the loss of wealth and life in a night, and it is a little odd to have the terrors in the day and the tempest later on, in the night. The phrase in 5:14, “by daylight they meet with darkness,” is no real parallel (against Dhorme), though the Terrors may be thought of as, properly speaking, creatures of the night.

20.c. is the ordinary word for “steal” (BDB, 170a). M. Dahood (“Hebrew-Ugaritic Lexicography VII,” Bib 50 [1969] 337–56 [342]) translated the colon, “Night will kidnap him like a tempest,” regarding “Night” as a term for the underworld. But this requires recourse to Dahood’s view of the prep kaph as “double-duty,” and agreement that “like a tempest” is a suitable adverbial phrase for “kidnaps.” J. Lust (“A Stormy Vision: Some Remarks on Job 4, 12–16,” Bijdr 36 [1975] 308–11 [309]) has correctly seen that here and at 4:12 and 21:18 means “transport violently”; it sounds like a different word, but no alternative etymology is propounded.

21.a. On the pausal form , see 7:9, and GKC, §§29q, 69x.

22.a. NAB combines this verse with 26:13.

22.b. is unaccountably juss; perhaps it should be vocalized “and it casts” (as, e.g., Beer [BHK]; one MS has ). Most modern versions take the east wind () of v 21 as the subj and assume that hiph is to be understood as reflexive (Gordis), though there seem to be no parallels. Duhm supplies as the obj “missiles,” Fohrer “stones” or “sand,” Strahan “thunderbolts.” Dhorme, Hölscher, and Fedrizzi think the subj of is impersonal (“Men hurl themselves at him”), while KJV, RV had “God” (so too Moffatt “God pelts him without pity,” Duhm, Strahan, Driver-Gray, Terrien). According to Brockington, NEB adopts the emendation to “and it is driven”; but NEB itself has “it [the east wind] flings itself on him.”

22.c. , the inf abs before the verb to emphasize “either the certainty . . . or the forcibleness or completeness of an occurrence” (GKC, §113n). G. R. Driver proposed that a second verb “wound” should be postulated for Heb., cognate with Arab. baraḥa (not baraḫa) “bruise” and attested in the pual here (reading “he shall be sorely bruised [by its force]”) and at 41:28 (20), and in the qal at Prov 19:26; Job 20:24. See G. R. Driver, “Proverbs xix. 26,” TZ 11 (1955) 373–74; idem, “Problems in the Hebrew Text of Job,” in Wisdom in Israel and in the Ancient Near East, FS H. H. Rowley, VTSup 3 (Leiden: Brill, 1955) 72–93 (81); HALOT, 1:156b; DCH, 2:263a. For an argument against this proposal, see D. J. A. Clines, “Were There a II ‘vex’ and III ‘wound, bruise, pierce’ and IV ‘bar’ in Classical Hebrew?” (forthcoming in Sara Japhet Festschrift).

23.a. NAB deletes this verse as merely a variant form of v 21.

23.b. “clap” is elsewhere spelled (BDB, 706b).

23.c. The suff of is usually pl, thus “their hands”; so some emend the verb to “they [indefinite] clap” (Driver-Gray, Beer [BH ² frt]; cf. KJV, RV) or the noun to “his hands” (Duhm) or “hands” (Beer [BHK], Hölscher [frt], Kissane, Fohrer [], Gerleman [BHS prb]). But the suff seems to be sg at 20:23 (see also GKC, §103f, n) and may be allowed to stand here also. Peake, Hölscher, Fohrer, Terrien, Rowley, Fedrizzi, Gordis, Ravasi, and Sicre Díaz also regard the subj as impersonal (“men”), but do not emend the text. Duhm, Strahan, and Andersen think the subj is God, as in v 21.

23.d. The suff of also may be regarded as sg (as, e.g., Gerleman [BHS]), and the word need not be emended to “against him” (as Duhm, Driver-Gray, Beer [BHK], Hölscher, Fohrer). In both and we may be dealing with consciously archaic forms (cf. GKC, §91l: “these [suffixes] are revivals of really old forms. That they are consciously and artificially used is shown by the evidently intentional accumulation of them”). At the very least they are chosen for their sound (Sicre Díaz).

23.e. Beer (BH ² frt) would make the sg verb into pl in conformity with the emendation of the previous verb.

23.f. Gordis thinks the mem should mean “in [his former place].” NEB “wherever he may be” likewise takes the mem as “in.” One MS (cf. BHS) has “his place,” which would then be the subj of “hisses”; this is adopted by Beer (BHK) and is followed also by Sicre Díaz, who thinks it is equivalent to “the men of his place.” It is much more natural, however, to translate “from its place.” Beer (BH ²) notes alternative emendations, to “from on high” or, most unlikely, (which must be an error for ) “[and] rising up [they (indefinite) hiss at them].”

23.g. It is the wind’s place (as RSV, NJPS, Habel, Good) and not the wicked’s place (as KJV, JPS, NIV) or God’s (Duhm, Strahan; Moffatt “hisses scorn at him from heaven”).

23.h. JB, Pope, and Ravasi follow this verse with 24:18–24 (Pope and Ravasi add v 25).

Form/Structure/Setting

Once again, the question of the integrity of the speech must be treated. The view that has been preferred in this commentary is that, although the Masoretic text ascribes 27:7–23 to Job, these verses (with the exception of vv 11–12) in fact constitute the last speech of Zophar, which is otherwise entirely missing from the book (so also, e.g., Beer [BHK]). H. G. Reventlow (“Tradition und Redaktion in Hiob 27 im Rahmen der Hiobreden des Abschnittes Hi 24–27,” ZAW 94 [1982] 279–93) thinks that vv 7–10 and 13–23 have been inserted at a late date from a wisdom psalm on the fate of the wicked, but it is preferable to assign the material rather to a final speech of Zophar.

The other main element of Zophar’s third speech, as here reconstructed, is the strophe 24:18–24, which has been retrieved from Job’s eighth speech, and located after 27:17. The passage fits poorly within Job’s speech in chaps. 23–24, but here it is entirely suitable, continuing Zophar’s depiction of the wicked in 27:13–17 with a strophe of eight lines. For further discussion of the reasons for the transference of this strophe from Job’s eighth speech, see Comment below on 24:18–24. Two verses of chap. 27 have been transferred from their traditional place to follow 27:6, as part of Job’s ninth speech.

The strophic structure of the speech is of four strophes of unequal length, all of them devoted to the theme of the wicked. The first strophe (27:7–10) concerns the hopeless future of the godless wicked, the second (27:13–17) the reversal of the expectations of the wicked, the third (24:18–24) the downfall of the wicked as brought low by God, and the fourth (27:18–23) the downfall of the wicked as the victims of cosmic forces that tear them from their dwellings.

The three strophes of chap. 27 that are here assigned to the third speech of Zophar are of four lines, five lines, and six lines, respectively; and the strophe that we should probably insert (after 27:17) from 24:18–24 contains eight lines, perhaps consisting of two substrophes of four lines (24:18–20, with closure at v 20d; and 24:21–24, with closure in v 24). Within the strophic structure there are some two-line units, notably vv 14–15 about the offspring of the wicked, vv 16–17 about the possessions of the wicked, and vv 18–19 about the instability of the wealth of the wicked. Hölscher and de Wilde as usual find everything to be composed as two-line strophes, but Hölscher needs to omit v 13 and de Wilde v 12 to make this system work. Almost all the lines are bicola, except for the tricola in 24:18, 24, framing the strophe 24:18–24.

Terrien notices the same three strophes in the text of chap. 27 as it stands (though he assigns vv 7–10 to Job); the second strophe he divides quite reasonably into vv 13–15 and 16–17, but his two substrophes of vv 18–21 and 22–23 are hard to justify since the violence of the east wind is the subject both in v 21 and in vv 22–23 (though the objection does not apply if Terrien’s own understanding of God as the subject of vv 22–23 stands). Fohrer likewise recognizes three strophes, but he attaches v 13 to vv 7–10 (perhaps because the “This is . . .” sentence functions elsewhere as a mark of closure), and he connects v 18 with vv 14–17 (similarly NAB); it is better though to connect it to what follows, since it announces the theme of instability and uncertainty, which is developed summarily in v 19 and more extensively in vv 20–22. Webster finds five strophes in the chapter, which he regards as a unity: vv 2–6, 7–11, 12–15, 16–19, and 20–23, a scheme that has no evident difficulties if the reassignment of verses proposed here is not accepted. The disjunction between v 12 and v 13 is quite commonly recognized, by RSV (not NRSV), JB, NEB, NAB, NIV, GNB (but not NJPS), Gordis, and Habel. Good marks a break only between v 13 and v 14.

The genre is again the disputation speech, of which the four rhetorical questions in vv 8–10 are a typical feature (e.g., 21:27–31; 22:2–5; 26:4).

Among elements of forms drawn on in the speech there is principally the wisdom instruction, which prevails in vv 13–23 and 24:18–24 (which is here seen as part of this speech of Zophar); motifs encountered in the wisdom literature and the Psalms are frequent. The headline form, a noun clause opening with “This is . . . ,” is a feature of the wisdom teaching (cf. Ps 49:13; in Job 8:19 and 20:29 it serves to introduce a closing summary appraisal). The form of the contrast is repeated, between the good fortune of the wicked in their children and the fate of the those children (vv 14–15), between their acquisition of wealth and clothes and use of them by others (vv 16–17), between their exaltation and their humiliation (24:24). The topos of the fate of the wicked (as already in 5:12–14; 8:13–19; 15:20–34; 18:5–21; 20:5–29) is a familiar one in the book of Job.

The other distinguishable form is the wish: the speech probably lacks, because of disturbance in the course of transmission, its original proemium, and, in its present form, it opens with a wish (v 7), apparently against the enemy of the speaker, which is comparable with psalmic wishes against enemies (e.g., Pss 5:10 [11]; 12:3 [4]; 31:17b–18 [18b–19]); but here the wish is directed against the wicked rather than against the person with whom the speaker is in disputation.

The function of the speech cannot be established from the internal evidence of the text, for it is almost entirely descriptive and gives no clues about its intention. However, in the light of the other speeches of Zophar (chaps. 11, 20), it seems most likely that its function is to encourage Job to avoid the fate of the wicked that is here depicted. Though there are some points at which the language reflects, rather cruelly, the life experiences of Job (as in the references to the many children of the wicked being destined one and all for death [vv 14–15], and to the role of the east wind in bringing the wicked to their doom [vv 21–23; cf. 1:19]), it does not seem that Zophar claims that Job is himself one of the wicked. On the contrary, the depiction in this speech is precisely of what Job must avoid becoming.

The tonality of the speech is likewise difficult to determine, since Zophar distances himself so sharply from the subject matter of his speech and employs an objective reportorial style. But the language, with its many rhetorical flourishes, suggests that Zophar is savoring the description of the downfall of the wicked, elaborating traditional material to a fanciful degree (e.g., with the trope of the threefold agents of death [vv 14–15; cf. Zophar also at 20:24–25] or with the picture of the personified east wind that does not spare [v 22] and that plays the role of the passing traveler who mocks at the signs of the ruin of the wicked [v 23]). The tone of the speech has a distinct element of Schadenfreude in it, which overwhelms the professed didacticism (“This is the portion of the wicked . . .”) and any ulterior motivation that may be to Job’s benefit.

The nodal verse may be said to be v 8, “What is the hope of the godless?” For the theme of the speech is that the future of the wicked is established and fixed: they have a “portion,” a “heritage” from God (v 13), from which there is no hope of escape. And they can have nothing positive to hope for, since their posterity is already marked down for death, and they themselves can expect only a sudden and irreversible removal from the stability of their life.

Comment

27:7–10, 13–17; 24:18–24; 27:18–23 This sequence of verses is here taken as Zophar’s third speech (see on integrity under Form/Structure/Setting), its theme being evidently the fate of the wicked. It is not a lot different from chap. 20, Zophar’s previous speech, except that the focus here is entirely on the fact of the destiny of the wicked, and not at all on the behavior that marks them out as wicked. In this speech there is hardly a word of what the wicked have done wrong (apart from wronging barren women and widows [24:21, if this strophe is correctly transposed to this point]; heaping up silver and fine clothes [v 16] is not represented as a crime).

Parallels of language and thought between this speech that is here presumed to be Zophar’s and the previous speech that was indubitably his, are these: the survivors (27:14–15; cf. 20:26); he is overtaken by a flood (27:20; cf. 20:28); he is swept out of his place (27:21; cf. 20:9b); he is forgotten (24:20; cf. 20:7–9).

We might well suppose that Zophar’s speech once began (before the damage to the text in the course of transmission) with the conventional opening, “And Zophar the Naamathite answered and said” (as in 20:1), and perhaps also with some personal address to Job (as in 11:2–6; 20:2–4; cf. also Duhm).

7 Zophar is appalled at the thought of what lies in store for the wicked man. His destiny is to be abandoned by God (v 9), to see his children fall to the sword, to famine, or to plague (vv 14–15), to lose his wealth overnight (v 19), to be swept away from the security of his home (vv 20–22), and to be ultimately forgotten (24:20). Zophar wishes no one any harm—any harm, that is to say, that they do not deserve—and he shudders to think of such a fate befalling anyone, unless perhaps they had assaulted him personally (“rose up against” him). We ourselves might say we wouldn’t want it to happen to our worst enemy, and there is perhaps only a difference in rhetoric when Zophar wishes it would happen to his enemy (for the language, cf. 2 Sam 18:32). It is not that Zophar is thinking of any particular enemy of his, or even that he is conscious of having any enemies at all (any more than we are when we speak of our worst enemy). His emphasis is entirely on the wicked (as Davidson sees), rather than upon any hypothetical enemy he might have.

So how is Job connected with this depiction? We may be sure that by his “enemy” Zophar does not in the least mean Job. Job is his friend (even if Job will not believe it), and Zophar wishes Job no harm. In 11:13–19 he had offered Job his prescription for how he could be restituted to his former happiness and security, and had painted a glowing picture of future hope, safety, and rest for Job. The purpose of this third speech of his is no doubt the same as that of his second speech (chap. 20): it was the grimmest picture Zophar knew how to paint of the fate that awaits the wicked, and he set it before Job in order to frighten him, in all kindliness, into amendment of life. Not for a moment does he regard Job as a wicked () man or a wrongdoer ()—though Job has no doubt sinned in some way and is being punished for it, and that less than he deserves (11:5–6). What Zophar does not seem to realize is that Job has in fact already suffered the fate of the wrongdoer, having lost all his offspring and being overturned by a flood of disasters. It is an irony that what Zophar wishes for his enemy is reality for his friend.

8 One might think that when anyone, righteous or wicked, is “cut off,” they do not have a lot of hope; there is certainly no hint here that the righteous do have hope when the wicked do not (cf. Driver-Gray), and it is not a matter of recovery from sickness (as Strahan). The only hope anyone can have at the end of their days is that they may somehow survive in their descendants and in the property they leave behind them for their descendants—and that, says Zophar, is the hope that is denied the wicked (the thought will be developed in vv 14–17).

9–10 Even the “impious” (, previously at 8:13; 13:16; 15:34; 17:8; 20:5) may be constrained by calamity to approach God with prayers. But God of course—for (we must remember) Zophar knows what God will and will not do (cf. 11:5–6)—will have no regard for the prayers of the wicked. If the situation of vv 14–15 is already in view, of the loss of the wicked’s offspring, that has already happened before the wicked man is being “cut off”—so it is not for their survival that he is praying. The logic of Zophar’s position leaves something to be desired.

On the “cry” () for help, see on 19:7. On “delighting” ( hithp) in God, see on 22:26–27, where also it appears in the context of prayer. By asking whether the wicked will call upon God “at all times,” Zophar asks whether the wicked will become a pious person, constant in prayer (cf. de Wilde “Can he have his delight in the Almighty, so that he can call on God at any time?”). He is not suggesting that “it is useless to cry to God in the crises of life, if he is ignored at all other times” (Rowley). Nor is it that v 10 strays from the track of the fate of the wicked to the question of his character, whether he acts as a pious man (as J. Strahan). For the sequence of thought seems to be: Will he be heard by God? Will he be continuously in prayer, as the pious are, and so be sure to be answered?

These sentences contain a hidden message for Job, no doubt. Since he is not one of the “impious” and the “wrongdoers,” he could conclude—and Zophar wants him to make this inference—that he will be heard by God in his extremity. This is no more than the obverse of Eliphaz’s cameo in 22:26–27 of how Job may expect God to listen to his prayer.

11–12 These verses are assigned in this commentary to Job’s ninth speech (27:1–6, 11–12); for Comment and Notes see after 27:6.

13–23 The fate of the wicked person ( is “human being” and not “man” specifically) is here described in terms of the fate of the offspring. The end of the wicked is here not to be cut off in their prime but, worse than that, to live to see the death of their children, who are brought to an early grave. Rhetorically, it heightens the disaster that befalls the wicked person if others of the family are drawn into the same fate; but ideologically also there comes to the surface an important theme in Hebrew ethics, that of the solidarity of the family and the difficulty of escaping the consequences of one’s parents’ wrongdoing (cf. Jer 31:29; 18:21).

Though the Hebrew uses the singular forms throughout vv 13–23 to speak of the wicked (except in v 13b), it also has, unusually, described the wicked in v 13 as an , a “person,” without specifying the gender. So in the translation and commentary I have used plural forms consistently since it appears that the text does not want us to regard the wicked here as necessarily male.

13 The remainder of this third speech of Zophar’s, on the fate of the wicked, begins with a sentence that is almost a trademark of his. At the end of his second speech he has concluded “Such is the fate God allots to the wicked” (20:29a), using identical language to that of v 13a here—except that it is “with God” () here and “from God” () there, and “this, such” () looks backward there and forward here.

On the meaning of “portion” () as life as a given totality and of “inheritance” () as life as something in process of becoming, see on 20:29. The doctrine of exact retribution is combined in these terms with a kind of predestination.

14–15 The unfortunate fate of the children of the wicked is now the theme; it is a common topos in wisdom texts (cf. 5:5; 18:19; 20:10; Prov 13:22). Having many sons, or children of either sex (the Hebrew is rarely specific, the term meaning either “sons” or “children”), is usually a mark of divine favor (cf. Pss 127:3; 128:3). For them to die early, before their parents, is a mark of signal divine displeasure (cf. 5:4; 20:10; and cf. Ps 37:25). The misfortune of the wicked will be to lose their children to an unavoidable disaster; the text invokes the familiar sinister trio of death—war, famine, and plague (so too in Jer 14:12; 15:2; Ezek 5:12; 6:11–12; 14:12–20 [with wild beasts]; Rev 6:8 [also with wild beasts]; in Job 5:20 we have simply famine and war, and in Lam 1:20 war and plague). The image is of some children surviving the first disaster only to be carried off by the second, and so on (cf. 20:24); for “those who survive” () in v 15 cannot be those children who outlive the wicked person, since the death of the wicked person is not in view at that point.

If the children of the wicked have become many, it is not a mark of divine blessing, says Zophar; it is only to provide food for the sword (for the image of the sword as “devouring,” cf. Deut 32:42; 2 Sam 2:26; 11:25; 18:8; Isa 31:8; Jer 2:30; 12:12; 46:10, 14; Hos 11:6; Nah 2:14 [13]; 3:15; 1QM 6:3; 12:12; 19:4). The sword is implicitly personified, as the plague is explicitly—and, later, the east wind (vv 22–23). Those of them that escape death in war will starve; if they are “not satisfied with food,” that does not mean that they are hard to please; rather, it is a litotes for not having enough to live on (cf. Amos 4:8; Mic 6:14). Those who escape the first two disasters will be brought to their death by the third, plague; and if they are buried by the plague (), it means that they lie where they fall and they are not really buried at all; so to the fact of their death is added the bitterness that they lie unburied, a terrible fate (cf. 1 Kgs 13:22; 2 Kgs 9:10; Jer 7:33; 8:2; 9:21 [22]; 14:16; 22:19).

But who are “his widows” (), who do not weep? If we take the word at its face value, they must be the widows of the wicked person, who is generally referred to in the singular throughout vv 13–23 (though in v 13b it is the plural “oppressors”). In that case, the wicked person is a polygamist (so Hölscher, Fohrer, Gordis, Andersen, Sicre Díaz, Good). That makes sense, of a sort, since in most societies it is only the wealthier who can afford to be polygamous, and the wicked one here is plainly a person of means (cf. vv 16–17, 19). But it seems a little strange that the reference to polygamy should be dropped into the text so casually; it is alluded to nowhere else in the book of Job, and it is not as though there is anything “wrong” with the practice, since in the Hebrew Bible it is mostly attested to among the ancestors and rulers of the people, not among evildoers. And it is strange too that the wicked person here being described should have been called in v 13a an , a “person,” and not an , a “man,” if the wicked one in question is so clearly a male as to have wives. It is odd too to find here a reference to widows of the wrongdoer when there has been no sign hitherto that the wrongdoer has died; indeed the very point of vv 14–15 seems to have been that the wrongdoer outlives his or her children, and has the misfortune of seeing their premature deaths.

All of these difficulties disappear if we regard the widows as the wives of the wrongdoer’s children. These offspring of the wicked have been said to be “many” (v 14a), so that is why “widows” is in the plural; and if they are killed by the sword they are perhaps more likely now to be adults than children. So they will have been married, and it is their widows who will not mourn their death. And why will they not? The same clause occurs at Ps 78:64b, where the priests of Yahweh have fallen by the sword. Are these widows “unmoved” by their husbands’ death (Dhorme)? Or are they “glad to be rid of him [the wicked man]” (Andersen)? Or is it that death by plague becomes so common that even mothers will not weep for their children (Gordis), or that they are facing such hardship themselves that they cannot weep over the loss of their own children (Hartley)? Or is it that “their widows are too stricken to think of the customary rites of mourning” (Strahan)?—which is to say, no doubt, that they are at the point of death themselves, since plague is nothing if not contagious. Or is it not rather that, if they are not buried, their widows cannot carry out the solemn rituals of mourning for them, and do not even have the consolation of laying them to rest (Davidson, Duhm, Hölscher)?

The picture of the premature deaths of adult children is cruelly reminiscent of the personal history of Job himself, and it might be thought that Zophar is implying that, with such an event in his life, Job must belong to the company of the wicked. But it is more likely that this is no more than another example of the callousness of the friends, and that Zophar’s point, just as in his second speech (chap. 20), is not to threaten Job but to bring him, by portraying the fate of the unrepentant sinner, to abandon any guilt in his own life.

16–17 The evildoers’ conspicuous wealth now becomes the subject. Even if their children are many, the wicked do not get the benefit of them, for they die before their time (vv 14–15). And now we find that even if the possessions of the wicked accumulate, they are not left to the children to live on, and the wicked have no enjoyment of them themselves. Rather they are distributed to the righteous. Nothing is said here explicitly of the death of the wicked; but it is hard to see how the innocent can divide the wrongdoers’ silver among themselves if not after the wrongdoers’ death. Though nothing is said explicitly of God’s involvement here either, it is no doubt implied that it is his doing that the righteous find themselves rewarded for their piety out of the proceeds of the evildoers’ activities.

The clause “he heaps up silver like dust” occurs also at Zech 9:3b (though with a variant word order); it is doubtful, however, whether there is any literary relationship between the texts. Unusually, it is not gold that is here paired with silver (as in 3:15; 22:25; 28:1) but clothing (), another commodity of high value (cf. Gen 24:53; Josh 7:21; 2 Kgs 7:8; Zech 14:14; Matt 6:19). Hartley notes a similar parallel in Ugaritic texts (UT 1115:3–5; 2101:14–17 [= RSP, 1:248, no. 329]). The parallelism of dust () and clay () as substances without value is met with also at 4:19; 10:9 (cf. 30:19). There is a hidden order of things alluded to here: “dust is not only a symbol of what is abundant (Gen 13:16; 28:14) but also one with the world of death and decay” (Habel).

The two cola of v 17 correspond in inverse order to the two cola of v 16 (a rare example of “mirror chiasmus,” as at Isa 22:22; cf. Watson, 203): the righteous wear the clothing the impious have amassed (vv 16b, 17a), and the innocent share out the silver the wicked have heaped up (vv 16a, 17b). For the idea of others acquiring one’s wealth, cf. 5:5; Ps 39:6 (7); Eccl 2:18–21; and especially Prov 13:22 “The sinner’s wealth is laid up for the righteous.” It must be said, however, that the idea that, in the real world, the righteous fall heirs to the wealth of the wicked is a piece of wishful thinking, no more.

24:18–24 This strophe has been transferred from its usual place in chap. 24 because it appears to belong to a speech of Zophar rather than of Job. It forms one of the most difficult sets of verses encountered in the book. There are many textual and philological problems; NAB, for example, does not even attempt to translate most of vv 18–21 but simply offers an English version of the Vulgate in a footnote. The worst problem, however, is that, in its present position in the book, it is so hard to see what these verses have to do with Job’s argument in this speech, indeed with Job’s argument at any point in the book. If they are really saying that the wicked get their just deserts, that is not only the position of the friends and not of Job, but it is also the very opposite of what Job has been arguing in this very speech in chaps. 23–24.

For this reason, it would not be surprising if the theory that the strophe has been misplaced were correct; for we are at the end of the third cycle of speeches where by all accounts there has been serious textual corruption. In the Hebrew text as it stands, Zophar has no speech at all in the third cycle, and there are good grounds for assigning 27:7–10, 13–23 to one of the friends rather than to Job. Perhaps the present strophe (24:18–25) belongs with that passage and helps to restore Zophar’s missing speech.

Many commentators and some translations believe that the strophe is misplaced in its present position in chap. 24, and remove it to some other speech. Larcher, followed by JB and Pope, for example, places vv 18–24 after 27:23, and Dhorme after 27:13, attributing the verses to Zophar. GNB also assigns this speech (perhaps vv 18–25) to Zophar. Alonso Schökel-Sicre Díaz transpose the verses to follow 27:7, and regard them as the opening of Zophar’s speech. The passage might equally well serve as part of Bildad’s speech, after 25:6, just a few verses away. Peake thinks only vv 18–21 are not Job’s, but it is just as hard to imagine v 24 in Job’s mouth as vv 18–21.

There are three possible ways for salvaging this strophe for Job’s speech, which are worth reviewing, though none of them is ultimately successful. One is to regard vv 18–24, affirming the eventual downfall of the wicked, as words Job puts in the mouth of the friends. The passage could then be prefaced with “You say” (as RVmg.; so too RSV, Gordis, regarding the quotation as extending from v 18 to v 24; NRSV, however, does not have “You say”). This is the view of Davidson, who thought that vv 18–21 might be Job’s parody of the popular view of the fate of the wicked, while vv 22–24 are his own depiction of the actual truth. It is an attractive interpretation, especially if we understand vv 22–23 as God’s continuing support for the wicked; but it is hard to see how v 24 can mean that “it is natural death that overtakes them, like that of all others [Davidson reads the MT ]. . . . And they are cut off . . . not prematurely, but having attained to full ripeness.” For the emphasis seems rather to be upon the brevity of their exaltation ( “they are exalted for a moment”)—which makes the verse into a rather conventional statement of the fate of the wicked. And there are other problems, too: the meaning of (v 22) and the sense of “his eyes are upon their ways” (v 23; see Note 24:22.c and Comment on v 23).

The second method of understanding these lines as genuinely Job’s is to take them as a curse that he puts on the evildoers. Thus NJPS “May they be flotsam on the face of the water; may their portion in the land be cursed.” Similarly Hartley, Newsom. This interpretation follows the LXX, which translates several of the verbs in vv 18–20 as wishes (optatives). The difficulty with this approach is that there are no clear jussives among the Hebrew verbs here, i.e., there are no grammatical markers to show that we are dealing with wishes (we have, for example, “he is light” and not “let him be light,” and we find “he turns” and not “let him turn”).

A third approach is to see vv 18–24 as an argument that, though the wicked do in fact suffer disasters, in the end things turn out well for them. That would account for apparently categorical statements about the fate of the wicked, such as “their portion is cursed in the land.” Job could be perhaps be meaning that although their portion may be cursed, nevertheless . . . The verbs could be used in a modal sense (cf. Note 4:20.b; NEB adopts such a view in v 21: “He may have wronged . . . yet God in his strength . . .”). This line of interpretation would depend on finding some strong positive statement about the success of the wicked, and vv 22–23 seem to provide such a statement. If we are to follow the RSV, for example, it would seem that God “prolongs the life of” the wicked and “gives them security,” even when they themselves are in despair. That would fit well with Job’s general point of view in this speech, where he is arguing that the wicked are able to persevere in their nefarious deeds without any intervention by God. Here he would be saying, at the climax of his speech, that not only does God not bring wrongdoers to justice on days of assize (v 1) but he even supports and encourages them in their wickedness. The strophe could then be translated:

¹⁸They may be carried off swiftly on the face of the waters,

their portion in the land may be accursed,

and no one may turn to their vineyard.

¹⁹Drought and heat may snatch away the snow waters,

Sheol may snatch away sinners,

²⁰The womb may forget them,

the worm may feast on them;

they may no longer be remembered,

and wickedness may be shattered like a tree;

²¹they may wrong the barren woman,

and do no good to the widow—

²²yet God prolongs the life of the mighty by his power;

they rise up even when they have despaired of life;

²³he allows them to rest in security,

and his eyes keep watch over their ways.

But there are problems with this approach. The first is that it cannot cope with the verse that follows, which can only mean that the wicked come to a bad end:

²⁴They are exalted for a time, and then are gone;

they are brought low, and shrivel like mallows;

they wither like the heads of grain.

Vv 18–21 can indeed be concessive, but v 24 cannot—partly because it is the sequel to the “positive” verses (22–23) and partly because the fate that it portrays is so final: the wicked “are no longer,” they “shrivel” and “wither.”

The second problem is that even the apparently “positive” verses may not be such. A lot hangs on the verb in v 22: does it mean that God “prolongs” the life of the mighty (i.e., the wicked), or, since there is nothing in the Hebrew corresponding to “the life of,” may it perhaps not mean what it usually does, “he drags off” the wicked? If that is the meaning of the verb, then vv 22–23 could be rendered:

²²God drags away the mighty by his power;

if they rise up, they can have no assurance of their life.

²³He allows them to rest in security,

but his eyes keep watch over their ways.

All in all, it seems most satisfactory to regard vv 18–24 as descriptive of the downfall of the wicked, and, moreover, as belonging to a speech of Zophar rather than of Job, as it does in its present place. See further the Comment on v 23.

The theme of this strophe is the end of the wicked; we can compare Bildad’s depiction in 8:11–19 and 18:5–21, and Zophar’s in 20:4–29. The main themes of the account are that the wicked, when their time comes, are swiftly and utterly removed from the world of human life (vv 18–19); they are soon forgotten (v 20); their security and ease are only apparent (vv 22–23); their power is temporary; and their end is as final as the death of a plant (v 24). The whole strophe has the air of certainty we have come to expect from the friends.

18 The controlling idea in this whole depiction of the fate of the wicked (vv 18–23) seems to be the contrast between the disastrous reality that has overwhelmed them and the appearance they have given of solidity and strength. Their appearance is that they are “the mighty” (v 22), who are “at ease” (v 23) and “exalted” (v 24). But what this opening line says of them, now that they have met their end (or, at least, now that their end is known to the wisdom teacher who speaks these words), is that they are nothing but “light” () and insubstantial. is normally used of a swift runner (2 Sam 2:18; Eccl 9:11; Isa 18:2; Jer 46:6; Amos 2:14, 15), but since one cannot run “on the face of the waters” the image must be of something light on the surface of the water, like the twig on the face of the waters in Hos 10:7; NJPS and Habel think of “flotsam” on the waters, NIV of “foam,” and NEB of “scum.” The verb , with which the adjective “light” is connected, means “to be trifling, of little account, contemptible” (e.g., 40:4; Gen 16:4; 1 Sam 2:30; but also “to be swift,” as in Job 7:6; 9:25). So the “mighty” are in reality as light as a leaf, and “contemptible”—if only a God’s eye view of them could be taken.

Furthermore, to be “light” or “contemptible” () is also in a way already to be “cursed”; piel is a normal word for “curse” (as in 3:1), and the next line plays on the connection between “light” and “cursed” with its phrase “their portion is cursed () in the land.” Their “portion” () is obviously their portion of ground, their parcel of land (as in 2 Sam 14:30 [RSV “field”]; Amos 7:4 [RSV “land”]) since it is “in the land” (). Being “cursed,” presumably by God (as in Gen 8:21), it will be barren. Likewise their vines yield no grapes, so no one turns down the path to their vineyard. Less probably, the idea may be that the curse that lies on the vineyards frightens off farmworkers, so that the crops of the wicked cannot be reaped; so NEB “their fields have a bad name throughout the land, and no laborer will go near their vineyards.” Fields and vineyards are, as Ravasi says, the outward signs of a socioeconomic position of well-being. To have one’s productive land cursed means annihilation (cf. Deut 28:16).

19 If v 18 has pictured the wicked as cursed, v 19 has their actual death in view, snatched away from life by Sheol. The verse must contain a comparison, between the effect of heat on snow waters and the effect of Sheol on sinners. To “snatch away” or “rob violently,” the usual meanings of (as already in vv 2, 9; also in 20:19), is strange language for what heat does to snow water, and Sheol itself is not elsewhere said to “seize” its victims, though the wicked is “torn” () from his tent by the underworld terrors in 18:14, and the snares of Sheol encompass () the pious in Ps 116:3 (cf. Ps 18:4 [5]). The point of the comparison may be the rapidity of the disappearance both of the snow and of the sinners: as we have read in 6:15–17, the wadis are in their season “swollen with thawing snow,” but “no sooner are they in spate than they dry up; in the heat (, as here) they vanish away.” But it is perhaps more likely that the idea is that both the snow waters and the wicked disappear without trace; there would then be a connection between this verse and the following, where the wicked are “forgotten” and “no longer remembered.”

20 The images of the fate of the wicked here become increasingly random and incoherent (contrast 8:11–19; 15:2–35; 18:5–21; 20:4–29). Their mothers forget them, the worm eats them, they are forgotten (by humanity generally, apparently), their wickedness is broken like a tree. Three or four unrelated images (if the text is sound) are clumsily (so it seems) lumped together; or perhaps the text is becoming surrealistic.

The wicked are soon forgotten. In a society in which it is important to have one’s name “kept in remembrance” (cf. 2 Sam 18:18), it is a dreadful end that one should be forgotten. Cf. Jer 11:19, where the prophet is threatened with being “cut off,” so that his name is no longer remembered. This forecast of the fate of the wicked is very different from that given by Job in 21:32–33, where watch is kept over the evildoer’s burial mound. Usually, of course, it is offspring that keep one’s name alive; here it is, strangely enough, the mother of the wicked. The womb is not elsewhere said to “forget” (), but cf. Isa 49:15: “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb?”

And the wicked are nothing but food for the worms (). Job himself has spoken of addressing the worms as “mother” and “sister” (17:14; cf. also Isa 14:11), as if he already belonged to their company, and he has seen the fate of humanity, prosperous and miserable alike, to be covered by worms (21:26). Zophar’s picture here is grosser, one of an infernal gastronomy, as the wicked are “snatched” from the upper world by Sheol (v 19) in order to be fed to its worms as juicy tidbits to be sucked at ().

For the image of a tree being “broken” or “shattered” (), cf. Exod 9:25; Ps 105:33. We have already had images of a tree being “cut down” (, 14:7) and of hope being pulled up () like a tree (19:10).

21 Here is another oddity about this strophe. While its prevailing subject is the fate of evildoers, at this point it seems to veer off into a description of their wrongdoing, not their eventual end. Whatever they do or do not do to the barren woman and the widow seems at this point irrelevant to the depiction of their ultimate fate. Some indeed think that this verse too must recount one of the punishments in store for them, namely, that they should “consort with a barren woman who bears no child” (NJPS), and so fail to produce offspring who will keep their name alive. But it would be strange if a reference to the barrenness of their wives should follow the reference to their death (v 20), and in any case there are some difficulties with the translation of as “associate with, consort with” (see Note 24:21.b).

The Hebrew text has the wicked “feeding” or “preying” () on the barren woman, but what have they to gain from preying on such a person? Habel thinks the wicked man is trying to extract the last ounce of life from her and finds this “another example of the poet’s brilliant combination of incongruous elements.” Somewhat preferable is the small emendation to , which will yield the translation, “he wrongs” the barren women. But is that any more meaningful? However unhappy the situation of a childless woman in a patriarchal society (cf. Ps 127:3; Isa 51:18; 54:1), how can it be the fault of the wicked man? It can only be that the childless woman is his own wife, and that in his lifetime he is already being punished by having no offspring, which not only hurts him but is a matter of him “doing wrong” () to his wife by being the indirect cause of her barrenness. And he “does no good” to his widow (again, his own wife, not widows in general) by leaving her childless, without sons and daughters to support her.

However the verse is understood, it seems to have no connection with what precedes or follows it.

22 There are two main ways in which the Hebrew of this verse may be taken. (1) RSV: God prolongs the life of the wicked, giving them security even when they are despairing (v 23), but then bringing them to destruction (v 24). There would be a conflict then between the extending of life in v 22 and the brevity ( “[for] a moment”) of the exaltation of the wicked in v 24; and there is a problem with rendering the verb as “prolong” (see Note 24:22.c). (2) NIV, NEB: God drags away the mighty; even if they feel secure, they can have no assurance about their life (v 22). God lets them rest in a feeling of security (v 23), but their power soon comes to an end.

“Dragging” () is something done with cords or ropes (Jer 38:13; presumably Gen 37:28; with a fishhook, Job 40:25 [41:1]; metaphorically, Isa 5:18). In Ps 28:3 also it is the fate of the wicked to be “dragged away” by God to destruction. The metaphor is from hunting (cf. 18:8–10): the prey is caught with ropes and dragged off by the hunter. When do the wicked “rise up,” then? In Job, “rising up” is most commonly used of rising from sleep (7:4; 24:14; from the sleep of death, 14:12) or of rising to one’s feet (1:20; 19:18, 25). Here it seems to be the latter, “standing up” in the metaphorical sense of being prosperous, successful (as Ps 20:8 [9]; cf. BDB, 877b). Even when things seem safe for the wicked, says Zophar, they can have no certainty (lit. “he does not trust in life, or, his life”); the phrase is found also in Deut 28:66, among the curses for disobedience to Yahweh: “your life shall hang in doubt before you; you shall be in dread night and day, and you will have no assurance of your life.”

23 If v 22 has said that no matter how mighty the wicked may be, they can be taken away by God, and that even when they feel they are in possession of their power, they can have no assurance of their life—then in this verse also there is a contrast between their apparent security and their underlying insecurity. God grants them to live untroubled lives of ease ( “be at ease,” “in safety”), as he leaves the tents of brigands in peace (12:6)—but his eyes are “on” () their ways. This latter phrase is taken by some as a further indication of God’s protection of them (so RSV “and his eyes are upon their ways”; cf. Peake, NAB, Moffatt), but the phrase is elsewhere always used in a negative sense: in 2 Sam 22:28 God’s eyes are on the proud to bring them down; in Jer 16:17 his eyes are on the wicked people of Israel, whose iniquity is not concealed from him; and in Job 34:21 his eyes are upon the ways of a man, and there is no darkness where an evildoer can hide (Job has himself suffered from the over-watchful eyes of God; see 7:20; 10:14; 13:27). It is different when “our eyes are upon you” (in prayer, 2 Chr 20:12), and different again when the preposition is “unto, towards,” as in Ps 34:15 (16), where the eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous (quoted in 1 Pet 3:12; cf. also Job 33:18), or when it is “on,” as in Job 7:8, when God is looking for Job. So it seems that there is in this verse a contrast between the ease that God grants the wicked and his searching examination of their doings that never ceases (GNB “but keeps an eye on him all the time”). It is the contrast between appearance and reality that we have met with also in v 18, at the beginning of the strophe.

To “rest” is literally to “lean” (), as when a man leans upon his house (8:15) or upon a spear (2 Sam 1:6) or “relies” on God (2 Chr 16:7; Isa 50:10) or upon horses (Isa 31:1). Here, exceptionally, the verb is used absolutely, of resting, being at ease, feeling secure. The sense is strengthened by the word “in safety,” which is commonly used of dwelling in safety (e.g., 11:18; Lev 25:18).

24 The theme of appearance versus reality is here transposed onto the temporal plane; that is, the contrast is now not between two concurrent states of affairs but between the high standing of the wicked that is swiftly overtaken by their sudden humiliation. They are “high” () for a little, but then they are suddenly “low” (); for a moment they are very visible, and then they have disappeared ( “he is not”; cf. 7:8, 21). The picture cannot be of a swift and painless death (cf. Peake), of their being harvested when they are fully ripe (as in Eliphaz’s picture in 5:26 of the sheaf of grain coming up to the threshing floor at its season), for the language is of the contrast between elevation and humiliation, and that cannot be a positive picture.

“Mallow” (, emendation of “totality”; see Note 24:24.e) is a desert plant that grows in salt marshes. Whether or not there is a backward reference to the “drought and heat” of v 19 as the cause of the shriveling of the mallows and the withering of the heads of grain, the wicked are destined for the same withering away, drooping, and ceasing to exist. The image of the withering of plants for the death of the wicked has been used previously in 8:12 of papyrus and reeds (which wither even when they are not “cut” [, which some read here instead of , which apparently means “shrivel”; in 30:4 is used of cutting mallows]). We cannot tell whether the heads of grain are thought of as withering on the stalk because of dryness or because they have been cut off. “Heads of grain” () is the natural term for what is harvested, since “corn was reaped by cutting off the tops of the stalk a little below the ear” (Driver-Gray; others, however, say that the stalks of grain were cut off a few inches above the ground; so J. A. Patch and C. E. Armerding, ISBE, 1:74). Wetzstein, quoted by Delitzsch, reports that bedouin will make raids on standing grain, cutting off the heads of grain with their knives, since they obviously do not carry sickles on raids. It would be interesting if this idea of violent plundering by death lay behind the picture of the heads of grain here.

27:18–23 Finally in this last speech of Zophar, the personal fate of the wicked becomes the subject. The fragile house that the wicked build (v 18) is a symbol for the insecurity of their existence, and the strophe as a whole focuses on the sudden (vv 19–20) and inescapable (vv 21–22) devastation that awaits them, concluding with a picture of the final triumph of death over the wicked (v 23). The language of death, however, is never used, and the disappearance of the wicked is portrayed rather as a violent dislocation by a hurricane. It is as if they were trees that are uprooted from soil where they believe themselves to be planted permanently, from their “place” (v 21).

18 The wicked do not of course recognize that the houses, or lives, they make for themselves have no more permanence than a bird’s nest (some versions make it a spider’s web) or a flimsy hut () built in the fields during the summer for a watchman who will guard a vineyard or field of crops (as in Isa 1:8, where Zion after an assault on it has no more security than such a booth, and 24:20, where earth sways like a booth). J. G. Wetzstein, quoted by Delitzsch, gives an interesting description of the watchman’s hut in nineteenth-century Syria: it was built for the protection of vineyards and melon and maize fields against thieves, herds, or wild beasts; in its commonest form, the hut was a cube of about eight feet, with four corner poles and a roof of planks on which the watchman’s bed lay. Three sides of the hut were hung with a mat or with reeds or straw, and the watchman would sit in its shade during the day and sleep on its roof at night. Once the crops were gathered, the hut would be dismantled. See further, Dalman, Arbeit und Sitte, 1:161–63; 2:55–63; 4:316–19, 333–34.

19 In a night, the wealth of the wicked can disappear. They can go to bed rich, and wake up poor. And once their wealth is gone, it is gone forever; it simply “is not” (). It does not seem to be the wicked themselves who disappear (as against Dhorme) at this point, but their wealth. Nevertheless, this loss of their wealth is the beginning of the end, and death itself follows hard on its heels; it is more of a punishment, and it suits Zophar’s moral audit better that the wicked should personally experience during their lifetimes the loss of all that is valuable to them.

20 The “Terrors” () we have met with before at 15:21 (), 18:11, 14, and 20:25 () as personified spirits of vengeance, denizens of the underworld; they hunt their prey down, surround them, and drag them off to Sheol. The Terrors overtake the wicked “like water” (); the image may seem a little tame since water is not usually an image for sudden destruction (see Note 27:20.b); perhaps the best analogy is Isa 28:17, where “waters” () “sweep away () a shelter,” and the image here may be of travelers caught in the bed of a wadi by a sudden rush of water from a cloudburst (Fohrer). Job himself has spoken of the wicked being “stolen away” () by a tempest () in 21:18, but to very different effect: there he questioned whether that conventional language (cf. Ps 1:4) is borne out by reality, but here Zophar expresses no doubts, only certainties. It might be doubted whether tempests can do anything as secretive as “stealing”; the point then must be not any secretiveness but the fact that the tempest robs the wicked from life and from their dwellings where they have seemed to belong. The onset of destruction in the night only makes it all the more fearful, of course.

21 The picture of the wicked being carried off by a tempest is now elaborated throughout vv 21–23 in a fantastical and baroque style. Though the wicked are not said to “die,” it would seem that being “seized” () and “whirled away” () by a tempest can mean only that (so Fohrer, as against Dhorme, who finds in vv 20–21 only that the wicked are victimized by the Terrors and condemned to wander through the world like Cain, and Hölscher, who thinks that the death of the wicked is nowhere in view in vv 20–23).

The sirocco, the hot violent wind from the desert that blew down the house of Job’s children (1:19), is here the “east wind” (; cf. on 15:2). It sweeps the wicked from their “place” (), their habitation viewed as their stable and fixed location; and, as we have heard before, once they are driven out, their “place” does not see them again (20:9), does not know them any longer (7:10), but disowns them, saying, “I never knew you” (8:18). J. G. Wetzstein, quoted by Delitzsch, reports that in Syria and Arabia the east wind or sirocco is mostly experienced in the winter and early spring. “The east wind is dry; it excites the blood, contracts the chest, causes restlessness and anxiety, and sleepless nights or evil dreams. Both man and beast feel weak and sickly while it prevails.” Here the east wind is connected with a “tempest” (, v 20), and Wetzstein’s reports are once again a propos: “Storms are rare during an east wind. . . . But if an east wind does bring a storm, it is generally very destructive, on account of its strong gusts; it will even uproot the largest trees.”

22 The focus is still upon the tempest as this verse opens, and it is represented as a “demonic enemy” (Habel), a vicious assailant who “does not spare” (as of God as Job’s enemy in 16:13, and as of pain in 6:10), and who assaults the wicked with its “hand” () or force. Then, for a moment, by way of portraying the effect of the tempest upon its victims, the wicked are focalized as they desperately seek to escape from it; the infinitive absolute in the phrase (“fleeing he flees”) “emphasizes the flight as hasty and inevitable” (Dillmann).

Dhorme thinks we are still reading of the wicked who have been uprooted from their homes and have been “abandoned to public vengeance”; so too Hölscher and de Wilde, who think that it is the oppressed who now turn on the wealthy wicked and throw () stones at them. So too JB, translating “Pitilessly he is turned into a target, and forced to flee from the hands that menace him. His downfall is greeted with applause, he is hissed wherever he goes.” (Hartley manages to combine the east wind with human enemies by having the wicked hear “the taunts of the community in the howling of the wind.”) But there is no explicit mention in the text of human opponents, and it is perhaps unlikely that the populace in general would be said to act “without pity” (since it is usually a very much superior opponent, who could in principle show mercy, to whom such a phrase is applied), and above all, once the underworld Terrors have entered the scene (in v 20), we are surely reading about the ultimate fate of the wicked and not their hounding by a disgruntled public. The tempest and the east wind are not mere meteorological phenomena: they are cosmic agents of vengeance, and their intervention also signals that the wicked are now in extremis.

23 Finally, there is attributed to the tempest a human-like gloating over the fate of the wicked, perhaps specifically over “the deserted ruins where the wicked once lived in splendor” (Habel), a calling to attention of the shame of the wicked in their downfall. The tempest claps its hands () at them, a mark, not of approval as it is with us, but of anger, grief, or horror, either genuine (Num 24:10; Nah 3:19) or in derision (Lam 2:15). Hissing or whistling () is a way of expressing scorn (Jer 49:17; Ezek 27:36; Zeph 2:15; Lam 2:15). And the tempest, which might have been thought to be always in motion, with no fixed “place” of its own, on the contrary stands securely in its place (), jeering at the wicked who have been driven from their place (, v 21; strangely, Pope thinks this interpretation “insipid and much too tame for the context”). The tempest and the east wind are depicted as malevolent autonomous forces, but just below the surface Zophar means that they are agents of the divine retribution.

Zophar is at the top of his bent as he draws his depiction to a close. If the art of the poet is to suggest rather than to describe, he has excelled himself in never explicitly mentioning the death of the wicked (so successfully as to lead some commentators to deny that their death is even in view!) and in making his only reference to it the reaction of the east wind: it claps its hands and hisses at them—which it could not do if their fate were not sealed. In this closing verse, moreover, he implicitly invokes the authority of the past with the archaic language he presses into service (see Note 27:23.d). And he has a fine sense of an ending, leaving to the very last the word for stability ( “place”), which the wicked lose but the east wind keeps. And the whole comes packaged with rhythm, assonance, and rhyme: yišpōq ʿālêmô kappêmô, wĕyišrōq ʿālāyw mimmĕqōmô.

Explanation

This speech is the nearest the poet of Job comes to automatic writing. There is nothing new in this speech of Zophar’s. It is hard to see what its point is, and what it seems to be saying is profoundly unrealistic.

Its starting point is that there is a category of humans who are the “wicked.” It is not the purpose of this speech, however, to tell us how they come to be wicked or in what their wickedness consists; its concern is solely with what they may expect, what is their destiny, their “portion” or “heritage” appointed by God (v 13).

What the wicked may expect, one and all, is that they will be “cut off” (v 8), which means that in a night (v 19) all their wealth may be taken from them and they themselves may be snatched away from life as by a violent wind (vv 20b–22). It means also that they will not even succeed in living on in the person of their children, for they will see them die premature deaths (vv 14–15); nor will they leave property behind them as a memorial of their dignity, for it will be shared out among others more righteous than they (vv 16–17). Perhaps, as they see such disasters coming upon them, they will in remorse cry out for help to God; but they can expect no hearing from God (v 9). After all, they have proved by their way of life that they are not the kind of people who “delight in the Almighty” (v 10), so there is little likelihood that they will be found at their prayers. In short, there is no “hope” (v 8) for these people, and their destiny is fixed.

But why is Zophar saying all this to Job? Either Job is one of these people or he is not. Since there is no hope for the wicked, there is no point in preaching to them about their guilt. So if Zophar is preaching to Job, he must believe (as we are encouraged to think from his previous speeches in chaps. 11 and 20) that Job himself is not one of the wicked. Job is of course not perfect, in Zophar’s opinion, for he is being punished by God, and no one is punished without due cause (11:11). But that is not the same thing as belonging to the company of the wicked, so everything that Zophar says about them is in principle irrelevant to Job.

Perhaps Zophar means not to warn Job against becoming like one of the wicked but rather to assure him that there is no danger of that happening, and that the future he can expect is the very opposite of theirs? That seems to have been the line Zophar was taking at the end of his first speech: “You [Job] will be secure, because there is hope; you will be protected and lie down in safety. . . . But the eyes of the wicked will fail, escape there will be none for them, their only hope very despair” (11:18, 20). If that is still his line in this speech, then perhaps by reiterating that there is no hope for the wicked (v 8), he means to say that by contrast there is hope for Job. All one can say is, if that is his intention, it is a strange way of expressing it. For throughout his second and third speeches (20:2–29; 27:7–23) Zophar has addressed not a word to Job personally, has held out no encouragement to him, and has said nothing with a shred of hope in it, but has made his unwavering theme the fate of the wicked. He is expecting a lot of good will from Job if he expects him to hear all of this as indirect support, as constant affirmation that Job may expect in every detail the very opposite of what is laid up for the wicked.

If we take all of Zophar’s three speeches together, their logic does seem to be that Job has nothing to fear since he is essentially a righteous man who has only to “direct [his] mind toward God and spread out [his] hands to him” (11:13) for his life to become “brighter than the noonday” (11:17). But where stands logic if Zophar does nothing (in his second and third speeches) but harp on doom and gloom? Communications have effects beyond their logical force and sometimes to the contrary of what their utterers intend. And the airtime Zophar gives to the wicked suggests that it is with them rather than with Job that his interests lie. If Job is not disposed to take comfort from Zophar’s words, we can hardly be surprised.

But the worst of it is that Zophar’s theology is without a hint of realism. All his depiction of the fate of the wicked can only be what ought to happen, not in the least a report of what does happen. Perhaps we should assign his speech to the genre of “magic realism” so common today in the novel and the cinema. There are, to be sure, literally wicked people in the world, there are oppressors and godless, there are children and widows. But the Terrors and the Tempest, the Plague and the East Wind, of which Zophar speaks (and which we must capitalize, as abstractions personified), belong to a world of magic, of make-believe and wish fulfillment. For these beings have the capacity to discriminate between godly and godless, to sweep away only the oppressors and their offspring, and to leave the pious dividing the silver and wearing the fine clothes of the wicked (v 17). There are terrors and plagues and tempests in the real world, of course, but their effect is entirely indiscriminate—and that is what Job knows, Job who has lost his children and his wealth and his hope of life, and what Zophar knows too, since he has traveled through a real world to visit a real-life Job. But his theology has gotten the better of him.