Why a new translation? I have two motives. The first is personal. I have been deeply engaged by the challenges of the book of Job—its themes, literary affiliations, language, and poetics—for over four decades. During this period I have struggled to set the text in the best Hebraic form that I can and to understand it as authentically as I can in as many layers of sense as I can reasonably construe. It has been said that “translation is the most intimate act of reading.”1 My translation project has demanded that I try to find meaning in every detail and nuance of the text. My efforts in this intimate endeavor have been profoundly rewarding, even though I know one could continue this pursuit for many lifetimes.
The second reason for producing a new translation is on the face of it altruistic—to set the record straight. The book of Job is sometimes touted as the world’s greatest poem. I would hardly challenge that assessment. It is nonetheless a remarkable claim, considering that virtually no reader of the original Hebrew has ever felt satisfied at having understood the poem at the core of the book verse by verse; and that virtually no translator has got a satisfactory amount of it right.
The earliest translations of Job, into Aramaic and Greek, already exhibit diverse interpretations, often reading a Hebrew word or phrase that is different from the one we have received. The classical rabbis were conflicted about whether the story of Job was historical or fictitious and whether Job was fundamentally pious or blasphemous. Early Christian sources immortalized the patient Job of the prologue, seeing in him, as in the “suffering servant” of Isaiah 53, a prefiguration of Jesus, who, though innocent, suffered greatly and ultimately became a paragon of righteousness and model of divine blessing. Medieval Hebrew scholars made many original suggestions toward the elucidation of this or that word; but they were almost entirely wedded to the traditional text, and they virtually all interpreted the book in line with theologies and philosophies that comported with their own or those of their contemporaries. Early modern and modern translations tend to canonize these traditional understandings, assuming the book has been more or less correctly interpreted.
However, the meanings of many words and expressions in Job are based on guesswork. One is often hard-pressed to reconcile the language of the translations with the traditional Hebrew text. There is no delicate way to put it: much of what has passed as translation of Job is facile and fudged. Translators have for the most part recycled interpretations that had been adopted earlier, dispensing with the painstaking work of original philological investigation that might lead to new and proper understandings. Modern commentators have made use of the ancient translations, but these were themselves all too often in a quandary. Accordingly, traditional interpretations have often held sway, and translators have usually followed suit, imposing their notions of what the book of Job is presumed to be saying on their largely unsuspecting audiences. They have, for example, blunted Job’s attack on the deity’s justice and presupposed that Job—who has failed to receive the explanation of his suffering that is revealed to the audience in the book’s prologue and has repeatedly expressed his determination to speak his mind—acquiesces to the deity’s browbeating in the end. In this and in many less significant instances a less prejudiced, or different minded, approach produces the very opposite sense.
Job’s response to the deity’s lengthy lecture on his prowess as creator and sustainer of the world—and on Job’s total lack of power and esoteric knowledge—is routinely interpreted as surrender. The verse (Job 42:6) has always stymied translators. The earliest translation, an Aramaic version found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, interprets: “Therefore I am poured out and boiled up, and I will become dust.”2 The two verbs are parsed entirely differently from the way they are most often understood today. A typical modern translation of Job 42:6 is: “Therefore I despise myself (or: recant), / and repent in dust and ashes.”
The first part of this translation is a stretch, and the second part turns out, after advanced investigation, to be highly improbable. The verb in the first clause (ma’as) is assumed to be transitive, in need of an object, and the translators supply that object, either explicitly or by implication. Concerning the widespread interpretation as “recant,” it is an invention of the translator—no such usage is attested in ancient Hebrew. It assumes an implicit object, “words” or the like, but no such expression occurs with this sense.3 Concerning the rendering “despise (myself),” the closest phrase one can find occurs in Job 9:21: “I’m fed up with (despise) my life.” However, the verb in question does not need an object. It occurs intransitively in the sense of “I am fed up” in Job 7:16, where it is often rendered correctly. In other words, there is a very weak foundation in biblical parlance for the common rendering. It stems from the presumption of the translator that Job is repentant.
The second verb phrase, ordinarily rendered “I repent,” has other well-known usages. An often overlooked one is “to take pity, have compassion” (for example, in Psalm 90:13). Those who translate “I repent” tend to render the following words literally: “on dust and ashes.” They assume that in Biblical Hebrew one can say, “I am doing such and such (in the present case, repenting) in / on dust and ashes.” The assumption is false. An extensive examination of all phrases relating to performing an act in the dust, on the earth, and the like shows that another verb is required: if Job were “repenting” or “regretting,” he would have to be “sitting in / standing on / lying in / being in (and so forth) dust and ashes.” No such complementary verb is found here. We ought therefore to adopt the same meaning for the phrase “dust and ashes” here that we find in its two other occurrences, one in the haggling between Abraham and God concerning the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:27), where the patriarch humbly presents himself as no more than “dust and ashes,” and the other in Job’s characterization of his abasement: “making me seem like dust and ashes” (Job 30:19). The phrase is used figuratively of the wretched human condition.
In this light, Job, in 42:6, is expressing defiance, not capitulation: “That is why I am fed up; / I take pity on ‘dust and ashes!’ (= humanity).”4 I note as well that in the preceding verses Job is mimicking the deity’s addresses to him from the storm (see there). Mimicry is the quintessence of parody.5 Parodic as well is Job’s assertion in 42:2: “you cannot be blocked from any scheme.” Job is unmistakably alluding to the disdainful remark the deity makes about the builders of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:7: “they will not be blocked from anything they scheme to do.” Consequently, Job is parodying God, not showing him respect. If God is all about power and not morality and justice, Job will not condone it through acceptance. This response may not accord with the image of a pious, Bontshe the Silent–type Job that most interpreters have wanted to find in this biblical book. However, Job’s defiance, a product of his absolute integrity, is not the only radical or surprising feature of the book in the reading presented and defended here.
The book of Job is a Wunderkind, a genius emerging out of the confluence of two literary streams. One is a tradition of ancient Near Eastern texts that deal with the plight and appeal of a pious—but not entirely innocent—sufferer. While several motifs and images are shared between these Near Eastern texts and the poem of Job, two works in particular display a structural similarity to the Hebrew masterpiece. The Babylonian “Theodicy” comprises an argument back and forth between a suffering man and his friend, who urges him to eschew a critique of divine justice and acknowledge the positive signs of providence all about him. The form of debate and the theme of theodicy (justifying the deity) certainly evoke a family resemblance to Job. A more piquant parallel to the structure of Job is the Egyptian tale “The Eloquent Peasant.” A poor farmer is railroaded by a landowner who seeks to steal his pack animal and the meager goods he is transporting. The peasant defends his honor before a magistrate. The magistrate is so taken with the simple man’s rhetoric that he selfishly defers giving him justice in order to hear the man speak again and again. Eventually, with the help of the gods, it seems, the case receives a favorable disposition. The fact that the peasant’s poetic speeches are framed by a prose narrative makes this Egyptian work a close parallel to Job, even though the former deals with human injustice and the latter with God’s.
The second literary tradition of which Job partakes is the classical Hebrew corpus, not only the so-called wisdom texts of the Bible, like Proverbs and some of the psalms, but works of narrative and prophecy as well. Of the Hebrew Bible’s three wisdom books, Proverbs, Job, and Qohelet (Ecclesiastes), the latter two shake the pillars of conventional theology. The doctrine of just retribution (the good are rewarded, the bad are punished), which predominates in most biblical literature and is trumpeted in many formulations in Proverbs and some of the psalms is challenged and contradicted in Job and Qohelet. The most obvious way to illustrate this phenomenon is to cite the following verse from Proverbs 13:9: “The light of the righteous shines, / but the lamp of the wicked wanes.” This traditional dogma is quoted almost verbatim and elaborated by one of Job’s companions, Bildad (18:5–6): “The light of the wicked really does wane, / and the flame of his fire fails to glow; / the light goes dark in his habitation, / and his lamp goes out on him.” Job directly undermines this dogma by asking rhetorically (21:17): “How often does the lamp of the wicked wane? / And their ruin overcome them?”
The Joban poet’s reliance on the Hebrew literary tradition goes well beyond this sort of citation, however. The annotations to the translation below indicate many of the allusions and sources, but for the sake of an impression consider the following few examples. The portrayal of Job as a Transjordanian figure of the generations of Israel’s earliest ancestors is drawn through allusions to the narratives and nomenclature of Genesis. The idea that Job could mount a lawsuit against the deity is entertained by Jeremiah (12:1). Job’s railing against what he perceives to be the deity’s indulgence of the wicked finds precedents in Jeremiah (for example, 12:1–2) and Habakkuk (chapter 1). The prophecies of Isaiah son of Amoz (Isaiah chapters 1–39) and the “Second Isaiah” (an anonymous prophet of the Babylonian exile, in Isaiah chapters 40–66) as well as those of Jeremiah, Hosea, Amos, and others provide the poet with a rich reservoir of vocabulary and phraseology.
The character Job is legendary, not an invention of the poet.6 Job is mentioned together with Noah and a certain Danel in Ezekiel 14 (verses 14, 20) as three righteous heroes who, when the imminent catastrophe arrives, will be able to save themselves alone and not their families with them—as Noah had done in the great flood (Genesis 6–9). Considering the nexus among Job, Noah, and Danel, some aspects of an earlier legend of Job can be reconstructed.7 Noah we know. Danel we have known since the 1930s, when a north Canaanite epic called “Aqhat,” for Danel’s son, was discovered at the ancient site of Ugarit, on the north Syrian coast. The epic, written down around 1300 BCE, tells of a righteous judge, Danel, who is granted a son by the gods. A somewhat impudent young man, Aqhat is slain by a petulant goddess. There is reason to believe that in a final, missing part of the epic the son is revived for at least part of the year (perhaps the part when the Hunter constellation appears in the sky). The son’s restoration would have resulted from the gods’ sympathy for the righteous Danel’s grief over losing him. Which brings us to Job. Like Noah and Danel, he is a righteous man among the gentiles. In the biblical book Job’s ten children are killed at the outset and another ten children are given him when his ordeal is over. In line with the legendary pattern, the return of Job’s children would have been predicated on the righteousness of their father.
The biblical book of Job has a distinctive structure. It opens and closes with a story, which, like all biblical narratives, is written in prose. The prologue relates the circumstances under which Job, a uniquely perfect individual, is afflicted by God, and the epilogue relates a rapprochement between the deity and Job upon which he receives another estate and family. In the prologue Job maintains his devotion to God in spite of a sudden turn in his fortunes: “Can we accept the good from Elohim and not accept the bad?” (2:10). But when three old friends come to console him on the loss of his children, it becomes clear that the conventional wisdom, by which God would do nothing unjust, is not up to the task. They have nothing to say. It would seem that Job has begun to reconsider his commitment to blind piety. He shatters the silence by cursing his birth and excoriating the deity for ushering people into a life of pain.
Job’s discourse, formulated like all the speeches in Job and most in the Bible in verse, triggers well-intentioned responses from his companions, each of whom Job answers in turn. The pattern of disputation is cyclic: the companions speak in order, and Job’s replies are for the most part lengthier. Job conducts two arguments in tandem: one with his friends, the other against God. In the second cycle Job’s friends abandon their sympathy as they become convinced that the erstwhile paragon of piety has turned blasphemous. Job has meanwhile initiated a lawsuit against the deity as his only recourse for discovering the reasons for his afflictions—to compel the deity to testify.
The clashes on two fronts set the stage for the remaining structure of the book. At the end of the third cycle (from which a discourse by friend Zophar is missing), Job makes a lengthy forensic presentation. Job’s strategy succeeds in eliciting a response from the deity. However, prior to the original book’s closure, a fourth companion, Elihu, is introduced. This young man, whose presence is noted nowhere else in the book, anticipates the divine discourses but adds a number of points that he feels were insufficiently made by the first three friends and are absent from the deity’s response. Even if, as most scholars think today, the Elihu chapters were added belatedly, they form part of the biblical book. Ironically, because Elihu’s discourses are immediately followed by the divine speeches, one may get the impression that the deity, by seeming to omit Elihu’s embellishments, is rejecting them. The God who speaks out of the storm in the end is far less concerned with justice and human refinement than the God represented by Elihu.
The divine discourse near the end of the book is divided in two, separated by a brief response of dissatisfaction by Job that seems to prompt the second speech. Job responds to the second speech as well (see above), and then, in a stunning turn, God speaks again—this time not to Job but to his companions. Twice he praises Job for speaking “in honesty” (42:7–8), unlike his friends. The companions had rehearsed traditional wisdom in spite of the reality confronting them. Job had sized up reality and revised his beliefs. We the readers know from the prologue that Job’s afflictions derive from the deity’s pride, not from some moral calculus. In the context of the full structure of the book this does not mean, as interpreters have usually thought, that Job took back his criticism. Rather, the remark focuses our attention on the theme of honest speech. The topic of the dialogues between Job and his friends may be the question of divine justice. But the theme of the book, the one that upon reflection has been highlighted all along, is the importance of proper speech—honesty in general and truth in God-talk in particular.
For one thing, the bulk of the book is and revolves around discourse—people, and then the deity, speaking. It is a drama of words. For another, the physicality of speech is underscored: “Job did not commit-a-sin with his lips” (2:10); “Job opened up his mouth and cursed” (3:1); “my speech is a garble (to you)” (6:3); “(How long) will the words of your mouth be a massive wind?” (8:2); and so forth. In the beginning Job’s paramount concern is that his children did not sin by “blessing” (used here euphemistically of cursing) the deity “in their hearts” (1:5). The test of Job’s piety is whether he will “bless” (curse) God or not. Job repeatedly insists that there is no “corruption on my tongue” (6:30); “I swear that my lips will speak nothing corrupt, / and my tongue will utter no deceit” (27:4). When his companion Eliphaz refuses to believe he has enjoyed a revelation from a holy spirit (4:12–21; see there), Job takes pride in the fact that, even if God were to slay him, “I did not conceal the words of the holy one” (6:10). Job is honest to a fault.
A corollary to the theme of integrity and honest speech is the conflict between Job’s epistemology and that of his friends. The companions, as noted above, warrant their claims by appealing to traditional wisdom, sometimes in the form of pithy sayings. Knowledge for them is secondhand—what they have learned through the chain of tradition (see, for example, 8:8–12). Job demonstrates that he can quote—or invent—proverbial wisdom as well as they can (chapter 12). But he gets his insights from experience—from the implications he draws from the fact that he, a righteous man, sorely suffers; from a revelation, a particular experience, he receives from a rogue spirit (see the introduction to 4:12–21); and from the perennial sticking point that the wicked prosper. Job’s companions seek to deny these claims, but Job perseveres in reiterating them.
Determining the time and place of the book’s composition is bound up with the nature of the book’s language. The Hebrew prose of the frame tale, notwithstanding many classic features, shows that it was composed in the post-Babylonian era (after 540 BCE).8 The poetic core of the book is written in a highly literate and literary Hebrew, the eccentricities and occasional clumsiness of which suggest that Hebrew was a learned and not native language of the poet. The numerous words and grammatical shadings of Aramaic spread throughout the mainly Hebrew text of Job make a setting in the Persian era (approximately 540–330) fairly certain, for it was only in that period that Aramaic became a major language throughout the Levant. The poet depends on an audience that will pick up on subtle signs of Aramaic. A geographic setting in the land of Israel, in the Persian province of Yehud, is also fairly certain. The Transjordan is referred to as the East (qedem), and the Jordan River is mentioned in 40:23.
The author displays a familiarity with several Semitic languages—Phoenician, Arabic, and even Babylonian, in addition to Aramaic—and an acquaintance with local Canaanite mythology and some genres of Mesopotamian literature, such as the descriptions of gods (see at the Deity’s Second Discourse) and incantations for the ease of childbirth (see at Job’s Opening Discourse). Several words and expressions can be properly understood only when foreign languages are brought into play. The poet appears to be a polymath whose knowledge of language, literature, and realia (animals, plants, law, astronomy, anatomy) is impressive. Most impressive, however, is his deep and wide familiarity with earlier works of Hebrew literature. He draws on numerous sources, and he dazzles like Shakespeare with unrivaled vocabulary and a penchant for linguistic innovation—in words, forms, and combinations.
The wide use of foreign, and particularly Aramaic, linguistic features in the poetic core serves distinct literary functions. On the one hand, the admixture of foreign words and sounds, together with the predominant Hebrew, yields additional possibilities for wordplay, assonance, and double entendre (see, for example, at 3:8). On the other hand, because the speakers in the book are Transjordanian, and to the east of Israel the Semitic idiom manifests many Aramaic features, the characteristic sprinkling of Aramaic colors the speech of the characters as dialectal, as foreign.
One may surmise that the poet who shaped the prose narrative and composed the bulk of the dialogues was an extremely well-educated Judean, probably living in Jerusalem, who was writing for an audience of like-minded intellectuals. The conclusion that the book was first written for a limited circle would also explain the sorts of difficulties that are posed by the text of Job.
There are several types of difficulty in the text of Job. One stems from the highly poetic vocabulary. The poet, as said, draws on language from a wealth of Hebrew sources. He delights in unusual meanings and forms. He also introduces, as said, foreign words and expressions, sometimes translated into Hebrew terms but often barely domesticated. Moreover, he occasionally invents Hebrew words, patterning them on known forms, adapting them to a particular need or fancy. Accordingly, the interpreter of Job must be alert to the possibilities and prepared to search for the word or form, in any available language, that makes the best sense of a passage.
For example, in 4:3–4 the first line in a set of four is routinely understood to convey Eliphaz’s reminder to Job that he had always “taught the many” how to respond to a personal tragedy. That is the simple sense of the Hebrew (yissarta rabbim). This sense does not, however, comport with the next three lines, each of which highlights the support Job had shown the victims in physical terms: he would “strengthen” their “limp arms,” “raise up” “the stumbling,” and “stiffen” “buckling knees.” A more physical manner of expression is expected for the first line as well. Such a meaning emerges when one realizes that the verb yisser has the unique sense of “fortifying” in Hosea 7:15 and that the word rendered “many” can with a minor change in vocalization be read as rabim (for rabbim) and derived from a Babylonian verb, used elsewhere in Job (33:19), meaning “to tremble.”9 The requisite sense can thereby be obtained: “It is you who have fortified the trembling.” The commonplace translation of “teaching the many” becomes a secondary meaning.
Yet another kind of difficulty in reading Job is that a usage may depend on one’s recognition of its source in order to understand it. When Job in his opening discourse (3:23) asks why light / life would be given “to a man / whose path is hidden” from the deity, nearly all translators misconstrue it. They interpret the first line to mean that the man’s path is obscure to himself. The next line of the couplet they take to mean that the deity blocks the man’s path from him. They entirely miss the point. The first line is drawn almost verbatim from Isaiah 40:27, where the sense is that people’s path cannot be seen by the deity. The second line conveys therefore that it is God who “screens (the man) off from (the deity’s) sight”—and not that the deity puts an obstacle in the man’s path.
There is another way to corroborate this interpretation. In many instances a later discourse in Job picks up on an idea articulated earlier. In this case Job alludes to it in 21:22 when he asks, “Can one teach awareness to El, / when he is judging from the heights?” The full sense of Job’s meaning is brought out by Eliphaz in his elaboration in 22:13–14: “But you (Job) have said: ‘What does El know? / Can he enact justice from behind foggy cloud? / The clouds are his blind, so he cannot see, / as he walks about the rim of the sky.’ ” Job wants to say that by remaining remote from the earth, the deity occludes his view of what happens to people. Job’s intent would have been properly grasped had readers been attentive to the literary source of its language and / or the reiteration of the point later in the dialogues.
A final type of difficulty I will enumerate is that the poet employs language idiosyncratically to convey a technical meaning, such as a legal procedure or an eccentric notion. Perhaps the most outstanding example is Job’s reference to the womb in which he gestated as his own. Whereas Job speaks of the “doors of my womb (belly)” (3:10), nearly all translators render it as the “doors of my mother’s womb,” even though there is nothing in the verse to suggest the presence of his mother. Not only does this interpretation suppress Job’s perspective that the womb in which he wished he could have remained was his own—identifying with the fetus, Job does not know of or acknowledge that the space he inhabits belongs to another person. But by calling the womb his own Job establishes a key to the understanding of one of his later discourses. In his response to Bildad in the second cycle, Job painfully laments that his affliction has become a stigma from which the members of his family and society recoil. In delineating those who reject him, Job asserts the following: “My breath is foul to my wife, / and my odor to the sons of my belly” (literal rendering of 19:17). In the Hebrew and Aramaic of the Persian period the “son of one’s belly” is one’s child, and this is how virtually everyone (mis)translates it here. This sense is unsettling, however, because Job’s children have all been killed in the prologue. Rather, once one recalls that Job’s “belly / womb” is the one out of which he was born, one then realizes that the “sons of (Job’s) womb” are the others who gestated there—his siblings. They, like his wife, keep their distance from him. The Joban poet sometimes creates a sort of private language; and the patient interpreter must discern it.
Job is wont to think differently, even surrealistically. When real life is unbearable, one may turn to the surreal. Job seeks to eliminate the day of his birth and the night of his conception after the fact; and he pursues a lawsuit against the deity. The latter is no metaphor, as many scholars describe it; the lawsuit is enacted and realized to the very end. Suing God may not seem real to the contemporary interpreter; but it is real to Job, to Elihu, who urges Job to drop the suit (34:23)—and to the deity, who responds.
Not only are the language and rhetoric of Job a challenge, but the condition of the text is problematic. As suggested above, the book of Job probably circulated for a time within an elite circle. It did not begin as a sacred or traditional tract. There may not have been more than a few copies, if that. On account of the difficulty of reading and making sense of the work, scribes would have had a hard time preserving it properly and copying it correctly. When one inspects the early translations of the book, into Aramaic, Greek, and Latin, one is struck by how much they misunderstood (see the example from the early Aramaic translation presented near the beginning of this introduction). Specialists tend to agree that the ancient translators often resorted to guesswork, to the substitution of words they knew for words they did not, and to loose paraphrase. Scribes copying the original, too, often replaced unfamiliar words with more familiar ones, seeing what they felt more comfortable seeing.
Moreover, ancient scribes would often leave their mistakes uncorrected and move on. This means that if, for example, a scribe erred, omitting a verse or two, and only later realized his mistake, he would copy the omitted verses following the ones he got ahead of himself in copying. The result is that some verses are out of place. Another possible source of dislocation is that the pages of papyrus, on which Job or copies thereof were likely written, could come unglued accidentally or be taken apart for the purpose of interpolating another text. Scholars agree that several passages in the middle of the book (from chapters 24 through 28) are in partial disarray. I would explain this phenomenon by observing that toward the end of chapter 24 is a later insertion and that a roll of papyrus pages would have had to have been taken apart in order to insert the Elihu discourses, which include, I am convinced,10 chapter 28 (see there). The separation of the earlier version of the text made for errors in the process of its reconstitution.
Be that as it may, part of the process of translating Job entails the reconstruction of the original arrangement of passages, to the extent that one can. There are several philological procedures one can apply in order to restore words and phrases as well as the proper sequence of the text. They all rest on the fundamental principle of making good sense in accord with the norms of the language, poetics, rhetoric, and logic of the ancient period. Our main guides are the texts of the Hebrew Bible and the extrabiblical literature from biblical times; and a careful examination of the structure, language, and rhetoric of the book of Job itself, in which certain patterns can be discerned. A foremost tool is the parallelism between two or more lines that characterizes biblical verse. If one line of a couplet is readily understood and the other is not, the clear line becomes a key to the form and meaning of the other (see, for example, at 4:2).11 Sometimes we are assisted by the ancient versions, which may reflect a text that is more authentic than the one that has been preserved in the traditional Jewish scribal tradition (the Masorah).
The notes to the translation explain or at the least allude to the basis for restorations. Two rhetorical features of the poetry of Job are particularly helpful in this regard. One, as mentioned and briefly illustrated above, is the recapitulation or reiteration of a point in a later—or earlier—discourse.
Another and sometimes related rhetorical feature in Job that assists in the proper rearrangement of text is its dialogic character. Speakers relate to each other and often quote or paraphrase one another. Thus, for example, a passage in which the interlocutor is addressed in the singular must be spoken by one of the companions to Job. And a passage in which the interlocutors are addressed in the plural must be spoken by Job to the companions. Accordingly, a passage with a plural address within a discourse of one of the friends is almost certainly a quotation or paraphrase of Job. The most elaborate example of rearrangement in this translation is the reordering of sections in chapters 25 and 26, which, in spite of the evidently secondary and mistaken attribution to Job in 26:1, is a single discourse, all belonging to Bildad. The first two verses of chapter 26 are addressed to a party in the singular; it is therefore Job who is addressed. Verse 26:4 asks the same addressee, whose words has he been revealing—an allusion to the speech of the rogue spirit that Job quoted in 4:17–19 and which is parodically paraphrased in 25:4–6. Once these pieces are lined up in order, the two other sections fall into place, forming Bildad’s paean to divine grandeur; it starts in 25:2–3 and continues in 26:5 to the end. This is an easy enough jigsaw puzzle to solve.
In the course of the arguments, the speakers, as said above, tend to quote or paraphrase one another. Occasionally someone will be explicitly quoted; but that is the exception. Not to worry, however, there are some rhetorical cues by which we can identify quoted speech. The speaker may make use of a deictic (pointing) pronoun such as “this” or “these” as a preface to quotation. In producing a long series of wise sayings or mock proverbs in his first response to Zophar, Job precedes his citations with the rhetorical question, “And who doesn’t have such (sayings) as these?” (12:3). Further, a switch from singular to plural may tip the reader off. When Bildad formulates his opening in the plural (18:2), it should be evident he is paraphrasing Job (in 16:3). In most instances of quotation the direct discourse will be introduced by references to speaking and / or hearing. Some obvious instances are in Bildad’s first discourse (8:10) and in Eliphaz’s paraphrase of the rogue spirit (15:13). Sensitive to these rhetorical cues, one should realize that 27:13–23, which do not sound like Job, are not from a misplaced speech of one of the companions, as many scholars propose. Rather, Job is citing the “nonsense” that his companions have been “spewing” (27:12). Explicit reference to speech can signal direct discourse. When a speaker gives a cue, we are meant to pick it up.
Most translators and even many modern interpreters of the book of Job are more interested in respecting the traditional Hebrew text than in restoring a more original one and in retrieving its more authentic meaning. One of the best of the modern commentators writes, for example, “Although [a particular] interpretation is somewhat strained, it has the advantage of reading the existing text.”12 From my perspective, there is no advantage at all to promoting an interpretation that is “strained,” much less in translating a Hebrew that is gibberish. The diversity of ancient translations and interpretations demonstrates the frequent unclarity of both the text and understandings of it. The goal is to understand the text, not to sanctify it; and my assumption is that the text was meant to be intelligible—difficult but intelligible. A reconstructed text that is idiomatic, Jobian, plausible, and supported by analogous language elsewhere is certainly preferable to a received text that is simply impossible. If the object is to understand, then the philologist will take advantage of all available means to make sense. In view of what I have written above concerning the theme of Job—honesty in God-talk—it would be quite an irony indeed if one were to sacrifice intellectual honesty for piety in seeking to understand the book.
That being said, I have tended to reconstruct a sequence and correct a reading only when I felt it was necessary for a proper understanding. If one were to compare many modern commentaries on Job, one would find that my approach is, contrary perhaps to first impressions, fairly conservative. I try first to read the text as it is, and I believe I have often been able to explain the present language where others have not. To me it is nothing short of a miracle that a text as difficult as Job can be read and interpreted to such a large extent as received. By my measures, relatively little restoration has been needed.
Translation is not only interpretation; it is not only distortion; it is simplification. The act of translation ascribes sense not only to the intelligible but also to the barely intelligible and even to the unintelligible. It is nearly always easier to follow the translation of a poem than the original. The original enfolds within it untold levels of meaning and suggests a plethora of associations. The original purveys mystery in a way a translation rarely can. A translation necessarily transforms the opaque into the transparent. Accordingly, to read a translation of a book like Job is inestimably simpler than reading the Hebrew original. Even a properly restored Hebrew text is a formidable challenge, demanding that one turn time and again to the entire literary and linguistic resources on which it draws. No one can read Job without research, rumination, imagination, and speculation. The experience of reading a translation of Job, in which interpretative choices have already been made and served, cannot be compared to the exasperating grappling of the translator with the challenges of the Joban text.
And yet in the present translation of Job I propose a restoration and philological interpretation. I have made choices for the reader in line with my overall understanding of the arguments and of the particulars of language, rhetoric, and poetics. Although my primary objective is to convey an accurate sense of the original, I have attempted in addition to convey something of the text’s poetics—its style, its imagery, its wordplays, its sound play, its rhythmic thrust, and the balance between lines. As any reader of literature knows, form and meaning go hand in hand.
My attention to rhythm and the sounds of the text is reflected in the translation of the prose narrative framework of the book as well. With the team of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig and others as well as the tradition of chanting the Bible in the synagogue, I perceive a breaking of the prose sequence into rhythmic groupings, which Buber and Rosenzweig called “breathing units.”13 Although the text may have from the outset been written to be read, it is also engaging of the ear. The amount of alliteration, assonance, and punning one encounters confirms the oral nature of the text. As an added bonus, dividing the prose into divisions of unequal length, on the basis of syntax and sense, facilitates the reader’s grasp of the structure and movement of the narrative and of the dialogue embedded within it.
Most translations of Job pay insufficient attention to the niceties of structure. To take a plain example: Job, in his opening discourse, lays a curse on the day of his birth and the night of his conception (3:3). He expresses this twofold pronouncement in two relatively balanced lines of a couplet. For reasons of syntax in the language of translation, most renderings divide the verse into three lines, thereby unraveling the intertwining of content and form. I have taken a small liberty, by repeating a word and reinforcing the pervasive sound play in the two halves of the verse, in order to produce a balanced couplet—one line for the day, one line for the night. I have tried to maintain a similar sensitivity to form throughout.
In the notes, if not in the translation, I have made the reader aware of the way a notion is expressed in the Hebrew. Translations, as is well known, tend either to bring the source text to the reader in the reader’s own idiom; or to bring the reader to the text and its world, exposing the reader to the thought and language patterns of the source culture. In this translation I have leaned toward the latter approach, believing it to be more authentic. It is certainly more in keeping with my primary philological purpose: to suggest what is actually being said in accord with the earliest established meanings.
1. Spivak, 180.
2. Sokoloff, 101. The first verb is derived from m-s-s “to melt” and the second from ḥ-m-m “to be hot.”
3. “To reject (God’s) words” is what does occur (1 Samuel 15:23, 26).
4. Compare Curtis.
5. Dentith, 3.
6. There was a king of Ashtarot in the Transjordan in the fourteenth century BCE bearing the name Ayyabu, that is, Job. It is possible, but far from likely, that the legendary Job is based on this historical figure (see de Moor).
7. Compare Spiegel. Danel is mentioned in a Phoenician context in Ezekiel 28:3 as well. The name is consistently spelled differently from the namesake of the biblical book of Daniel, a young Judean exile in Babylon.
8. See Hurvitz, Joosten.
9. It is used in 4:14 as well; see there.
10. So Clines, “The Fear of the Lord” and Job 21–37.
11. This method will not always produce sure results, but experience shows that it usually will.
12. Hartley, 404.
13. See Greenstein, “Theories of Modern Bible Translation.”