By Edward L. Greenstein

No biblical text challenges the interpreter more than the Book of Job. It abounds in otherwise unknown words and expressions; its discourse and poetry are often dense; it draws on vocabulary, phrases, and grammatical phenomena from foreign languages; its text is frequently problematic; and the ancient translations, such as the fragmentary Aramaic targum from Qumran and the Old Greek, tend toward paraphrase and simplification—leading sometimes to bizarre interpretations. No wonder scholars medieval and modern have suggested that the book itself is of foreign provenance and is written in a language other than Hebrew.

William Blake, The examination of Job, Satan pours plagues on Job, 1821. (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Blake_Book_of_Job_Linell_set_6.jpg)

Nevertheless, even a cursory reading by a competent Hebraist will reveal that the book is composed overall in a peculiar Hebrew. The poet or poets responsible for the dialogical core of the work (chapters 3 through the first third of 42) make frequent use of foreign language in order to lend verisimilitude to the conceit that the speakers are not Israelites but Transjordanians.

The prose writer of the frame tale, as well as the poet (who may be one and the same), seek to set the story and dialogue in the period of the Hebrew patriarchs, and so they make use of terms and names associated with the biblical literature conveying that era and certain archaic or pseudo-archaic linguistic forms. The poet invents Hebrew words and features, sometimes to project an aura of Aramaic and sometimes because, like Shakespeare and other virtuosos, he likes to play with language.

I have just published a new, annotated translation of the Book of Job with Yale University Press.

Job, A New Translation.

In producing this book, after close to fifty years of study and twelve years of translating, I have constantly had to take account of the linguistic, philological, rhetorical, and poetic possibilities I might encounter. One needs, first and foremost, a command of ancient Semitic modes of expression. On needs to know, for example, that “to get one’s fill of someone’s flesh” (Job 19:22; and compare Psalm 27:2) is not about cannibalism, as one recent translator has asserted, but is an idiom for denouncing an enemy, as a well-known Akkadian locution, borrowed in the Aramaic of Daniel 3:8, shows.

One also needs a deep immersion in Biblical Hebrew of all periods, including the Persian era, when most scholars believe the Book of Job was written. Thus, when Job employs the verb ga’al in calling on the deity to “expunge” the day of his birth (3:5; my translation), he is not using it in the classical sense of “to redeem” but in the Second Temple sense of “to disqualify,” as it is used of the “disqualified” priests in Ezra 2:62 (= Nehemiah 7:64).

The author reading the text of Job in the Leningrad Codex.

Job is a highly intertextual work, in which the interpretation of a word, phrase, or image may depend on the identification of a source—usually from the Hebrew scriptures we know and often from an earlier passage in the Book of Job itself. The poet not only cross-references phraseology in the course of the back-and-forth among the interlocutors, but he twists the meaning of phrases through parody and deconstruction. In the introduction to my translation I highlight a clear example of this phenomenon (the use of Isaiah 40:27 in Job 3:23). Here is a more esoteric one.

In 19:25 Job affirms his belief that were the deity to appear, he would support his claims of innocence: “For I know that my redeemer lives; / The respondent will testify on earth” (my translation). Contrary to the claims of some, to me it is clear that the “redeemer” is God, identical with Job’s “witness…in the heavens” in 16:19. The term for “respondent,” literally “the latter one,” has stumped interpreters. The reference can be understood, first, by considering the immediate context, in which Job expresses his wish to memorialize his legal claims (19:23-24), and, second, by realizing that “the latter one” is the counterpart of “the former one” in the forensic context of Proverbs 18:17. There, we read, the “first/former” litigant brings a suit, and “his colleague comes to cross-examine him.” If the “first/former” is the initiator of the lawsuit, then “the latter” of Job 19:25 is the respondent.

Familiarity with ancient Near Eastern mythology and imagery is also crucial in dealing with a text like Job, whose author displays a quasi-encyclopedic knowledge of the lore and literature of his time. Accordingly, when the poet describes the anatomy of the creatures Behemoth and Leviathan as inanimate material—wood, stone, metal—he is adopting a trope, attested in Mesopotamian descriptions of deities, which endows the creatures with a quasi-mythological character.

But apart from the challenges of interpreting what is written in Job, a serious scholar, who seeks to restore the earliest meanings of the book, must also imagine what is not, but should have been, written. A philologist must treat the biblical text no differently from any other ancient text. Such texts were set to writing and transmitted by human beings. A work like Job was hardly composed as scripture; it almost certainly circulated in small circles of intellectuals and literati before it was copied and transmitted among scribes, who may, like the ancient translators, have had a limited understanding of it.

Accordingly, the serious translator must do one’s utmost to reconstruct the correct sequence of text, based on discursive and logical clues (for example, if the address is in the plural, Job is speaking to his companions; and if the address is in the singular, it is the reverse)—and in accordance with what we have learned about how scribes work.

For example, a scribe who forgets to write a verse, or miswrites a word, will often leave what he’s written and write the correct text at the next opportunity. And, of course, an unintelligible or inapt word or phrase should be replaced by a similar-looking locution that makes sense in context. One’s restoration may not be right, but a sensible emendation is potentially correct, whereas a nonsensical text is not. In my translation I have tried to produce a text that is both linguistically and thematically sound. Many if not most of my footnotes provide justifications for my readings and interpretations.

However, an equal challenge to making sense of the text of Job is to produce a translation that evokes the poetic structure and tropes of the original—to present the reader with a taste of how the complex Hebrew text of Job reads. Here, for example, is my rendering of the most fully discussed metaphor in the book. Job describes the course of his life as a mechanical motion that abruptly stops:

My days run faster than the shuttle in a loom,

Running out for lack of cord, lack of hope.

Apart from the balanced rhythm, there are other poetic features to convey. The verbs translated “run” and “run out” are slightly different, but they form an ironic pun—qallu, wa-yiklu—and so I have rendered them alike. The term for “cord” and “hope” is identical—tiqwa—and so I have provided a double translation, in which the source of the metaphor—the shuttle pulling the thread—and the target of the metaphor—Job’s hopelessness—are both represented in English, as they are both evoked in Hebrew. Finally, the verse is beautifully constructed, as it reaches its end with the “cord/hope” reaching its end.

It has been said that translation generates an intimate relationship with a text. I have enjoyed that intimacy and hope to sustain it as I complete the two commentaries on Job I am engaged in writing.

Edward L. Greenstein is Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies and Head of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan University.