Fokkelman-2012-The Book of Job in Form

The Book of Job in Form

Studia Semitica Neerlandica

Editor-in-Chief

Prof. dr. K.A.D. Smelik

Editorial Board

Prof. dr. P.C. Beentjes, Prof. dr. W.J. van Bekkum,Dr. W.C. Delsman, Prof. dr. H. Gzella,

Dr. W. Th. van Peursen, Prof. dr. J. Van Steenbergen,Prof. dr. E. Talstra, Prof. dr. M. Tanret

VOLUME 58

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/ssn

The Book of Job in Form

ALiterary Translation with Commentary

Translated from the Hebrew, Annotated and Introduced by

Jan P. Fokkelman

LEIDEN BOSTON2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fokkelman, J. P.[Het boek Job in vorm. English]The book of Job in form : a literary translation with commentary / translated from the Hebrew,

annotated and introduced by Jan P. Fokkelman.p. cm. (Studia Semitica Neerlandica, ISSN 0081-6914 ; v. 58)

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-90-04-23158-0 (hardback : alk. paper) ISBN 978-90-04-23234-1 (e-book : alk. paper)1. Bible. O.T. JobCriticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.

BS1415.52.F6513 2012223'.105209dc23

2012018008

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ISSN 0081-6914ISBN 978 90 04 23158 0 (hardback)ISBN 978 90 04 23234 1 (e-book)

Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing,IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

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This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ixThis English Version . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x

PART I

INTRODUCTION

A Great Work of Poetry and the Competent Reader . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Poetics and Competent Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5How Quality and Quantity Work Together: Two Examples . . . . . . . . 10The Way to the Text Itself: Knowledge and Foreknowledge,

Decisive Authority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14Remarks on the Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

Notes to Part I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

PART II

THE BOOK OF JOBA LITERARY TRANSLATION IN STROPHIC FORM

Introductory Prose and Jobs Prologue (Curses and Complaint),Chs. 13 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

The First Round of the Debate, Chs. 414 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43First Speech by Eliphaz, Chs. 45 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43Jobs Answer to Eliphaz, Chs. 67 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49First Speech by Bildad, Ch. 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57Jobs Answer to Bildad, Chs. 910 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59The First Speech of Zophar, Ch. 11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67Jobs Answer to Zophar, Chs. 1214 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

The Second Round of the Debate, Chs. 1521 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85Second Speech by Eliphaz, Ch. 15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85Jobs Answer to Eliphaz, Chs. 1617 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89Second Speech by Bildad, Ch. 18 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95Jobs Answer to Bildad, Ch. 19 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97Second Speech by Zophar, Ch. 20 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103Jobs Answer to Zophar, Ch. 21 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

vi contents

The Third Round of the Debate, Chs. 2228 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113Third Speech by Eliphaz, Ch. 22 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113Jobs Answer to Eliphaz, Chs. 2324 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117Third Speech by Bildad, Ch. 25 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123Jobs Answer to Bildad, Chs. 2627 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125Jobs Final Judgment onWisdom, Ch. 28 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

Climax I, Chs 2931 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135Jobs Survey of His Situation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

The Intervention of a Fourth Friend, Elihu, Chs. 3237 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151Climax II, The Last Long Speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

God Speaks Four Poems, Chs. 3841 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175Jobs Answer, 42:16 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191TheWriter Concludes with Narrative Prose, 42:717 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

PART III

READING AIDS, NOTES, MEASURES

Introductory Prose, Chs. 12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199The First Poem: Jobs Prologue, Ch. 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203The First Round of the Debate, Chs. 414 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209

Eliphaz First Speech, Chs. 45 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209Jobs First Answer, Chs. 67 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212Bildads First Contribution, Ch. 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215Jobs Second Answer, Chs. 910 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217The First Speech By Zophar, Ch. 11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223Jobs Third Answer, Three Poems, Chs. 1214 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

The Second Round of the Debate, Chs. 1521 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233Chapter 15: Eliphaz Second Speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233Jobs Answer to Eliphaz, Chs. 1617 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235Bildads Second Speech and Jobs Answer, Chs. 1819 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240Zophars Second Speech and Jobs Answer, Chs. 2021 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246

The Third Round of the Debate, Chs. 2228 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251Chapter 22: Eliphaz Third Speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251Job Answers in Two Parts, Chs. 2324 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253A Resum En Route . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258The Last Exchange, Chs. 2527 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259Conclusion after Debate, Ch. 28 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

contents vii

First Climax After Debate: Survey In Three Poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273Chapter 29 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274Chapter 30 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277Chapter 31 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279Evaluation: A Growth Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286

Elihu, a Younger Friend, Contributes, Chs. 3237 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289Introduction, the Appearance of a Fourth Friend . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289Chapter 32 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289Chapter 33 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291Chapter 34 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292Chapter 35 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295Chapter 36 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296Chapter 37 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298

Climax II: Gods Answer from the Storm and Jobs Final Words . . . . . . . . 301Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301Gods First Round: Two Poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301Conversation in the Middle: 40:15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305Gods Second Round: Again Two Poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307

The Concluding Chapter, Ch. 42 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313The Conclusion of the Conclusion: Verse 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317The Narrator Concludes the Book, Verses 717 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319

Notes to Part III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329Some Bible Translations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329

Glossary (Literary Terms) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331Subject Index to Parts I and III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333

PREFACE

TheBookof Job is an exceptional, eminently literarywork. It is the onlywell-sustained work of poetry with a well-thought-out plan, and of considerablelength, within a body of literature which itself is of an exceptional qualityand variety in its cultural milieuthe Ancient Near East. The collection ofwhich Job is a part is known in the Christianized world by the somewhatunfortunate nameof Old Testament; themore recent title First Testamentleads to fewer misunderstandings.

The writer did not make things easy for himself. He struggled with fun-damental questions: is integrity possible and credible, evenwhen subjectedto an extreme test? What does this entail for our image of man? And forreaders who are believers and who hope to link up with the Israelite whois the anonymous author of the Book of Job: what does it entail for ourimage of God? Can one be uninhibitedly furious, sad or desperate when oneaddresses God?

The Book of Job is a particularly unwieldy text. Like its author, neithertranslator nor readers can make things easy for themselves. The forms(translations) in which the text is available are of little help, because theyprint the masses of verses without breaks. It is a tall order not to becomedejected and not to get stuck when working through such unarticulatedmatter. Moreover, biblical scholarship has not concerned itself with theproper framing of a theory which could clear up the foundations, the rules,and the conventions of this poetry.

I have concernedmyself extensively with poetics, as readers of my Read-ing Biblical Poetry (2001) know. I have demonstrated that the poets of theBook of Psalms, Lamentations, Song of Songs, Job, Proverbs, and otherpoetry were in full command of their craft on all levels of the text. They con-tinually watched the proportions of verses, strophes and stanzas and man-aged to make them subservient to expression and content. Now that thishas been elaborately documented, we can print and read the poetry in theforms and proportions which have characterized it from the beginning. Mytranslation of the Book of Job makes the text much more accessible by theapplication of blank lines; they make every little step in the speakers trainof thought visible. My annotations provide aids to reading and follow theplot in which the debate of Job and his friends is embedded, together withGods reply from the storm. Furthermore, I establish connections between

x preface

higher units of text, so that the cohesion and the depth of the text can comeout well. At the last moment, the new translation of Job 42:6 fifnally bringsout the true proportions of the heros portrait.

This English Version

The original version of this book is in Dutch, appeared in October 2009 inthe Netherlands and it is called Het boek Job in vorm. The English versionof the central part, the Job text proper, is from my hand. I am grateful toMrs. P. Visser-Hagedoorn, M.A., for her translation of the parts I and III(the Introduction and the Reading Guides) and to my friend Dr. Lloyd Haft,who meticulously checked the entire text and polished some details whereneeded. I wish to thank my Californian friends from the Peninsula BibleChurch Cupertino: their support, well coordinated by Mrs. Melody Moh,covered an important part of my translation costs.

There is one major change in this book. For those readers who like tocheck my version of Job with the original text I have added the full Hebrewtext in such a way that the central part of this book has become bilingual.The left pages have the Hebrew and show those verses which on the rightpages are presented in English.

The main aim of this book is to present a platform for an intensive andhighly personal encounter with a unique and major work of art. Thereforethe presence of the Hebrew text has a subservient function. In the scope ofthis book some subtleties of the Masoretic text are not relevant, so that Ihave skipped them. The book of Job has some forty cases of Ketib and Qere.Most of them are mainly or merely of an orthographical nature; then theQere is attractive. For the rest, I maintain and print the Ketib in Job 9:30a,13:15a, 19:29c, 21:13a, 24:6a, 30:22b, 33:19b and 28ab, 41:4a and 42:16b.

PART I

INTRODUCTION

A GREATWORK OF POETRY AND THE COMPETENT READER

The Book of Job, part of the Hebrew Bible, is a formidable work of poetrywithin a slender frame of narrative prose. For more than one reason it is anexceptional text. First of all, this book is the only sizeable work of poetry inthe Hebrew Bible, and it is an excellent, well-sustained composition. Pointtwo: the author has created poetry of great earnestness, poems inwhich halfa dozen speakers are concerned with diffifcult, fundamental questions ofhuman existence. The central problem is themeaning of innocent suffering.That is a question of unfathomable depth, which, moreover, casts a heavyshadow over the relationship which the believer has or tries to continuewith his or her God. Ultimately, in the Book of Job one is wrestling for thecorrect concepts of both man and God.

The third reasonwhy the Book of Jobmay be called exceptional becomesvisible if I shift for a moment from the Palestine of some centuries beforeChrist to classical Greece. The fiferce debate which Job has with his friendsduring two-thirds of the book, shows a certain similarity with Platos dia-logues as to its nature and concern. Leaving aside the considerable differ-ences, we see in both cases a literary text which defifes the passage of cen-turies because of its quality and which offers an account of a penetratingextended conversation about serious matters. Plato tells us how his hero,Socrates, converses with students and philosophical opponents on subjectslike the destination of the soul, the validity of knowledge, the wished-forform of government, the enchantment of poetry, and many others. Theauthor of the Book of Job in turn stages the elaborate exchange between Joband his visitors, and here, too, the concerns are central things like integrity,wisdom, and the pressing question whether God can still be called good orjust in the face of innocent suffering (the theodicy).

Then the fourth reason: the mutual pervasiveness of prose and poetry.The simple prose sentence with which the author introduces the speech-esthen x from y said or then Job answeredis the standard formula ofquotation which we encounter numberless times in the stories from Gene-sis up to and including Kings, and in younger books like Ezra-Nehemia andChronicles. This introductory sentence inprose signals direct discourse, andit reveals that it is he, the author, and no one else who is holding the strings;he alone decides who can say what andwhen. The repetition of the formulais a thin but strong red thread running all through the poetry, and it ensures

4 a great work of poetry and the competent reader

that all the spoken words in the main body, from chapter 3 on into chap-ter 42, ultimately remain embedded text, that is, speeches by characterswithin a narrative text. Even if their speeches in those chapters are poetry,the author remains, in his capacity as narrator, the fifrst and the last personresponsible for the long series of poems.

And yet, however strong the authors grip may be and however muchthe narrative frame gives the debate in verses unobtrusive rhythm andproportions, a main characteristic of the Book of Job remains that its body,the long series of speeches, is in the form of poems. The type of text chosenis that of didactic literature, but in strikingly renovated form. It is aboutthe genre that is called Wisdom. Its normative form we fifnd in the Book ofProverbs, which is also poetry: worldly wisdom and exploration of moralsin the form of loosely organized collections of proverbs. The Book of Job, itis true, follows this genre, but in quite an idiosyncratic sense. It is unusuallypowerful in two ways: for a long time the speeches are concerned with asingle theme and its attendant motifs, and together the forty poems form astrong composition which builds up to an outstanding conclusion. Becauseof theunique fusionof this art of poetrywith the thin red threadof quotationandwith the prosewhich encloses the body like an envelope, the author liftshis own exercise in wisdom to the level of dramatic art.1

Looking at this Bible book through eyes which have perused AristotlesPoeticsmore than once, I recognize yet another quality, one that the fatherof scholarship in those days ascribed to epic and tragedy: that its hero isdistinguished, not an average citizen. The Book of Job does not representan epic, but the hero after whom it is named, the man Job, is not only aman of high standing socially, but also emotionally and spiritually a strikingpersonality, and his struggle against the injustice that is done to himatleast he thinks in those terms for a long timeis dignififed and immense.

All thismeans that the Book of Job has great pretensions. Reading, under-going and evaluating such claims makes a great demand on the reader;without patience and perseverance we will not get very far. But there isno reason for the reader (m/f) to get discouraged, on condition that he/shegives him/herself and the text time and that he/she has adequate compe-tence. It is exactly that quality, or rather: ability, which Iwant to support andincrease with this introduction. The translation I offer is characterized byqualities which are new andwhich are productive in two directions: regard-ing the text itself and the reader. I shall explain myself.

a great work of poetry and the competent reader 5

Poetics and Competent Reading

The new thing that I am offering here has everything to dowith poetics. TheBook of Job can only show itself to full advantage if we learn how to readand value the poetry as it wants to be read and listened to: as poetry. If weare aware of the rules and conventions of making verses in those days, wewill be much better able to understand the book, and to distinguish whatmatters in the six gentlemens argumentation. In the world of professionalliterary studies, people have become more alive to the literary quality of atext2, but not yet nearly enough. The dimension of the structure of strophesand stanzas has not yet been mapped accurately and convincingly. I haveaddressed that lack with a four-volume work of literary scholarship thatmakes it now possible for me to reap the fruits of that research in my owntranslation of the Book of Job and in the relevant notes.3

The translation I havemade has two characteristics intended to be of usefor productive reading. I have indented the second half-verse of each poeticline, and each poem is presented in strophic form by the use of blank lines.I shall return to this before long, but fifrst I must mention and explain someterminology which is unavoidable in discussing the art of biblical verse:verse, colon, strophe, and prosody.

The original of Job was composed and written in classical Hebrew. Thatlanguage uses fewer words than Dutch or English to say the same thing. Anexample: the statement I have listened to you has fifve words, but Hebrewexpresses the same thing in one word of four syllables, and compared withDutch or English it includes an additional detail as regards information. TheHebrew form also reveals whether the you is male or female; Dutch andEnglish do not show this distinction. These differences between the sourceand target languages have an important consequence for the typography orlayout of poems. The two-part poetic line, the most frequent form of versein Hebrew, easily fifts on one line in a book, but not in our language. That iswhy for years and years our translations have divided such a full verse overtwo lines: each half-verse gets its own line. It is not a bad solution, if onlybecause this division reflfects how the poet makes use of his syntactic units:often his half-verse coincideswith a complete, short sentence (the clause, asthe linguist calls it). And if the poet makes a compound sentence, the mainclause gets its own colon and the subordinate clause as well.

Theword colon can now replace the term half-verse. The greatmajorityof the poetic lines consist of two parts (i.e., they are bicolic), but there arealso three-part (tricolic) verses, and in that case the word half-verse is notappropriate. In the Book of Psalms 12.8 percent of the total 2695 verses are


tricolic, and in the Book of Job somewhat fewer: 7.8 percent of the 1005verses. Theword colon comes from theGreek and itmeans member, part. Itis nowbeing usedmore andmore, since other terms, like stiche, hemistiche,line and couplet do not alwaysmean the same thing for all biblical exegetesand therefore cause a lot of confusion. The term colon is welcome andindispensable because it is unambiguous. Sometimes I also use the wordline segment for such a part of the verse. If we want to lookmore closely ata poetic line, I shall call the fifrst part the A-colon, and the second part willbe the B-colon. They are the half-verses of the binary line. And if there is atricolon (a three-part poetic line), the third line-segment will be called theC-colon.

The older Dutch translations were so wise as to have each B-colon (andthe C-colon, if there was one) indented. This was true of the Dutch Autho-rized Version (the Dutch counterpart of the King James Bible), the LeydenBible of more than a century ago, the widely read 1951 version of the DutchBible Society, and the fifrst and secondeditions of theRomanCatholic Trans-lation. Some time ago things changed; more recent versions have aban-doned this typography, and that is a serious step backward. All cola nowbegin at the same place along the left margin. On the page this creates theimage of a mass of lines which has been articulated too little: a slightly dis-couraging pulp of text.4 If the second colon is indented, the reader will seeimmediately andwithout trouble how the verses run andwhere they end. Itenables him/her to go with the rhythm of the clauses and of the verses, andto enjoy reading with aminimumof breaks. Indentation, howevermodest atypographical measure, actually is well suited to the essence of this poetry,because the difference, made visible, between A- and B-cola helps us expe-rience the creative play which takes place, verse after verse, between thefifrst and second (and sometimes third) line segments. In verse after verse,one half-verse is geared to the other by form and content, by techniques ofcompletion, argument, repetition or intensififcation. Thus each pair of linesegments becomes an interesting duel or duet. Versions which skip inden-tation deny their readers an essential service.

The term verse alsodemands someexplanation.Whenpeople talk abouta Bible versewhether it is in prose or in poetrythey mostly mean thenumbered unit of text. Its numbering, which does not date back to the orig-inal manuscripts but is much younger, is there for practical purposes: forreference to a passage. In this case the term verse is of little literary impor-tance. However, the word is given a specififcally literary meaning when weare engaged with Job, the Book of Psalms, or other poetry. Then it meanscomplete poetic line. In the Books of Job and Proverbs, the numbering of


Biblical verses almost always coincides with the progression of the actualpoetic versesa convenient situation. In the Book of Psalms and in thepoetry of the prophets, however, this is not at all always the case, and thereader must be alert to the difference.

Just as the poets verse nearly always consists of two or three cola, two orthree verses nearly always forma strophe. This term, too, comes fromGreek,where it simply means turn. But, the reader wonders: can we actually usea word from quite a different culture in poems from the Near East whichmake use of a Semitic language, Hebrew? Elaborate investigation yields apleasant surprise: the term strophe links upperfectlywith theway inwhichthepoets of ancient Israel grouped their verses.5Thebiblical strophehas twovariants: it is either short or long, depending onwhether it comprises two orthree verses. Accordingly, I shall speak of the S-strophe and the L-strophe inthe notes that follow my translation. The Hebrew poets habit of makinga turn after every two or three verses is of fundamental importance forunderstanding the train of thought. So for the reader biblical poetry is aconstant appeal to stay flfexible: if we are to remain faithful to the text, wemust reply to the poets challenge and to his manoeuvers by always stayingwith him, again and again making the turn which is put before us. The newDutch national Bible version of 2004 has broken new ground by showingthis strophic division of biblical poetry. Opening the Book of Psalms, onefifnds a blank line after each pair of two or three verses, which is there tomake the strophes visible.6 It helps us readers not to get lost in breathlessreading, and to articulate the reading experiencebymeansofwelcome shortintervals.

Wenowcome to another termwhich is derived fromGreek: prosody. Thisword stands for the command of quantities, for the regulation of measureson the various levels of text. The poem is organized as a hierarchy whichextends from very small to very large units. There are syllables and words,cola and verses, strophes and stanzas, and the poet keeps an eye on theproportions of all those layers. He knows exactly how many syllables andwords go into his cola, and he obeys rules which determine howmany theremay be at the least and at themost. He also knows exactly howmany versesand strophes emerge from his hands.

On the levels beyond theword, the numbers 2 and 3 are highly normative.I have alreadymentioned that a verse consists of two or three line segments,that a strophe nearly always is two or three verses long; I will now add thattwo or three strophes usually group themselves into a stanza. Very longpoems have an extra level, which we simply might call parts or sections.This is the case, for instance, in Psalms 18, 78, and 89.


All this can be proved by counting. Is that really advisable? Isnt a poemafter all an entity that is determined by meanings of words, by the contentof sentences, by motives and themes? Yes, I say wholeheartedly, that is andremains themain thing, but Imust add that the proportions of the texts andour numerical understanding of themyield an unexpected additional value.Counting produces great surprises.7

Here I must restrict myself drastically, and offer only a small selectionof examples of numerical perfection. Counting the smallest units (syllablesand words) must be done in the original Hebrew, whereas this book isprimarily meant for the common reader who does not have a commandof Hebrew. However, I cannot help mentioning, every now and then, somedeeply detailed fifgures, if only to give the reader an impression of howaccurately the poet was working.

Perhaps a fifrst impression can best be gained on the central level ofstrophes. The fifgures of these units do not differ in translation from theoriginal.8 The poetry of the Book of Job consists of 232 short and 180 longstrophes. Their sum, 412, does not look very particular.9 But this changesradically when we examine how the strophes are spread over the speak-ers.10 Then it turns out that exactly fiffty percent of the total falls to onlyone of the six speakers, and that is the hero himself, Job. Job speaks 206strophes and the other 206 strophes are divided over his four friends (actu-ally three plus one: the Elihu section follows when Eliphaz, Bildad andZophar have fifnished) plus God. And anyone still wishing to call this fiffty-fiffty division a coincidence in spite of its glaring inequality (one versus fifvespeakers), can no longer maintain this when we go a step further. The 206strophes that Job himself speaks are also exactly divided into two equalhalves as regards S- and L-units: 103 strophes by him are short (two-linestrophes) and 103 are long (three-line strophes). This form of balance is aspecififc characteristic of the Book of Job, for in the Book of Psalms it is notused.

For a second impression of the numerical perfection which the poethas as it were hidden in his text and interwoven with it, I go down to thelevel of syllables and words. Three-quarters of the cola in the Book of Jobhave a length of seven, eight, or nine syllables. The same measures are lessfrequent, but still constitute a great majority, in the Book of Psalms. Thesefifgures 789 are normative numbers which the poets have in the back oftheir minds while creating verses. More than half of the 148 poems in theBookof Psalms score an exact 7, 8, or 9 as the averagenumber of syllables percolon. A single examplemay serve byway of illustration. In the beginning ofthe Book of Psalms there are four songs which have 144 syllables; the reader


will recognize this fifgure as the square of the holy number 12. Psalm 1 beginswith it and places its 144 syllables in 16 cola. When we divide the 144 by thenumber of cola, we do not get a fraction, but a precise integer: 9. There are adozen other Psalmswhich score the same average, but there is not even onethat extends beyond that 9, so that I believe Psalm 1, as the beginning of thecollection, has the prosodic intention of immediately indicating a ceiling.The other three Psalmswith 144 syllables have eighteen cola, so that divisionleads to exactly eight syllables as the average per colon.11

There are tens of songs in the Book of Psalms which score this exact 8when we divide the number of their syllables by the number of cola. Thefifgures 7 and 9 also occur regularly, but less often than 8. The number 8 isthe central normative number in classical Hebrew poetry. It also turns up onother levels, as I shall show presently. One of them I shall mention rightnow: the body of the Book of Job contains forty poems, and that number isprestigious in the Bible.12

But in the meantimeI can imaginethe reader wonders: is it usefulfor me to know this? I think it is, for it enhances our sensitivity to propor-tions. After the correct delineation of the strophes the normative numbersregularly appear to be in the service of the structure of the poem. They helpus fifnd the heart of themessage. Though I am resolved not to glut the readerwith numbers, I will shed some light on them wherever they matter.

On reflfection, I still need to go deeper into the normative power of thenumber 8. The inflfuence of this fifgure makes itself felt on the levels of theverse and the strophe as well. The poet regularly creates a verse with abalanced 8+8 syllables for its two halves. Thus the double 8 has a powerfulclaim to being the norm for the standard verse. And the same holds good forthe four- or six-part structure one level up.When climbing up to the regularS-strophe of two bipartite poetic lines, we may confifdently expect the poetto enjoy now and then giving to the entire quartet of cola the symmetryof 8+8//8+8 syllables. A step further and there is the regular L-strophe:three bicola which always have the 8 as measure. Thus 32 and 48 becomethe normative numbers on the level of strophes.13 To attain these totals forthe strophe, the poet has many variants at his disposal. The 32, for example,can take the formof two verses of 7+9 and 10+6 syllables. Similarly, the totalof 48 for the L-strophe can be built up by a symmetrical series of 9+8, 7+7,and 8+9 syllables.


How Quality and Quantity Work Together: Two Examples

For me, the meaning and content of a poem always remain primary. Some-times it is tempting to deduct the design or the structure of a literary textfromnumerical data, but tome that seems improper and incorrect. My ownanalyses of the style and structure of biblical poems remain independent of,and mostly precede, any conscious process of measuring and counting. Buthaving said this, I fifnd in practice that numerical data do sometimes offeramazing corroboration as to the correct division of strophes and stanzas.First I shall look at an example of something that went wrong in the recentDutch version. I open Psalm 33 in that translation and look at the typogra-phy, especially at the position of the blank lines thatmark the strophes. Thetranslators want us to believe that the fifrst and last verses are separate andthat the body of the song, vv. 221, consists of ten regular S-strophes. Couldthis really be true?

Isolating the fifrst and last verses ismost unfortunate; to see that, one doesnotneed to knowHebrewat all. Anybody reading vv. 13will see at once thatthese verses all say the same thing. The poet asks a group to praise God. Theverses are variants of each other as concerns theme or message, and theyshare two other characteristics: each half-verse (except one) is determinedby the imperative mood, and the use of the second person (plural in theoriginal) is specififc and does not occur in subsequent verses.

In reality the poet started with a long strophe. In each verse a collectiveis addressed; these you are people from his community, fellow citizens,fellow believers. But saying you implies that there is a person who does theaddressing; and that is the poet himself. If we now add him to the group,there is a simple sum: you + I = we, and this fifrst person plural of all peoplegets its turn in the last three verses (and nowhere else). These poetic lines,too, are united by being each others variants or synonyms. We concludethat the head and tail of the composition are both formed by long stropheswhich are each others pendants, and that in this way the poem has beennicely framed and marked as a complete whole.

Psalm 33 is a tripartite composition: there are three stanzas, each ofwhich has three strophes. Around the middle (stanza II, vv. 815) thestrophic units are balanced; by their different lengths parts I and III showthis symmetry:

L S S//S S L

This mirroring of seven plus seven verses and the correspondence we havejust found of the fifrst and last strophes raise the suspicion that the poet


has been composing with a concentric structure in mind. This surmise isconfifrmed when we look at the centre. Stanza II, vv. 815, consists of eightverses. If we follow their structure, we immediately see the pivot aroundwhich the composition as a whole swivels. This time I will copy out the text:

Let all the earth fear Yahweh, (strophe 4)let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him!

For he spoke, and it came to be;he commanded, and it stood forth.

Yahweh brings the counsel of the nations to nought; (strophe 5)he frustrates the plans of the peoples;

but the counsel of Yahweh stands for ever,the thoughts of his heart to all generations.

Blessed is the nation whose God is Yahweh,the people whom he has chosen as his heritage!

Yahweh looks down from heaven, (strophe 6)he sees all the sons of men;

from where he sits enthroned he looks forthon all the inhabitants of the earth.

He who fashions the hearts of them all,he observes all their deeds.

The words are mainly taken from the RSV, except for Gods proper name,which I refuse to censor. If my division of the poem as 33 strophes iscorrect, the division in the Dutch version means that a linguistic work ofart has been ruined. That is the result of putting fifve blank lines in thewrong places. A short explanationwill do to prove the correct arrangement,and here again, one does not need to know Hebrew to make the correctconnections.

Strophes 4 and 6 are each others pendants by virtue of speaking ofGod as creator and of his unceasing guarding or care for his creation. Therepetition of words for those who inhabit the earth urges us to make theconnection. It also strikes us how far the poet casts his net: the wholeearth corresponds with the much-used all of strophe 6. Finally there isthe complementarity of heaven and earth, for the Israelite the halves of theuniverse sinceGenesis 1:1. The fifgure of speechwhich such a pair constitutesis called merism.

Between these two strophes is the heart of the poem, strophe 5. This unitis the middle of the nine in total. Because it is long, the poet can makeits middle verse (v. 11) the pivot which explains why the world is durable.Around it he now places a nice contrast: the mass of the peoples versusone particular nation, and that is of course Israel, the chosen people. The


negative (of frustrating) stands opposite to the positive (election), and theperfect balance of the strophe is fifrmly grounded by the correspondenceof peoples/nations in v. 10 and people/nation in v. 12. This relation is aparallelism and at the same time an antithesis. Opposed to the plans thatlead nowhere is the one plan on which history is based. The repetition ofthe word plan draws our attention to it. As the middle of the middle, v. 11radiates a supremecalmwhichmocks themaddingworlds ignoble strife. Thedimension of time (eternity) is specififc to the centre.

Psalm 33 turns out to be largely a ring composition.14 The arrangementin nine units15 can be justififed with the observation that all these strophes(except one) introduce Gods proper name, Yahweh, at once: right in theirfifrst half-verses. As far as I know this is unique. Now it is obvious who, to thepoets mind, is the hero. The question remains how things stand with theprosody of the original, the command of quantities.

Psalm 33 is very regular. All verses are bipartite, and 84 percent of thehalf-verses have 7 to 9 syllables in the original. In total there are 352 syllables;that number raises the question whether we may read it as 320+32, that is,forty-plus-four times the central normative number eight. The answer is yeswhen we consider the fifgures for the short strophes; these fifve units have3232333231 syllables respectively. It is clear that the 33 and the 31 offseteach other. The conclusion is simple: 32 is the normative number for theS-strophes.

The L-strophes which form the head and the tail also offset each other,for their lengths are 47+49 syllables. The small variation cannot concealthat 48 (read: six times 8, fiftting a unit of six cola) is their inspiration. Thenthere are strophes 5 and 6 (which contain vv. 1012, the heart of the matter,and vv. 1315 respectively). They differ markedly in length, viz. 52 and 44syllables. But when we add those two fifgures, we discover that their sum,96, again is twofold and again presupposes 48 as normative number for theL-strophe with its six cola.

How accurately the poet is working and counting appears in yet anotherstriking case of symmetry.16 Here are the fifgures for strophes 2 and 3, whichmirror each other on the levels of colon and verse and both of which resultin a total of 32:

(strophe 2) 7+9 = 16 8+8 = 16 (strophe 3)8+8 = 16 7+9 = 16

We now have an overview of what the fifve S-strophes and the four L-strophes do, numerically. The short units work with fifve times 32, which


is 160 (read: 20 times eight), and the long ones work with four times 48,in all 192 (or 24 times eight). The poem as a whole has 44 cola with 352syllables, and that yields an exact 8 as the average per colon. This resultis attained without me having to emend even one syllable of the originaltext.

I hope that all this counting and the many fifgures have not overtired thereader.Where does this fifnger exercise lead?What is themeaning or the useof all these fifgures? With their sums and their web of numbers that coversthe whole poem, they constitute a numerical proof that the composition isreally a series of three times three strophes. And thus they point to the heartof the poets argument: election and durability, as presented by v. 12, the axisof the middle strophe:

the counsel of Yahweh stands for ever,the thoughts of his heart to all generations.

My second example comes from the Book of Job itself. In chapter 9, Jobbegins his reaction to the fifrst speech of his friend Bildad. This poem isby far the longest of the entire fifrst round of the debate, and it consists oftwelve strophes. The outline of the three parts (long stanzas) is as follows:Jobpoints at the creators power, next (vv. 1324) hewonders howhe, aweakmortal, can go against itevidently I cannot; even if I am blameless, Goddeclaresme guiltyand in the end (vv. 2535) he longs for justice: he thinksit incomprehensible how God maltreats him.

Job 9, too, betrays great precision on the poets part. If I count the wordsof the original text, there are 256 (note well: 2 to the power of eight) andthey are spread over 17+17 verses exactly as 128+128 words. When I haveanalyzed the structure and delineated the strophes, this poem turns out tohave ten long and two short strophes:

L L L S/L L L L/S L L L

Ah, the two shorter ones have been placed very strategically round thecentre! We will soon see what they have to say and if they have a messagein common. Both strophes have to do with volatility. In v. 11 it is about Godwho remains elusive: one cannot pin him downwhen onewants to demandan explanation from him, Job complains. And in vv. 2526 Job is concernedabout his own life, which escapes him at high speed.

More remarks about the content will be found later, after the translation,but for the moment I will go deeper into the proportions. The strophescooperate in pairs. I call these pairs substanzas, and their size, embodiedin the most delicate measuring of syllables, is striking:


Strophe no. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12Syllables 4751 4433 4850 4950 3246 4851

98 77 98 99 78 99

The numbers in boldface are those for the substanzas (the six pairs ofstrophes). It is striking how the fifgures for the fifrst three are all increasedby one in the second three.17 Of course this can be traced back to thecomponents one line up: the fifgures for the strophes. There, too, is a play ononemore or one less: compare the fifrst pair, 47+51, with the third, 48+50; acomparable variation occurs between the fourth pair, 49+50, and the sixth,48+51.

TheWay to the Text Itself:Knowledge and Foreknowledge, Decisive Authority

Theprose that leads us up to thework of poetry is an indispensable requisitefor listening to the great debate, and in particular for doing so on the basisof the right information and a proper attitude. This was exactly what theOld Testament scholarship of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wasnot prepared to do. It followed the so-called historical-critical method andwasted a lot of energy addressing wrong and unproductive questions to thetexts from Ancient Israel. Those questions all have to do with origins. Theycan be summarized as howwould the text have come into being? and theywere asked in an attitude of suspicion or scarcely veiled distrust. Togetherwith this question goes the thought that one can only judge a text afterone has wholly mapped out the course of its genesis. And behind it liesthe curious idea that the explanation of a text is the fifnal goal of a causalchain: only if we know who the author was, to which school he belongedideologically and from which sources he drew, can we draw up a causalexplanation of the text which compellingly shows how all those factorscould not but lead to the given text.

All this zeal meansI now say severelya dogged refusal to listen tothe text itself, a refusal in spite of the primary quality of the textthat itis a speaking subject as soon as someone lends it an ear. Is there a goodalternative to causal explanation? Certainly. It is the insight that a text bydefifnition wants to convey something, and the willingness to reply to thatwish of the textssuch reaching out for communicationwith opennessand straightforward listening. With these reflfections I say goodbye to thedisastrous operation which historical criticism performed on the Book of


Jobwhen itmaintained that its prosemust be by a different author and datefrom a different time than its body of verse.

The author opens the Book of Job in his role as omniscient narrator. Thatquality enables him to inform us of what goes on in the heavenly council.He lets us listen in while God is talking to an angel on duty, a sort of DistrictAttorney. In the original he is called sataan, with the stress on the end; nottill centuries later did thisword get themeaning of Satanor devil. In classicalHebrew it means prosecutor. This person remains absolutely subordinateto Gods command. In spite of this, it is he who makes a fatal proposal, andwhen God agrees to this incentive, Job becomes the object of a horriblewager.

The qualififcation of the author as omniscient is not a theological buta narratological statement, and it holds good for all traditional narrationabout the world. And, vice versa, when a believer says God is omniscient,it is not a narrative but a theological assertion. When we take note of thebeginning of the Book of Job, we must realize that in reading the openingof a story we enter into a contract concerning the narrators authority, andthat a sharp distinction must be maintained between art of narrative andknowledge of narrative. I shall explain thiswith a comparable, shocking textfrom the Book of Genesis.

Suppose the narrator of Genesis 22 beganwith thewords in verse 2, Godsorder to Abraham, which in short is: Sacrififce your only son to me! Such abeginningwould be too crude and immoral to copewith, at least for a readerwhowas notmade of stone. Thewriter of Genesis knew asmuch, so he doesnot start with embedded text (the direct speech which we fifnd in verse 2)but with his own informative text. It says, in somewhat older English thanrecent translations: After these things [in ch. 21 we have just heard that theelderly Abraham and Sarah had a son at last] it happened that God testedAbraham. The real beginning of Genesis 22 relieves the readers pain aboutthe horrible command to a father, because the writer/narrator shares hissuperior knowledge of the event with the reader. That is why the reader atonce in vv. 12 realizes: Ah, just a second, this is only a test. Let me justwait and see how it ends. The reader suspends his judgement until he hasreached the goal of the story (in vv. 1618), and he already begins to relaxwhen in v. 11 he is informed that an angel holds Abrahams hand with theknife. Alls well that ends well.

Themaker of Genesis 22 is awriter who knows how to titrate that tensionand who prevents an excessive shock for the reader by applying the lead ofhis foreknowledge like a good psychologist. As a narrator he is omniscient,in terms of our conception of narrative. The author writes narrative and


offers a primary text. A reader with some learning practises narratologyand when he writes down his reactionsas I am doing nowhe producessecondary literature.

As soon as we open a narrative chapter from the Bible, whether it isGenesis 1 or 22, the short Book of Jonah or the prose with which the Bookof Job begins, our reading can only succeed if we adopt a loyal attitudeand accept the narrators authority. Whoever starts reading, enters intoa contract and implicitly says to the narrator: I accept your authority; Iunderstand that I must give you all credit, because otherwise it wouldmakeno sense to go on reading. We oblige ourselves to practise suspension ofdisbelief, in Coleridges phrase. This unspoken but fundamentally importantagreement also entails that we as readers must cover a double trajectory.In the fifrst place we obediently follow the linear axis of the language andwe receive a message comprising a series of actions and events. But in themeantime (and in the secondplace),wealso keepour ears prickedup for theraremoments when the narrator passes judgement or hints at a judgement,and for the way in which he characterizes his people. This takes us to thebeginning of Job.

The fifrst verse begins as brieflfy as can be by indicating the hero and thecountry where he lives, outside Palestine. But then! All at once, in the sameverse 1, the narrator takes his time (in the text it is space: an entire series ofwords) to characterize the man Job. At the earliest possible stage he givesaway quite a lot in words that sound the depths of Job:

That man was blameless and upright,fearing God and shunning evil.

This rendering of mine contains some words of the RSV and continues witha slight variation, in order to report accurately that the narrator does notcharacterize Job adequately in a single wordsomething that certainly lieswithin his powerbutwith twopairs. The fifrst pair consists of singlewords,the adjectives blameless and upright. The fifrst-mentioned of these twowords means, in other contexts, primarily complete, sound, in a physicalsense, but in our text sound in a moral sense has to be considered; severalversions say blameless.

As if this were not enough, we now get to hear another pair of qualififca-tions of Job; in the original they consist of two words each, literally fearingGod and shunning evil. What long ago was called the fear of God doesnot so much speak of fright, as of fiftting awe. We now have an overviewof verse 1 and we can determine that the terms for Jobs excellence in thefifrst instance are articulated as two pairs, but also that they realize a pat-


tern of 3+1. There are three positive terms, but the fourth one deviates bynegationof thenegative: turning away from/shunning evil; it is an exampleof the formula minus timesminus equals plus, which is not infrequentwithHebrew poets. The ending of verse 1 uses the contrast God-versus-evil, andvia the word shunning converts it to synonymy: turning away from evil hasbecome a form of fearing God. The reader keeps to the contract and nowunderstands: when the narrator says all this about Job, it is true. Readingloyally presupposes and accepts the narrators authority. Reading on, we aretold how rich Job is, we see his family, and how he looks after his offspring,vv. 25.

The sequence which then follows contains a lot of speech. Omniscientas the narrator is, he lets us listen in to the conversation between theProsecutor and hismaster. God himself sounds outright proudwhenhe saysin verse 8:

Have you considered my servant Job?There is none like him on the earth:

A man blameless and upright,Fearing God and shunning evil.

We note that there is an accumulation of authority. The words with whichthe author characterized Job just happen to be exactly the words withwhich God describes him to his district attorney, the angel on duty sataan.The authority of one speaker completely covers the authority of the otherone.

Is there a hierarchy in the authority with which Job is spoken about?The believing reader inclines to see God as number One, and only thenis there the narrator. This is understandable, but it is a judgement of atheological (or at least religious) kind. It is not a judgement of narrativepower. God is a character in the story Job 12 tells, and the master of thestory is the narrator. In his capacity as omniscient narrator the author hasdecided that hewants to give us a look into the heavenly council, but beforethat he had already decided to be the fifrst to reveal Jobs integrity, evenbefore his account of the conversation in heaven. The question as to theranking of authority requires less a theological answer than a narratologicalone: number One is the author, who as narrator pulls all the strings, andif it pleases him, God may be number Two. Put rather bluntly: in v. 8God parrots the narrator. And yet, however valid this order may be, theauthor, a believing Israelite we assume, knows very well that his audiencebelieves in the God who in Exodus 3 has manifested himself and identififedhimself as Yahweh, and of course he also intends the laudatory words


which God speaks about Job to strengthen his own words in his contempo-raries estimation.

Whyhave I been so elaborate about the twoplus twopredicates? Becausethe description of Jobs excellence by two unsurpassable authorities formsthe solid ground that we will be in dire need of under our feet, from themoment when we are cast into the deep by the author-poet: the unrulypoetry of so many chapters and the high-running emotions of a fifercedebate. Now that Jobs integrity is beyond all doubt, there arises in thereaders mind a space for understanding: understanding that will remainat all thosemoments when Job gets furious and says very nasty things aboutGod.

The author alsomakes this understanding possible by his skilful handlingof two levels of knowledge. The horrible accidents that befell Job rapid-fifrethe loss of his children, and that of all his property up to and includinghis own healthare the result of a wager. The one who conceives this bet,it is true, is the Prosecutor, but its execution is only possible with Godsapproval, and ultimately God is the truly responsible one for the disasterswhich Job has to go through. After the heavenly deliberation, Job becomesa guinea-pig, and everyone that matters knows this: within the story theyare God and his heavenly council, including the Prosecutor (who in someversions is called Satan: a serious mistranslation), and outside or above thestory they are the writer and his readers.

The only one who does not know that for a long time Job will be aguinea-pig in a horrible wager, andwhose ignorancematters, is Job himself.Thismeans that in Job 12 two levels of knowledge are createdwhich remainactive until just before the end of the book. The hero does not knowwhatweknow right from the beginning. That is why we read Job 342 with a doubleperspective: we understand his ignorance; we ourselves know more. Andbecause we understand his position, we all feel pityif not fury about thecruel exercisewith Job, and we have no diffifculty in pardoning himwhenhe furiously or bitterly storms at God.With that we are in the same positionas the celestials; for they also knowmore.

The backbone of a story is the plot. In Job 1 the plot originates froma question by the Prosecutor, which is as sneaky as it is brilliant. DoesJob really have no reason for standing in such great awe of God? Thisquestion presupposes the thought, the interpretation or the surmise byJob that his well-being and prosperity are a reward by God for his sincer-ity and avoidance of evil. We will regularly encounter the same approachamong the friends, but from a reversed point of view. When they see Jobssuffering and begin to speak after mourning for a long time, they try to


make things somewhat palatable to themselves by a logical operation inthree steps:

a) the disasters have been inflficted on him by Godan interpretationwhich is not incorrect, but which does not really satisfy us because itis ignorant of the true background and the framework in which theblows are dealt: the embarrassing wager;

b) this intervention by God means punishment of Job by God, andc) because God is just (the friends think), this punishment must have

beenprovokedby serious sins or trespasses on Jobs part.On these theyare going to nag him endlessly Put nicely, this three-stage reasoningis the classical form of the so-called theodicy (from theos = God anddike = right, again in Greek). It is the doctrine that tries to maintainboth the innocent mans suffering and Gods kindness or right: an allbut impossible task.

Back to the plot. God agrees to the Prosecutors challenge and grants himpermission to attack Job so severely that littlemore than his breath remainsto him. This creates expectations in the readerpeering forward on theedge of his chairand the question: will Job break, or will he stick torighteousness and morals?

Ultimately that is of course the crucial question: is Jobs faith inGodpure?Will he keep trusting inorhoping forGod, in spite of everything?ApparentlyGod does trust in his servant. It is a bit too facile to take refuge in thetheological reasoning that says: because God is omniscient (and also hasforeknowledge of what is coming) he foresees the good outcome. We maynot appeal to that, if only out of respect for theman and for the author. Thisreasoningwould also ruin thenature of the textthe tensionbuildup that isgenerated by the storyand the rich exploration of the subject (the debatein verses).

The Book of Job is exceptional, I wrote earlier. This emerges even moreclearly when we realize what the book is not. Let us consider the place thatthis text occupies in the Hebrew Biblethe collection of writings whichin the Christianized world is known under the misnomer Old Testament.The tens of books are mainly concerned with the origin, the history, andthe identity of the people of Israel. Not so the Book of Job. The hero of thebook, theman Job, is not even an Israelite! And the author allows him to usethe name of Yahweh freely! What is happening here?

Looking for an answer, let us listen to themessages of the prose. The highpoint of the action is a low point for the hero. Through four disasters Job is


deprived of everything but his breath of life. But the author does not reportthis in his ownhand; he subcontracts this job to others. He reports to us howtheblows are reported to Job, and thenat oncehe employs abreathless style:the reports by the messengers who arrive at Jobs with their tidings of woeare strung together without a break in 1:16 and 17 and 18, with the words:While he was yet speaking, there came another and said (): a threefoldchain.

Such a composition and the fact that all the disasters more or less takeplace within one part of the day, whereas they come about in differentlocations, evoke the thought that such a piling up of calamities (almost asynchronism) is too strong ever to occur in the reality of peoples lives. Theseries is as it were too smooth and too quick for that. And this brings me toa conclusion in terms of genre. What is reported here is not historiography,and Job is not a character to be pinned down in history. The story ofthe breathtaking series of tidings of woe is, on the contrary, a pastiche ofhistoriography. Then the question arises: why? What is the genre?

The most important help we get in correctly determining the genre isfrom an exile in Iraq, who was a priest and a prophet: Ezekiel. In ch. 14 ofthe book of the same name, we hear, four times, about three men who on aday of national downfall can save only themselves, and that thanks to theirown righteousness. In Ez. 14:14 and 20 their names appear: Noah, Daniel andJob.18 These are names with a prestigious aura, and they belong to legendarymen of consequence from prehistoric times. The story of the Deluge fromGenesis with Noah as its hero is notoriously fifctional, and in a different waythis is also true of the brief Book of Daniel, the youngest composition in theHebrew Bible.19

Ourwriter, too, has chosen the nameof a legendary hero fromprehistorictimes. The name was appropriate both for his overall purpose and his man-ner of exposition. The Book of Job is an exercise in thinking, an example, acase. Take a character who inspires reverence, characterize him as morallyabsolutely blameless, and see what happens when that man is cut downundeservedly by theworst fate imaginablethat is the thought-experimentbeing carried out here. The rabbis from Mesopotamia of the fiffth century(the second Babylonian exile) whose deliberations are to be found in theTalmud, and the most famous Jewish philosopher, Maimonides (twelfthcentury), also said: Job is an examplar; this Book is not historiography but aparable.

In the end the reader asks: when was this book written? No one knowseven approximately. I myself venture an estimation that could easily be acentury off: perhaps in the fiffth century before Christ. Ideologically speak-


ing, thewriter has a distant cousin: Qohelet (= Ecclesiastes), the only philos-opher of the Hebrew Bible, a radical thinker who freely explores forms ofWisdom in argumentative prose that now and then develops into poetry.I mention him because he can be placed accurately on account of his lan-guage. His Hebrew already includes forms that can no longer be called clas-sical; it is already on its way toward the so-called Mishnah-Hebrew of thePalestine of the fifrst and second centuries of our era. In short, the Preacheris identififable as a voice from the third century before Christ.20 The fact thatthe Book of Job does not yet use younger forms of language, but after duecomparisonwith the lyric poetry in the Book of Psalmsmay be called solidlyclassical, warns me not to date this document too late.

Dating it too early, however, would be equally unsupportable. I am im-pressed by the similarities in language and in passion between Job 3 (theheros prologue, with curses which might qualify this poem for the titlefifercest text in the Bible) and the very personal poem in Jeremiah 20. Thecontexts are quite different: the prophets pain, despair and fury are con-nected with his own task and with the fate of his country, the small perish-ing realm of Judah. But its language, emotions, and poetical framing haveremarkable points of contact with Job 3, so that I suspect some contact andinflfuence. In one direction: the prophet may have affected the poet of wis-dom. In that case Jeremiahs time (sixth century before Christ), is a terminusa quo (as the jargon has it) for the Book of Job.

Many practitioners of the humanities are obsessed with being able todate the important writings, and this is understandable (I had almost writ-ten: excusable). They experience it as a serious problem if a text defifesmoreor less reliable dating. Imyself prefer the reverse approach. The fact that Jobis diffifcult to pin down as regards origin, is something that this book has incommon with many of the Psalms. But the fact that it is diffifcult to dateresults from the very nature of these lyrical and didactic texts. One of theirmost important objectives involves an inner process: that of communica-tionwith the listener or reader. They seek to raise as few barriers as possiblefor their readers, so that they can identify with the voice that speaks thepoems. Biblical poetry is always fifercely emotional, but at the same time itis emotional in such a way that it reaches out for the universal, mostly suc-cessfully. Jobs fate and his emotions are not strange to us, and the Book ofJob explores the extremes for us. And wewe are of all times.


Remarks on the Translation

Myuse of language agreeswith the twomost important andwell-consideredprinciples of the recent Dutch translation, viz.: stay faithful to the sourcetext and attuned to the target language. I personally try to keep even some-what nearer to the original. Wherever my text is not flfuent, this qualitymirrors the unruliness of the original. This work of Hebrew poetry has neverbeen easy, not even for the poets contemporaries. It is not the task of a cor-rect translation to obscure this. So I shall not follow the principle that is themain characteristic of the Good News Bible (and its equivalents in othermodern languages): that broad obviousness of meaning is always desirable.Making things nicer, more supposedly simple, does our poet an injustice.

This translation was completed years after I had already done elaboratestudies of the style and structure of the Book of Job. Its strophic form is oneof the results of that work. The correct delineation of such units of text canonly emerge when the examiner has doggedly striven to distinguish all theaspects of form and to weigh them off against each other. For that, morepatience is needed than most people can muster who think they can justgo for the contents. With this book, the reader (m/f) can now go the wayin reverse. The strophes are there for him/her and they serve as his/herstarting-point. Thanks to their articulation, important indicators of styleand structure can become visible in the target language, so that the readermay penetrate the real Jobthe linguistic work of artmore deeply. AgainI will give an example.

Being a son of his literary tradition, the poet sometimes constructs ahymnal series of verses such as we encounter them here and there in thePsalms.21 Such series are not easy to recognize in modern versions, becauseeach line receives an independent verb. However, in the original this in-volves participles which denote qualities of Gods, not incidental actions.I deal with this by consistently putting adjectival subordinate clauses ina row. As they begin with the word who, the reader can now recognizethem more easily as a hymnal series: as actions by the deity beyond time.See for example 5:814 (a series of three strophes), a text which is meantto be laudatory on the part of Jobs friend Eliphaz, but also 9:510 (Jobsanswer), or 12:1425 (a series of no fewer than four strophes), by which Jobturns the genre of panegyric upside down and quite sharply portrays God asa destroyer and an unpredictable, violent criminal. Here I often repeat theword he at the beginning of the lines.

The word strophe means turn, as we have seen. The strophic form thatthis translation restores to Job is an invitation to the reader to experience


the turns in full. They can be indicated by many means: change of themeor subject matter; the change from one grammatical person to another, forexamplewhen the speaker has been speaking about God in the third personbut then addresses him in the second person; marking the beginning of astrophe by use of the imperative voice, or by a signal like look!, or by theintroduction of a rhetorical question. A complete list of the many ways inwhich strophes can distinguish themselves from their surroundings can befound in the concise but complete poetics I wrote for readers who do notknow Hebrew: Reading Biblical Poetry: An Introductory Guide (2001).

In my translation of Job I do not use metre. The man who did attemptthis deserves appreciation for his courage.22 Because my translation makesvisible and productive the higher levels of prosody, especially by meansof strophe boundaries, there is no need for me to pursue the virtuallyimpossible: an English verse formwhich purports to catch the rhythmof theHebrew verses. (Biblical poetry consists of accentual verses, which meansthat per colon there are two to four main stresses which function as metricaccents; the number of unstressed syllables surrounding those stresses is oflittle importance).

The translation is based on the standard Hebrew text, used all over theworld, which for more than a century has been printed in Stuttgart.23 Theoriginal has been slightly damaged during its tradition of more than twothousandyears, butmuch less thanmanyexperts think. I amconfifdent that Ican limitmyself to some thirty small emendations; this is substantially fewerthan the average commentator makes.24

In the text of the translation, the strophic units are distinguishedbyblanklines. Each strophe is given a letter in the right margin, and the stanzaswhich they form, mostly in twos or threes, are there indicated by a Romannumeral.

In the Book of Jobwe encounter different names for the deity. Besides thecommon word for God (god, gods) there is a short form El (pronunciation:ale). I maintain it because the word functions as a proper name. A numberof times it is accompanied in an adjacent half-verse by a kind of epithet,Shaddai. That, too, is maintained, not only because it functions as a name,but also because we do not really know what its origin and its meaning are.

Themost important thing, fifnally, is the proper name of theGod of Israel:Yahweh. It occurs about 6800 times in the First Testamentand is crossedout an equal number of times by Jews and Christians alike. They replacethe name by a word which fifts in with their ideology but which is sexist,authoritarian, and one-sided: Lord. And they assert that they do this out ofrespect. Yet, it is outright bizarre to whoever reads Exodus 3. There Moses,


who is given the supreme task of his life, asks the deity that addresses himwhat he is called. God is so obliging as to reveal to him his proper name:Yahweh, and even to offer an explanation, after which he expressly allowshim to use that name as the legitimation of his mission, leading the peopleaway from the house of slavery, Egypt. So, subjecting the proper name torelentless censorship is not justififed in biblical-theological terms. Nothingis more natural and polite than returning Yahwehs proper name to him.

I would like to be thrifty with capital letters, but now and then I feelobliged to write He when talking about God, in those places which mightotherwise confuse the reader into thinking that the third person refers toJob or a friend of his.

NOTES TO PART I

1. Franoise Mies, Lesprance de Job, 2006, considers which label best suitsthe genre of Joba diffifcult questionand fifnally opts for the well-arguedterm drama.

2. As a result the new Dutch Bible Translation (NBV) which was publishedin 2004, has the pretension of being a literary translation. Among commen-tators on the Book of Job, Norman C. Habel stands out with his contribu-tion to the Old Testament Library series (OTL): The Book of Job, 1985. InHolland there is the study Rhetorical Criticism & the Poetry of the Book ofJob by Pieter van der Lugt, a theologian who has not yet met real literaryscholarship halfway and whose divisions I often reject; unfortunately hisbook is not free from diachronic speculations. An honourable mention isdeserved by the elaborate study by Franoise Mies mentioned in the pre-ceding note.

3. Between 1998 and 2004 I published the seriesMajor Poems of the HebrewBible: At the Interface of Prosody and Structural Analysis. In it I study struc-ture, style and prosody of all the Psalms and the poetry of the Book of Job.Until recently, Bible explanation was the monopoly of divines: people thatare exposed to the danger of going for the contents, resulting in a seriouslack of fundamental understanding of the literary way-of-being of the textsand all it implies. One glaring example: David Clines recent commentary,in theWord Biblical Commentary series, studies the language pleasantly indetail and is sound in its kind; but of the more than one thousand pagesof volumes I and II (up to and including Job 37) not one has been reservedfor an introduction (if only a minimal one) on verse or strophe structure,or on any other aspect of poetics. Clines is also the umpteenth person whocuts and pastes texts radically, especially in and around ch. 27, and he placesElihus part radically somewhere else.

4. We are, it is true, offered a little comfort by the small (and superscript)print of the numbers of verses, but this is accompanied by a trap: as saidbefore, the numbers of the so-called biblical verses need not cover thedivisions or transitions of the actual verses (the full poetic lines), especiallynot in theBookof Psalms. There is evenmore comfort if there are blank lines

26 notes to part i

to distinguish the strophes, but for the time being that is only to be found inthe Psalms (as found in the recent Dutch version).

5. This elaborate investigation has been done in my tetralogyMajor Poemsof the Hebrew Bible, in which I justify the boundaries of more than 1600strophic units with the help of arguments regarding language, style, andstructure.

6. In the recent Dutch version there are more than one thousand blanklines in the poems of the Book of Psalms. Nine-tenths of them have beendirectly derived from my explorations of structure and strophe-building inthe Psalms in volumes II and III of my Major Poems. As volume IV (aboutJob) was not published until 2004 (as it happened on the very same day asthe recent Dutch version itself), the makers of this translation have not yetbeen able to provide the pages of the Book of Job with blank lines.

7. The original Hebrew of centuries before Christ sounded somewhat differ-ent from the biblical Hebrew which has come down to us with vowel andstress signs added by rabbis who lived amillennium after the completion ofthe canon. This phase of Hebrew is called Masoretic Hebrew. The poets ofthe Book of Psalms, of Job and of the oracles (for they are also poetry) in thebooks of the Prophets spoke pre-Masoretic Hebrew, and it had a somewhatdifferent syllable structure. In Major Poems, I counted the pre-Masoretic,viz. the original syllables of all the poems in the Psalms and in Job, therebyexposing a dimension that was unknown in biblical scholarship: the poetscounted their syllableswhich is actually done in many literary traditionsall over the world.

8. Readers that know at least some Hebrew will fifnd the complete text ofthe poetry in the Book of Job in strophic form and in Hebrewwithout vowelmarks (without them because I have counted the syllables of the original,viz. pre-Masoretic Hebrew): all 412 units are given in the back of volume IVof myMajor Poems. Numerous examples of numerical perfection which gobeyond the scope of the present book can be found ad locum: for ch. 3 inMajor Poems vol. I, for chs. 414 in vol. II and for 1542 in vol. IV (where Ihave again set out in appendices the numerical material per poem for allthe speeches and poems).

9. This concerns the body, the great mass of poetry in Job 342. I do notcount the two verses embedded in the prose beginning, viz. 1:21.

notes to part i 27

10. When I had completed my analyses of Job in 2003, I laboured under thedelusion that I had counted just about everything that might be counted.But while vol. IV ofMajor Poemswas being translated I discovered I had notyet counted how the strophes were divided among the speakers. The resultof that count was a formidable surprise to me: it is the numerical confifr-mation that my delineation and distinction of the strophesa dimensionwhich is quite independent of all the counting, since it preceded the latteris simply correct.

11. They are Psalms 3, 11 and 14.

12. In order to arrive at this number 40 a manipulation is needed whichcan be defended on the basis of content and proportions. Chapters 3 upto and including 39 are as many poems, thus 37 in all. Together with chs.40:732 and 41 (the last two poemswhich are spoken by God) theymake 39.These literary units are all quite sizeable (except Bildads mediocre effortin ch. 25), mostly consisting of more than twenty verses. The beginning ofch. 40 and the one stanza in 42:26 form the halves of a short conversationbetweenGod and Job, because two fragments of 40:25 (only one poetic lineby God and two by Job) are emphatically quoted in Jobs reaction in 42:26.I read this combination as a fortieth poem. Notice the proportions of thesefragments: one verse > one S-strophe > one stanza.

13. For the real fans: of the total of 412 strophes, more than three-quartersshow regular measures: there are 187 regular S-strophes (i.e., consisting oftwo bicola) and 148 regular L-strophes (three bicola). There are 93 verses of8+8 syllables, 59 verses of 7+7 syllables and 44 verses of 9+9 syllables. Thereare 30 S-strophes which contain 32 syllables and 18 L-strophes which have48 syllables.

14. If Ps. 33 were a ring composition from beginning to end, one could indi-cate its arrangement as ABCD-X-DCBA. The capitals betray the mirroringand the letter X indicates the uniqemiddle. I personally fifnd the correspon-dences AA and the centre D X D compelling. The number 33 of the Psalmis not important. As Pss. 9 and 10 together forma single poem(a smallmajor-ity of the experts recognize it as such) and as also Pss. 42 and 43 are onesong (which is recognized practically unanimously), Ps. 33 is actually the32nd song of the Book of Psalms and there are not 150 but 148 Psalms. [I alsonotice that strophes 2 and 3 are a tight pair by both mentioning the wordof Yahweh; that strophe 8 is a fifne response to that by following with the

28 notes to part i

eye of Yahweh; that strophes 2 and 8 correspond because of the fact thatboth discuss Yahwehs solidarity; and that the negative element in v. 7 (thechaoticmight of thewater!) as a pendant gets the negative (= critical) versesversus potentates of strophe 7 (vv. 1617).]

15. There are ten poems in the Book of Psalms which consist of nine stro-phes: Pss. 19, 33, 48, 49, 51, 72, 80, 90, 132, and 144. In the case of Pss. 33, 48, 49,51, 90, and 144 there is a heart-strophe: a central unit, a pivot. Thosewho canread Hebrew can see this very well in the book The Psalms in Form (2002),in which the text is printed with vowel marks in strophic form.

16. Verses 1819 (strophe 8) have 9+7 = 16, and 7+8 = 15 syllables; thesefifgures are mirrored in vv. 21 and 22, which contain 7+8 = 15 and 9+7 = 16syllables respectively. In Ps. 33 there are exactly eight verses which result insixteen syllables.

17. The counts for Job 9, with all the details, are in vol. II of myMajor Poems,pp. 482483. There I made an annoyingmistake on one point: strophe 7 hasnot 48but 49 syllables (and so substanza IIBdoesnothave98, but 99points).The correction brings out even better the true cohesion of the big numbers.

Corrigendum for the fanatic few and those that know Hebrew: the errorin the addition must now also be adjusted on pp. 351, 521, and 537538 ofvol. II; the total for Job 9 is not 548 (as in vol. II p. 346), but 549 syllables. Thesame correction should be carried through in vol. IV: pp. 385, 398, and 406.

18. The group of words three men is to be found in Ez. 14:14a, 16a, and 18a,and the names themselves form head and tail of the series. The author alsoapplies the scheme 3+1, for in v. 21 we read the announcement by God offourpunishments, which are enumerated. Two important terms take care ofthe intertextual connection with Jobs prose: justice (which materially fallsin with the integrity that characterizes Job) and the keywords in v. 23 (thefifnal sentence of Ez. 14) without reason= for nought: the Prosecutors fatalwords. Moreover, the speakers (the deitys) language betrays that he, too, isengaged in an exercise of his imagination.

19. The Book of Daniel was written in or shortly after 164bc, in the period ofthe Maccabees, and the author unabashedly fiflls out the New-Babyloniancourt (we recall Nebuchadnezzar, the conqueror of Jerusalem in 586bc)with data that actually belong to the Persian court. He is wrong aboutall kinds of data about Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, and Darius (as duly

notes to part i 29

summed up in present-day commentaries on Daniel), which only indicatesthat it is not relevant to judge him by the standard of historical accuracy.And as to the prestige of the name of Daniel: thanks to the discovery anddeciphering of Ugaritic (a sister dialect of Hebrew, fiffteenth-thirteenth cen-tury bc)wenowhave a text in epic verses about a king ofUgarit whohimselfwas called Daniel (in those days: Daniilu, this is the name in internationalnotation), viz. God (El) administers justice. This namemay then have beenfamous for a millennium.

20. Good documentation of this is to be found in W.C. Delsman, Die Datie-rung des Buches Qohelet.

21. See e.g. Pss. 18:34ff., 65:7 ff., 103:35, vv. 24, 10, and 1314 of Ps. 104, orPs. 146:67, 147:1517. A great part of Ps. 136 is a list of laudatory participles;and compare 74:1217, 89:915, and 145 from v. 13cd (rightly corrected in theDutch translation).

22. Marc Rozelaar,Mijn leven is een ademtocht. Het boek Job. Kampen (Kok)1984/1988. He renders the poems in unrhymed iambic pentameter.

23. It is the fourth edition of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, under thesupervision of K. Elliger andW. Rudolph, 1967/1977.

24. Those who know Hebrew will fifnd the complete list of emendations inthe back of myMajor Poems, vol. IV, pp. 415417; on the next pages they willfifnd the poetry from Job in strophic form, in Hebrew without vowel signs.

PART II

THE BOOK OF JOB

A LITERARY TRANSLATIONIN STROPHIC FORM

1:1

:2:

3

4:

5:

6:

7:

8:

:

:9

01

11:

21:

31:

41:

51:

:

61

:

INTRODUCTORY PROSE AND JOBS PROLOGUE(CURSES AND COMPLAINT), CHS. 13

1There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man wasblameless and upright, one who feared God and shunned evil. 2Seven sonsand three daughters were born to him. 3His possessions were seven thou-sand sheep, three thousand camels, fifve hundred yoke of oxen, fifve hundredshe-asses, and a very large number of servants; that man was greater thanall the people of the East.

4His sons used to hold feasts, each on his set day in his own home. Theywould send and invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them. 5Whena round of feast days was over, Job would send for them and sanctify them.Rising early in themorning, hewouldmake burnt offerings, according to thenumber of them all, for Job said, Perhaps my sons have sinned and cursedGod in their hearts. This is what Job always used to do.

6Now the day came when the sons of God came to present themselvesbefore Yahweh, and the Adversary also came among them. 7Yahweh saidto the Prosecutor, Where have you come from? The Prosecutor answeredYahwehand said, Fromroaming through the earth andgoingback and forthupon it. 8Yahweh said to the Prosecutor, Have you given thought to myservant Job? Truly there is no one like him on earth, a blameless and uprightman, onewho fears God and shuns evil! 9 The Prosecutor answered Yahwehand said, Does Job fear God for nothing? 10Are you not the one who put afence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You haveblessed thework of his hands, so that his possessions are spread throughoutthe earth! 11But stretch out your hand now and strike all he has, and he willsurely curse you to your face! 12Yahweh said to the Prosecutor, Very well,then, all that he has is in your hand; but against him do not stretch out yourhand! Then the Prosecutor went out from Yahwehs face.

13And the day came when his sons and daughters were eating and drink-ing wine in the house of their brother, the fifrstborn, 14and amessenger cameto Job and said, Theoxenwereploughing and the asseswere grazingnearby,15when Sabeans fell on them and carried them off; the boys they killed withthe edge of the sword, but I escaped all alone to tell you.

16This one was still speaking when another came and said, Gods fifre fellfrom heaven and burned the sheep and the boys, consuming them; but Iescaped all alone to tell you.

eugolorp sboj dna esorp yrotcudortni 63

71

:

81

:

91

:

:02

12

:

: 22

1:2

2:

:

3

4:

5:

6:

7:

8:

9:

:

01

:

11

introductory prose and jobs prologue 37

17This onewas still speakingwhen another came and said, TheChaldeansformed three columns; theymade a raid on the camels and carried themoff;the boys they killedwith the edge of the sword, but I escaped all alone to tellyou.

18This one was still speaking when another came and said, Your sons andyour daughters were eating and drinking wine in the house of their brother,the fifrstborn, 19when suddenly a mighty wind came from across the desertand struck the four corners of the house; it fell on the boys and they died,but I escaped all alone to tell you.

20Then Job arose; he tore his robe and shaved his head; then he fell to theearth in worship 21and said:

Naked I came out of my mothers womband naked shall I return there.

Yahweh has given and Yahweh has taken,may Yahwehs name be blessed.

22In all this, Job did not sin or cast reproach on God.

1And the day came when the sons of God came to present themselvesbefore Yahweh, and the Adversary also came among them to present him-self before Yahweh. 2Yahweh said to the Prosecutor, Where have you comefrom? The Prosecutor answered Yahweh and said, From roaming throughthe earth and going back and forth upon it. 3Yahweh said to the Prosecutor,Have you given thought tomy serv

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Fokkelman-2012-The Book of Job in Form