Job 34:20-22

New English Translation

Footnotes

1. Job 34:20 tn Dhorme transposes “in the middle of the night” with “they pass away” to get a smoother reading. But the MT emphasizes the suddenness by putting both temporal ideas first. E. F. Sutcliffe leaves the order as it stands in the text, but adds a verb “they expire” after “in the middle of the night” (“Notes on Job, textual and exegetical,” Bib 30 [1949]: 79ff.).
2. Job 34:20 tn R. Gordis (Job, 389) thinks “people” here mean the people who count, the upper class.
3. Job 34:20 tn The verb means “to be violently agitated.” There is no problem with the word in this context, but commentators have made suggestions for improving the idea. The proposal that has the most to commend it, if one were inclined to choose a new word, is the change to יִגְוָעוּ (yigvaʿu, “they expire”; so Ball, Holscher, Fohrer, and others).
4. Job 34:20 tn Heb “not by hand.” This means without having to use force.
5. Job 34:21 tn Heb “his”; the referent (a person) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
6. Job 34:22 tn The construction of this colon uses the Niphal infinitive construct from סָתַר (satar, “to be hidden; to hide”). The resumptive adverb makes this a relative clause in its usage: “where the evildoers can hide themselves.”