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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Job 4:6 - 4:6
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
6 Is not thy piety thy confidence,
Thy Hope? And the uprightness of thy ways?
7 Think now: who ever perished, being innocent?!
And where have the righteous been cut off?!
8 As often as I saw, those who ploughed evil
And sowed sorrow, - they reaped the same.
9 By the breath of Eloah they perished,
By the breath of His anger they vanished away.
10 The roaring of the lion, and the voice of the shachal,
And the teeth of the young lions, are rooted out.
11 The lion wanders about for want of prey,
And the lioness' whelps are scattered.
In Job 4:6 all recent expositors take the last waw as waw apodosis: And thy hope, is not even this the integrity of thy way? According to our punctuation, there is no occasion for supposing such an application of the waw apodosis, which is an error in a clause consisting only of substantives, and is not supported by the examples, Job 15:17; Job 23:12; 2Sa 22:41.
(Note: We will not, however, dispute the possibility, for at least in Arabic one can say, zı̂d f-hkı̂m Zeid, he is wise. Grammarians remark that Arab. zı̂d in this instance is like a hypothetical sentence: If any one asks, etc. 2Sa 15:34 is similar.)
תקותך is the permutative of the ambiguous כסלתך, which, from כָּסַל, to be fat, signifies both the awkwardness of stupidity and the boldness of confidence. The addition of הוּא to מִי, Job 4:7, like Job 13:19; Job 17:3, makes the question more earnest: quis tandem, like זֶה מִי, quisnam (Ges. §122, 2). In Job 4:8, כַּאֲשֶׁר is not comparative, but temporal, and yet so that it unites, as usual, what stands in close connection with, and follows directly upon, the preceding: When, so as, as often as I had seen those who planned and worked out evil (comp. Pro 22:8), I also saw that they reaped it. That the ungodly, and they alone, perish, is shown in Job 4:10. under the simile of the lions. The Hebrew, like the oriental languages in general, is rich in names for lions; the reason of which is, that the lion-tribe, although now become rarer in Asia, and of which only a solitary one is found here and there in the valley of the Nile, was more numerous in the early times, and spread over a wider area.
(Note: Vid., Schmarda, Geographische Verbreitung der Thiere, i. 210, where, among other things, we read: The lion in Asia is driven back at almost all points, and also in Africa has been greatly diminished; for hundreds of lions and panthers were used in the Roman amphitheatres, whilst at the present time it would be impossible to procure so large a number.)
שַׁחַל, which the old expositors often understood as the panther, is perhaps the maneless lion, which is still found on the lower Euphrates and Tigris. נָתַע = נָתַץ, Psa 58:7, evellere, elidere, by zeugma, applies to the voice also. All recent expositors translate Job 4:11 init. wrongly: the lion perishes. The participle אֹבֵד is a stereotype expression for wandering about viewless and helpless (Deu 26:5; Isa 27:13; Psa 119:176, and freq.). The part., otherwise remarkable here, has its origin in this usage of the language. The parallelism is like Psa 92:10.