Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bill Rea <cctr114 AT it.canterbury.ac.nz>]

Reggie wrote:-

>    Anyway, my own sense of Job 42:5-6 is as follows:
>v5 By the hearing of the ear I had heard You, but now my eye has seen You:
>v6 Therefore I shall reject that I should grieve upon dust and ashes.        
>   
>Thus, Job refuses mournful despair.  I have taken the *waw* in v6 to be an 
>introduction of a dependent clause that functions as the direct object of 
>*mem-aleph-samek*.  Although such a construction would not be expected in 
>prose, I have found it several places in the Psalms.  Since Job is poetry, 
>this 
>translation seems justifiable.  Also, this rendering avoids the problem of 
>leaving *mem-aleph-samek* without a direct object. Although BH does not have 
>the same problem English has with transitive verbs lacking objects, it still 
>is 
>less problematic to construe the *waw* in this way than to leave a 
>transitive 
>verb bereft of an object.      
>     Of course, *nun-heht-mem* in v6 could be translated "repent," so that 
> Job 
>would be refusing to repent -- essentially what you are saying, Robert. 

The problem is -- does mem-aleph-samek mean refuse or reject or some
similar meaning or is it the word which means to melt, dissolve, loose
courage and so on? It seems to me that Job has had the wind taken out of
his sails, to borrow the colloquialism. He says he's spoken
of things he didn't understand properly. It's difficult in the context
of v 1-5 to see how v 6 could be anything but a continuation of
the repentance process. Saying that refuses to repent or refuses to
be miserable seems out of line with the other verses.

To those who read the LXX, how did these early translators understand
v 6?

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