Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Reggie wrote:-

>> [ME]   and declared his willingness to stand before God and make his case.
>
>RWP: Those who understand 42:1-6 in terms of Job's repenting of sin or
>impiety seem to view his willingness to stand before God as impiety. 

This may be what others have said but it's not my position.

>Although a verse or two here and there might be understandable on those
>terms, in the main Job's position seems to be consistent with YHWH's own
>position as articulated  in Chapter 1 and in 42:7-9.
>     My own sense is that Job repents, not of sin or impiety, but of his
>mournful despair.

This was your offering on V6 a few days ago:-

v6 Therefore I shall reject that I should grieve upon dust and ashes.

Your paragraph above seems to have sifted ground. Am I correct?
Reject and repent seem quite different to me.

To me Job makes the claim that he is ready and willing to stand
before YHWH and make his case because he knows that YHWH is just
and will vindicate him. His friends were making the case that he
was suffering because he had committed some sort of wickedness.
But when YHWH turns up in the tornado and speaks giving Job a 
chance to talk with him, what happens? Job doesn't have anything to
say. The encounter with the tornado and baffling speech from YHWH
seems to be enough for him. He appears to be overwhelmed. While Job
may not be repenting of a specific sin he is overcome by just how
little he understood of YHWH. There is nothing he can say that YHWH
doesn't already know.


Dan wrote:-

>Bill Rea writes on 42:6, "I am still interested in what the LXX says at this
>point."
>
>Hmmm, interesting: "Therefore I disparage(d) myself, and
>faint/melt/dissolve(d): now/but/then [de] I have considered myself [to be]
>ground/dirt and ashes."
>
>The verbs are aorist, aorist, & perfect respectively, but that's probably
>not important for our purposes. My assumption would be that they are
>interpreting multiple ideas possible in the M)S verb and then trying to
>cover the scope of it's meaning with two separate verbs (trying to reflect
>your "double meaning" in his translation!?), and that the 3rd verb reflects
>NXM (though not very well it would seem). I don't think i'd want to suppose
>in any difference in the LXX's Vorlage, although i suppose only someone
>well-studied in the LXX of Job (assuming one translator of the book) would
>be in position to make a strong statement on that issue.

It's interesting the LXX seems to be aware of the double meaning possibility
and tries to capture it. Often these sorts of things rely on a unique
feature of the original language which can't be reconstructed in a 
second. Thanks.


Bill Rea, Information Technology Dept., Canterbury  University  \_ 
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