This verse has two parallel lines which Revised Standard Version takes to be rhetorical questions expressing emphatic denial. Eliphaz appears to admit that Job’s faith in God and his personal integrity should give him confidence and hope that God will deal justly with him. Fear of God translates the Hebrew “your fear” and can mean here the same as religion or belief. “Fear of Yahweh” in Proverbs 1.7, 29; 2.5; 9.10 is the religious source and substance of wisdom. Moffatt renders this line “Let your religion reassure you,” and New English Bible “Is your religion no comfort to you?” Confidence and hope are the qualities which Job should have as the result of his religious life and integrity, as expressed in Good News Translation. Integrity is the noun form of the Hebrew word translated “blameless” in 1.1. Confidence is often rendered idiomatically; for example, “resting the heart on someone” or “putting the innermost on someone.” Hope refers here to possessing a hidden source of strength and purpose in the face of disaster. It is used with the same meaning in 5.16 “The poor have hope,” and in 14.7 “There is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again.”

Although the two lines are parallel, there is little increase of poetic effect in the second line. Translators who are able to keep the poetic form of parallel lines will want to try to maintain the synonyms confidence and hope. Others may restructure the lines as two statements followed by a question, as in Biblia Dios Habla Hoy “You who are a faithful servant of God, a man of good conduct, how is it that you don’t have full confidence?” Good News Translation keeps all the elements of the parallelism but redistributes them so that “worshiped God” and “life was blameless” are the basis for the joint consequences of “confidence and hope.”

The Hebrew noun for hope is an important word in the Book of Job. It usually carries the meaning of the verb “to hope,” from which the noun is derived, and therefore it refers to the attitude of expecting or trusting that some good will occur. Sometimes it refers to that which is hoped for, or to the reason for hoping, as when Yahweh is called “the hope of Israel.” In the Book of Job much emphasis is given to hope that is left unfulfilled. The noun happens to sound like the Hebrew word for “thread,” and so in at least two places there seems to be a wordplay on these terms, as will be noted in the discussion.

Quoted with permission from Reyburn, Wiliam. A Handbook on Job. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1992. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .