They meet with darkness in the daytime: Eliphaz expands the picture to describe how those who seek advantage over others are brought down. Like the Syrians whom Elisha led to Samaria in broad daylight (2 Kings 6.18-23), they run into darkness. Line a in the Hebrew has the order “by day, by night,” and line b reverses this order to “night, day.” The two lines are parallel. Line a uses the common verb meaning to meet or encounter, while line b shifts to the more specific and striking grope, which means to feel about as if blind or in the dark. The same verb is used in Deuteronomy 28.29, “You shall grope at noonday, as the blind grope in the darkness.” Job will return to this theme in 12.25. Grope in line b steps up the poetic intensity and gives greater coherence to the two-line parallelism. By reducing the two lines of verse 14 to one, Good News Translation does not retain the poetic intensification and unity of the lines, which may be rendered in English “In daylight they run into darkness; in broad daylight they grope like blind men in the dark.” This may also be translated, for example, “When it is light they are in the dark, and in broad daylight they stumble like blind persons in the dark.”

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 .