As indicated in the outline of chapters 16 and 17 (page 305), verse 22 opens the second of Job’s complaints. This will be followed by a second plea in 17.3-5. Although the Handbook has not used a subdivision heading before 16.22, translators may prefer to do so. For example, a heading may say “Job sees his life ending” or “Job complains that he will soon die.”

For when a few years have come I shall go the way whence I shall not return: this verse is best understood as Job expressing the shortness of time left for him to live. Job has spoken before of his approaching death in 10.21-22. A few years translates “years of number,” meaning that the years are so few that they can be counted easily. The similar idiom “men of number” is used in Genesis 34.30; Psalm 105.12; Ezekiel 12.16. Here this is equivalent to “After a few short years….”

Line b emphasizes the fact that Job will not be able to return from the dead. In 7.9-10 Job said “So he who goes down to Sheol does not come up. He returns no more to his house.” In 10.21 Job said “Before I go whence I shall not return, to the land of gloom and deep darkness.” The main clause of this verse is expressed metaphorically in Good News Translation as “and I walk the road of no return.” The verse may have to be restructured in some languages to say, for example, “After a few short years I will die and will not live again,” “My days are numbered and I will go where people do not return,” or sometimes idiomatically, “I am about to depart, and when I follow the path of death, I will not walk this way again.”

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 .