Zophar imagines a situation where God would confront Job directly, similar to Job’s wish for God to appear in court with him. But oh, that God would speak, and open his lips to you: Zophar’s wish is that God would answer, reply, speak directly to Job, and correct him of his errors. The formula for expressing this kind of a wish in Hebrew is literally “Who will give (to me), that…,” and in English the same thought is generally expressed by “Would that…” or “How I wish that….” (This formula appears again in 23.3 and 29.2.) In this verse line b open his lips to you is parallel to line a. The poetic force of the parallelism with the figurative expression in line b is that of giving greater emphasis. The meaning in line b is the same as in line a, and Good News Translation has accordingly condensed the two lines into one. The translator who is translating Job as poetry should employ whatever device is natural in the poetry of the receptor language to preserve the heightening of poetic feeling. The whole line may be expressed, for example, “I wish that God would speak directly to you” or “I would love God to tell you exactly what he knows.” The heightened parallelism may be expressed in a form such as “I wish God would speak, that he would say it directly to you.”

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 .