In verses 7-12 Zophar enlarges upon the theme of God’s vast wisdom and man’s inability to grasp it. The two lines of verse 7 are parallel, but there is little increase in poetic effect in the second line, and Good News Translation combines them into a single sentence printed on two lines. The same verb translated find out occurs in both lines. Find out translates a verb meaning “explore, investigate, probe, discover the deep truth of a matter.” Zophar’s question is a way of saying that the mystery of God is beyond man’s ability to understand. Both lines of this verse are rhetorical questions, as were the two parts of verse 2, and may be rendered as negative statements, that is, “You cannot find out the deep things of God,” and “You cannot find out the limit of the Almighty.” Deep things of God may be restructured to say, for example, “the things about God that are difficult for people to understand.” The whole line may be rendered, for example, “Can you investigate and learn the things about God that are difficult for people to understand?” The answer to this question is “No!”

Can you find out the limit of the Almighty?: limit translates a word meaning “completeness, end, totality.” It is used in 28.3 to refer to the extremities or depths a miner digs into the earth. In 26.10 it refers to the outer limit of the earth, where darkness and light meet. The limit of God is the mysterious depth, the unknowable truth of God’s wisdom, and this is parallel to the deep things of God in the previous line. Good News Translation has transposed the two lines so that “limits and bounds” express the unlimited nature of God’s “greatness and power.” Almighty translates the Hebrew Shaddai; for a discussion of Almighty see 5.17. Line b asks essentially the same question as line a. There is little heightening of movement in line b. This line may sometimes be expressed “Can you also discover the truth about God’s wisdom which people cannot grasp?” or “Can you dig down and reach the truth of God that is beyond understanding? Of course not!” This may also be expressed as a negative statement, “You certainly cannot dig down and reach the truth….”

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 .