The figure now shifts from the attack of God’s arrows to the onslaught against a wall. He breaks me with breach upon breach: Hebrew has a verb which has a closely similar noun form used twice, and the result is poetic alliteration, which Revised Standard Version manages to imitate to some extent with breaks … breach … breach. Job pictures himself here as a wall which God smashes through. Good News Translation does not attempt to keep the image of storming a wall, but shifts to a nonfigurative expression: “He wounds me again and again.”

He runs upon me like a warrior: runs upon refers to the attack or running over of an enemy by an attacking soldier. Good News Translation has added to the expression of the simile like a warrior to give it the idea of anger: “like a soldier gone mad with hate.” This seems unnecessary, since the figure of a warrior on the attack adequately conveys Job’s thought. Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch translates “He wounds me again and again like a warrior breaking through a wall.” In translation it may be better to shift the simile in line b to the opening; for example, “like a warrior he attacks me” or “he assaults me like a charging soldier.” The whole verse may be rendered “He leaps on me like a warrior and wounds me again and again” or “Like a charging soldier he attacks me and leaves me with many wounds.”

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 .