And now my soul is poured out within me: And now, as in verses 1 and 9, contrasts the past with the present (the Hebrew uses the identical expression in all three verses). In these verses Job compares the former times, when he enjoyed God’s favor, with the present, when God is his enemy. Revised Standard Version renders the Hebrew line literally, but my soul (nefesh) is poured out within me makes little sense. The same Hebrew expression is found in Psalm 42.4, where the context is a sad person recalling the past and longing for God’s presence. In a similar way Job is downcast and in despair. The meaning here is that Job’s suffering has reduced his existence to nothing, and so the Hebrew concept must have been that the nefesh was like a liquid that could be poured out in death. New Jerusalem Bible translates “And now the life in me trickles away,” and Good News Translation “Now I am about to die.” Biblia Dios Habla Hoy has “I have no more desire to live.” All of these are adequate translation models.

Days of affliction have taken hold of me: this is again a literal rendering of the Hebrew. A similar expression occurs in verse 27 and in Lamentations 1.7. Days of affliction expresses the continuous nature of Job’s suffering and misery, or as New English Bible says, “Misery has me daily in its grip.” Days in this line is matched by “nights” in verse 17a. Good News Translation has kept the meaning but dispensed with the poetic images of days and the depiction of being aggressively seized by suffering: “There is no relief for my suffering.”

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 .