Have you commanded the morning: day and night must be carefully regulated for natural life to succeed. In this line morning is regarded as a person receiving orders so that it will appear on time as it should. Morning in line a has the same meaning as dawn in line b. Command means “give the morning its orders,” “tell the morning what it should do.” Since your days began, which is the opening phrase in the Hebrew of verse 12, means “since you were born,” “during your life time.”

Caused the dawn reminds Job that in 3.7-9 he wanted to impose a curse on the dawn to prevent it from seeing the light of day. To know its place is to know where its position is in the order of creation. If Job knew its established place, he would know the design that regulates its appearance. Good News Translation takes the two lines of verse 12 to mean the same and so reduces them to one. However, for those translators who seek to retain the focusing effect of the movement from one line to the next, dawn in line b is more specific than morning in line a. Verse 12 may be rendered, for example, as “During your lifetime have you told the morning what it should do or made the dawn start a new day?” In some languages it may be clearer to place dawn before the more general morning. For example, Biblia Dios Habla Hoy translates “Have you ever in your life given orders that dawn should come and day should break (begin)?” This may serve as a translation model for some languages.

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 .