Eliphaz now calls upon his personal experience regarding the teaching of retribution, or punishment. In the two-line parallelism, line a is the process and line b the consequence. Plowing and sowing are the process, and harvesting the consequence. These agricultural images provide the link between wickedness and destruction. For similar usage see also Proverbs 22.8; Hosea 8.7; 10.13; and Galatians 6.7-8.

In many languages the metaphor plow iniquity will have to be expressed as a simile; for example, “Like a farmer prepares the ground for planting, some people are busy sinning.” Sow trouble may have to be restructured to say “and spread trouble like a farmer spreads seeds.” The final clause may then be “The sin and trouble they make is like a harvest,” “They get back sin and trouble like a harvest,” or “For a harvest they gather sin and trouble.” Bible en français courant says “Plowing injustice or sowing misery leads to a harvest of injustice and misery.” Biblia Dios Habla Hoy has reduced the figures to two and says “Experience has taught me that those who sow crime and evil reap what they sow.”

In verse 9 Eliphaz qualifies his statement made in verse 8 by adding that it is God’s anger that destroys the wicked. The two lines are parallel with dramatic heightening in line b, where the image of snorting anger matches the more prosaic breath of God in line a. The same image is seen in Exodus 15.8; 2 Samuel 22.16; Hosea 13.15. Blast of his anger translates “the wind of his anger,” which is the same term for “wind” or “spirit” used in Genesis 1.2. Perish in line a is matched by the more dramatic consumed in line b. The picture may be that of the hot wind blowing from the desert, and Good News Translation takes it in that sense: “Like a storm, God destroys them….” The noun phrase breath of God may have to be expressed as a clause; for example, “God breathes on them and they die.” In a poetic rendering which attempts to reflect the form of the Hebrew, we may translate, for example, “God breathes on them and they die; he blows on them and they disappear completely.”

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 .