The caravans turn aside from their course: caravans refers to a line of camels with riders and merchandise, crossing the desert. They turn aside from their route in search of water, but find none and so die. Turn aside means to leave, abandon, stray from their path.

They go up into the waste, and perish: the first part of this line is parallel to the previous line, and the final part is a consequence. Waste translates the Hebrew word tohu, used in Genesis 1.2 in combination with the similar sounding bohu and translated by Revised Standard Version “without form and void.” This same term is used in 26.7, where Revised Standard Version says “he stretches out the north over the void,” and which Good News Translation renders “empty space.” In Isaiah 45.18 Good News Translation renders it “desolate waste.” Here the meaning is trackless waste land. Its most conspicuous feature is its emptiness. Perish is a literary word in English, meaning to die, which was also used in 3.3. The image of the lost caravan in hopeless search of life-sustaining water is the poet’s way of intensifying Job’s feeling of deception in the advice Eliphaz has offered him.

Caravans may be translated by some such expression as “travelers,” “camels and their riders,” or “travelers on camels.” The author and his readers knew why the caravans turn aside, but in some languages it will be necessary to say, as in Good News Translation, “looking for water.” If an empty desert area is unknown, it may be necessary to say, for example, “They wander far from where people live” or “They wander into the empty land where nothing lives, and they die there.”

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 .