It is best to consider verses 8 and 9 together, since verse 8 is only introductory to verse 9. With verse 8 Job returns to his plea to God to release him from life, as in chapter 3. Job hopes that his outburst will make God strike him down and finish him. The two lines of verse 8 are very similar, but there is little if any intensification in the second line.

That I might have my request: God is implicit in this line and expressed in the next. Good News Translation has taken God from the next line and placed it here, and has structured this line as a question rather than as a petition.

That God would grant my desire: desire translates the Hebrew term for “hope,” which was used in 4.6, where Eliphaz asked Job if his hope was not built on his fear of God and his integrity. Job’s hope is that God will kill him, which he expresses in the words of the next line. New English Bible says “That God would grant what I hope for,” and this is followed by Bible en français courant, New International Version, New Jerusalem Bible, Traduction œcuménique de la Bible, and others.

If the translator is able to maintain meaningful parallel lines, they may be translated, for example, “I beg God to do what I ask him, to give me what I want.” If the parallel lines can not be kept, verse 8 may be rendered as a single line; for example, “Grant me, God, what I ask you to do.”

Verse 9 gives the content of Job’s prayer from verse 8, that God should destroy him.

That it would please God to crush me: Job pleads that God be willing to crush him. Crush translates the same verb Eliphaz used in 4.19, “crushed like a moth” (Good News Translation). There it was used literally. In 5.4 and here it is used figuratively. That he would let loose his hand and cut me off: the form of the verb let loose is causative and means detach, release, free. The picture is that of God freeing his hand (from some engaging action) so that he can cut Job loose. Cut me off: in the light of the usage in Isaiah 38.12, the expression depicts God cutting Job out of the thread of the fabric being woven on the loom. For Job to be cut off, the act must be done by God, not by Job taking his own life.

The two lines of this verse are parallel, with the figure of thread being cut from the loom making the second line more visible in the image. The poetic strengthening can be expressed in English, for example, “If God would only crush the life out of me, if only he would take his hand and cut off my life as a thread is cut out of a cloth” or “… cut out when cloth is woven.”

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 .