complete verse (Job 4:20)

Following are a number of back-translations as well as a sample translation for translators of Job 4:20:

  • Kupsabiny: “A person can be alive in the morning (when it dawns)
    or then when it is afternoon he has died not to be seen again!” (Source: Kupsabiny Back Translation)
  • Newari: “From morning ’till evening they are destroyed.
    Unnoticed, they perish forever.” (Source: Newari Back Translation)
  • Hiligaynon: “They are alive in the morning, but by night (they are) now dead. They no-longer can-be-seen until forever.” (Source: Hiligaynon Back Translation)

Translation commentary on Job 4:20

Between morning and evening: in Psalm 90.5-6 the passing of a person’s life is compared to the fresh green grass of the morning, which fades and withers by evening. There is no attempt to give a precise time in the expression Between morning and evening. The meaning is that an individual is alive and well in the morning and before the day is over he is dead. Good News Translation is an accurate model in this verse.

They are destroyed: they refers not to the moth of verse 19c but to those who live in houses of clay and whose foundation is dust. Destroyed translates a Hebrew verb meaning to “pound or pulverize.” It is used of the warriors beaten down in Jeremiah 46.5 and of images being smashed to pieces in Micah 1.7. They perish for ever is the consequence of the previous line.

Without any regarding it: in order for this expression to mean “without anyone noticing it,” it is necessary to add the Hebrew word for heart as a complement of the verb, which is “place, lay,” thus “lay it in the heart.” The idiom is used in that way in Isaiah 57.1, which Revised Standard Version translates “No one lays it to heart.” This solution has not been widely accepted, and other suggestions have been made to correct the Hebrew text. However, as recognized by Gordis, the force of the parallelism of thought between verse 20a and verse 21a, and between verse 20b and verse 21b, makes it possible to understand without any regarding it to refer to those who perish as being unaware of their dying. Thus, for example, “they die and know nothing of it” or “they die and do not know it.”

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 .

textual location of Job 4:12-21

According to the Job translation by Greenstein (2019), Job 4:12-21 should be located following Job 3:26. He explains:

“For many reasons the passage 4:12-21 should be read here, right after chapter 3, as the conclusion of Jobs opening speech. One may suppose that two pages of ancient papyrus or parchment containing the two equal halves of chapter 4 were accidentally interchanged in the course of the text’s transmission. In an oft-compared Babylonian composition about a pious sufferer (“I Shall Praise the Lord of Wisdom”) it is the complainant, not the would-be sage, who experiences a divine revelation. It is also Job the sufferer, not his companions, who receives a theophany near the end of the book. More important, in the ensuing chapters both Eliphaz and Job refer to Jobs claim to have enjoyed a revelation. Further, Eliphaz (in chapter 15) and Bildad (in chapter 25) cite the words of the revelation as Jobs, and Elihu, who engages only with the arguments of Job, quotes from it (33:15).”