wild animal

The Hebrew, Latin and Greek that is translated in English as “wild animal” or similar is translated in Newari as “animal that lives in the jungle.” (Source: Newari Back Translation)

Translation commentary on Job 5:22

At destruction and famine you shall laugh: verse 22 forms a link between verses 21 and 23. The Hebrew word for destruction is repeated from verse 21, but the word for famine is Aramaic, a different word than is used in verse 20. There is no real change in meaning. Some interpreters would drop verse 22, believing it serves no purpose. However, Dhorme points out that verse 23 explains verse 22. Also 23a gives the reason for 22a, while 23b explains 22b. Laugh translates a verb which here suggests scorn, scoff, or deride. It is also used in 39.7, where it is translated “scorns” by Revised Standard Version. In some languages, to laugh at something means only to show puzzlement or embarrassment. Since that is not the idea here, the expression must often be adjusted to say, for example, “You will scorn violence and famine,” “You will scoff at…,” or sometimes idiomatically, “You will say that violence and famine are only small things.”

Beasts of the earth: these animals are wild animals in contrast to domestic animals, and the same as referred to in verse 23b. Wild animals are sometimes called “bush animals,” “animals that eat in the forest,” or “animals that people hunt.”

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 .