In these verses Job continues his complaint against God. Verse 13 is dependent on verse 14 to complete its thought, and may be taken as in Revised Standard Version or as a conditional sentence “If I say….” My bed will comfort me: Job in his anguish hopes he will find comfort and relief when he goes to bed to sleep. My couch is parallel to My bed in the previous line but is without heightened poetic effect. Will ease my complaint matches comfort me. Job’s complaint is not just for his physical illness but for the deeper anguish he is unable to escape. In some languages it will not be possible to find a pair of words with similar meaning such as bed and couch. It is possible in many cases to avoid one or even both nouns and employ verb phrases; for example, “When I lie down to sleep” and “When I go to bed.”

Verse 14 completes the thought of verse 13. The two lines of this verse are parallel, saying something very similar. Their purpose is to emphasize Job’s complaint against God, who will not even leave him alone in peace while he sleeps. Then thou dost scare me with dreams: then refers to the time when Job is in bed and sleeping. Eliphaz received his revelations in a vision of the night. For Job such visions are a further source of torment. Terrify me with visions is not intended to represent a different reaction nor a different experience. The two lines say very much the same thing. However, the verb translated terrify is in the Hebrew intensive form, which heightens the poetic feeling in line b. In some languages it may be necessary to say, for example, “You give me bad dreams that scare me” or “You make me have bad dreams and they scare me.” There is no attempt to distinguish visions from dreams in the parallel lines. The focus is rather on Job’s reaction to these nighttime experiences.

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 .