translation_id: net-engnet

book_id: JOB

label: NET study note

text: The number “ten” is a general expression to convey that this has been done often (see Gen 31:7 ; Num 14:22 ).


text: Job’s friends have been using his shame, his humiliation in all his sufferings, as proof against him in their case.


text: The images here are fairly common in the Bible. God has stripped away Job’s honorable reputation. The crown is the metaphor for the esteem and dignity he once had. See 29:14 ; Isa 61:3 ; see Ps 8:5 [6].


text: Now the metaphor changes again. Since God thinks of Job as an enemy, he attacks with his troops, builds the siege ramp, and camps around him to besiege him. All the power and all the forces are at God’s disposal in his attack of Job.


text: The use of the verb “rise” is probably fairly literal. When Job painfully tries to get up and walk, the little boys make fun of him.


text: Strahan comments, “The whole tragedy of the book is packed into these extraordinary words.”


text: The idiom of eating the pieces of someone means “slander” in Aramaic (see Dan 3:8 ), Arabic and Akkadian.


text: There is some question concerning the use of the lead. It surely cannot be a second description of the tool, for a lead tool would be of no use in chiseling words into a rock. It was Rashi’s idea, followed by Dillmann and Duhm, that lead was run into the cut-out letters. The suggestion that they wrote on lead tablets does not seem to fit the verse (cf. NIV). See further A. Baker, “The Strange Case of Job’s Chisel,” CBQ 31 (1969): 370-79.