Job 24:12-14

New English Translation

Footnotes

1. Job 24:12 tc The MT as pointed reads “from the city of men they groan.” Most commentators change one vowel in מְתִים (m^etim) to get מֵתִים (metim) to get the active participle, “the dying.” This certainly fits the parallelism better, although sense could be made out of the MT.
2. Job 24:12 tn Heb “the souls of the wounded,” which here refers to the wounded themselves.
3. Job 24:12 tc The MT has the noun תִּפְלָה (tiflah) which means “folly; tastelessness” (cf. 1:22). The verb, which normally means “to place; to put,” would then be rendered “to impute; to charge.” This is certainly a workable translation in the context. Many commentators have emended the text, changing the noun to תְּפִלָּה (t^efillah, “prayer”), and so then also the verb יָשִׂים (yasim, here “charges”) to יִשְׁמַע (yishmaʿ, “hears”). It reads: “But God does not hear the prayer”—referring to the groans.
4. Job 24:13 tn Heb “They are among those who.”
5. Job 24:14 tn The text simply has לָאוֹר (laʾor, “at light” or “at daylight”), probably meaning just at the time of dawn.
6. Job 24:14 tn In a few cases the jussive is used without any real sense of the jussive being present (see GKC 323 §109.k).
7. Job 24:14 sn The point is that he is like a thief in that he works during the night, just before the daylight, when the advantage is all his and the victim is most vulnerable.