Job 6:16

They grow dark with ice,

   Vanishing beneath heaps of snow.

Jumping right in.

I reread the King James version and chuckled at the language: “Which are blackish by reason of ice.” It seems like a geeky logic teacher trying poetry. Each source used ice except one who said: “icy day”. “Icy day” seems as silly as calling “dark” “gloomy” or “blackish” all of which were rejected. The wadi was described as “that run dark”, “when darkened”, “which are dark”, “they are dark”, and “they grow dark”. I preferred the ones that had an action rather than just a condition and the “grow” phrase seemed simpler. The “ice” came in the form of “with ice”, “by thawing ice”, “because of the ice”, and “from the ice”. I could not find a reason for the thawing bit, so I just went with plain old “with ice”.

Two sources used “melting snow” as opposed to “snow”. I still was not comfortable with the melting. “Turbid” and “swollen” were used with “melted snow” and I agree this physically is true, but everyone else talked about hiding with regular snow or hiding snow, so I followed that path. King James and New King James both had the wadi hiding the snow, but all the Jewish sources had the wadi hiding under the snow. “Obscures”, “covers up”, and “heaped on” were alternatives, but I liked the combination of “vanishing beneath heaps”.

The odd bit for me from where I come from is the concept of ice and snow in the desert. In my mind desert is all sand, but a “desert stream” seems to not fit in the paradigm, so I am forced to alter the mental image of a wadi being a desert stream to being a temporary stream based on the weather and run off as opposed to a stream fed from a spring.

So far, we have that wadis betray people by running dry, by icing over, by being covered in snow, and have more to come. This far in, I see that Job is really trying to show how bad his “friends” are being to him. Our president probably feels betrayed by the liberal in congress, by the moderates in the senate, by the press, by Putin, and everyone he ever thought was a friend. Only his financial backers are probably standing by him now and I am sure they are not helping the American cause. I once heard China might put out a warrant for your arrest if you said something bad about them and then left America, so I better stop there so I can still be of some use in a land of the ice and snow.