Job 5:5

His harvest the hungry will devour,

   His substance the starving will carry away,

      And the famished will drag off his wealth.

 

As mentioned in the last verse, this is Eliphaz poking at Job. Job’s kids, his animals, and his health have been taken from him. Something I just read said that Eliphaz was more diplomatic in this first round of speech than in the following rounds. That’s true if your think of being diplomatic as saying exactly what you mean in a way fools can interpret it another.

Every source had hungry and harvest, but the verb choices included “eat”, “consume”, “eat up”, “dine on”, and “devour”. I liked devour as the most negative of the lot, but also the finality of it.

The second stitch was much different. One source even had the man scrabbling for remnants of the harvest among thorns to feed himself. This source often misses the mark. The noun was sometimes “they”, sometimes the hungry from the first stitch, or “the starving” that I used from my favorite source. The verb ranged from “take it” to “carry it away” which are essentially the same. The third aspect of this stitch describes what is taken away. “Even out of the thorns”, “even from among thorns”, or “his substance” were the variations. I cannot remember the details, but the options were to further describe the people taking even that which was among the thorns or being poetic and matching the flow with the “hungry” taking his harvest that he intends to sell and his substance that he intends to eat. I chose the poetic.

The final stich has six uses of “wealth” and two of “substance”. Substance was from the King James and the New King James, so I felt wealth was probably the better term for the Hebrew word. It also has five uses of “thirsty” and one of “famished” along with the two outliers of the King James versions. Thirsty seemed off from a poetic standpoint. The verb uses include “pant after” (which seems way off), “swallow”, “gulp”, and “drag off”. My vision of this is the people are hungry enough to eat all his food, but they cannot eat the “wealth” that is not edible, so they simply take it away to use or barter for food. Hence, why I could not use swallow or gulp.

The King James has something like “the robber swallows up the substance” and the New King James has something like “a snare ‘#$%^’ their substance”). Obviously, my handwriting needs work if I cannot read it. “Snatches” was the word I could not read. My guess is the Hebrew has a pronoun like “it” that some have used literally and some have used to put in a word like “substance” and that there is a word like “wealth” that also has a “substance” quality to it. Either way the New King James seems to have messed up the workable solution in the King James and resulted in something different altogether with the snare bit.

As it turns out I used my favorite source for the whole thing. I do not like doing this, but sometimes this is what the process reveals. Going back, the verse is still about the fool and how his attempts to build wealth or feed himself often seem to end in misery for himself and gain for others. Job had all his stuff and now he has nothing, and his enemies have wealth. One might even think Eliphaz had something to do with the raiders raiding. He of course could not have been the source of the natural or supernatural disasters, but it was a thought.

This reminds me of the “If it quacks, it’s a duck” concept. If all this stuff happened to Job, he must be a fool. As the Bible teaches, it is better to say nothing than to open your mouth and prove that you are a fool. Eliphaz will be proven the fool later in the book and all his own evil hopes will be dashed.