Ayub 9:16

9:16 If I summoned him, and he answered me, ¹ 

I would not believe ² 

that he would be listening to my voice –

Ayub 29:24

29:24 If I smiled at them, they hardly believed it; ³ 

and they did not cause the light of my face to darken. ⁴ 

[9:16]  ¹ sn The idea of “answer” in this line is that of responding to the summons, i.e., appearing in court. This preterite and the perfect before it have the nuance of hypothetical perfects since they are in conditional clauses (GKC 330 §111.x). D. J. A. Clines (Job [WBC], 219) translates literally, “If I should call and he should answer.”

[9:16]  ² tn The Hiphil imperfect in the apodosis of this conditional sentence expresses what would (not) happen if God answered the summons.

[29:24]  ³ tn The connection of this clause with the verse is difficult. The line simply reads: “[if] I would smile at them, they would not believe.” Obviously something has to be supplied to make sense out of this. The view adopted here makes the most sense, namely, that when he smiled at people, they could hardly believe their good fortune. Other interpretations are strained, such as Kissane’s, “If I laughed at them, they believed not,” meaning, people rejected the views that Job laughed at.

[29:24]  ⁴ tn The meaning, according to Gordis, is that they did nothing to provoke Job’s displeasure.