18:6 The light in his tent grows dark;
his lamp above him is extinguished. 3
18:14 He is dragged from the security of his tent, 4
and marched off 5 to the king 6 of terrors.
18:21 ‘Surely such is the residence 7 of an evil man;
and this is the place of one who has not known God.’” 8
1 tn Heb “walk in” (also in v. 5).
2 tn Heb “and they turned aside after unjust gain and took bribes and perverted justice.”
3 tn The LXX interprets a little more precisely: “his lamp shall be put out with him.”
sn This thesis of Bildad will be questioned by Job in 21:17 – how often is the lamp of the wicked snuffed out?
4 tn Heb “from his tent, his security.” The apposition serves to modify the tent as his security.
5 tn The verb is the Hiphil of צָעַד (tsa’ad, “to lead away”). The problem is that the form is either a third feminine (Rashi thought it was referring to Job’s wife) or the second person. There is a good deal of debate over the possibility of the prefix t- being a variant for the third masculine form. The evidence in Ugaritic and Akkadian is mixed, stronger for the plural than the singular. Gesenius has some samples where the third feminine form might also be used for the passive if there is no expressed subject (see GKC 459 §144.b), but the evidence is not strong. The simplest choices are to change the prefix to a י (yod), or argue that the ת (tav) can be masculine, or follow Gesenius.
6 sn This is a reference to death, the king of all terrors. Other identifications are made in the commentaries: Mot, the Ugaritic god of death; Nergal of the Babylonians; Molech of the Canaanites, the one to whom people sent emissaries.
7 tn The term is in the plural, “the tabernacles”; it should be taken as a plural of local extension (see GKC 397 §124.b).
8 tn The word “place” is in construct; the clause following it replaces the genitive: “this is the place of – he has not known God.”