Ayub 19:22

19:22 Why do you pursue me like God does? ¹ 

Will you never be satiated with my flesh? ² 

Ayub 30:18

30:18 With great power God ³  grasps my clothing; ⁴ 

he binds me like the collar ⁵  of my tunic.

[19:22]  ¹ sn Strahan comments, “The whole tragedy of the book is packed into these extraordinary words.”

[19:22]  ² sn The idiom of eating the pieces of someone means “slander” in Aramaic (see Dan 3:8), Arabic and Akkadian.

[30:18]  ³ tn Heb “he”; the referent (God) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

[30:18]  ⁴ tc This whole verse is difficult. The first problem is that this verb in the MT means “is disguised [or disfigured],” indicating that Job’s clothes hang loose on him. But many take the view that the verb is a phonetic variant of חָבַשׁ (khavash, “to bind; to seize”) and that the Hitpael form is a conflation of the third and second person because of the interchange between them in the passage (R. Gordis, Job, 335). The commentaries list a number of conjectural emendations, but the image in the verse is probably that God seizes Job by the garment and throws him down.

[30:18]  ⁵ tn The phrase “like the collar” is difficult, primarily because their tunics did not have collars. A translation of “neck” would suit better. Some change the preposition to בּ (bet), getting a translation “by the neck of my tunic.”