Ayub 6:26

6:26 Do you intend to criticize mere words,

and treat ¹  the words of a despairing man as wind?

Ayub 13:2

13:2 What you know, ²  I ³  know also;

I am not inferior ⁴  to you!

Ayub 15:24

15:24 Distress and anguish ⁵  terrify him;

they prevail against him

like a king ready to launch an attack, ⁶ 

[6:26]  ¹ tn This, in the context, is probably the meaning, although the Hebrew simply has the line after the first half of the verse read: “and as/to wind the words of a despairing man.” The line could be translated “and the words of a despairing man, [which are] as wind.” But this translation follows the same approach as RSV, NIV, and NAB, which take the idiom of the verb (“think, imagine”) with the preposition on “wind” to mean “reckon as wind” – “and treat the words of a despairing man as wind.”

[13:2]  ² tn Heb “Like your knowledge”; in other words Job is saying that his knowledge is like their knowledge.

[13:2]  ³ tn The pronoun makes the subject emphatic and stresses the contrast: “I know – I also.”

[13:2]  ⁴ tn The verb “fall” is used here as it was in Job 4:13 to express becoming lower than someone, i.e., inferior.

[15:24]  ⁵ tn If “day and darkness” are added to this line, then this verse is made into a tri-colon – the main reason for transferring it away from the last verse. But the newly proposed reading follows the LXX structure precisely, as if that were the approved construction. The Hebrew of MT has “distress and anguish terrify him.”

[15:24]  ⁶ tn This last colon is deleted by some, moved to v. 26 by others, and the NEB puts it in brackets. The last word (translated here as “launch an attack”) occurs only here. HALOT 472 s.v. כִּידוֹר links it to an Arabic root kadara, “to rush down,” as with a bird of prey. J. Reider defines it as “perturbation” from the same root (“Etymological Studies in Biblical Hebrew,” VT 2 [1952]: 127).