02_Burnight-co_347_370 28/10/14 10:35 Pagina 349 DOES ELIPHAZ REALLY BEGIN “GENTLY”? 349 verses, and offer my own rendering (where it differs) in the com- ments that follow. III. A close reading of Job 4,2 4,2 If one ventures a word with you, will you become impatient? But who can refrain from speaking? Eliphaz’s first words are generally viewed as a gentle expression of sympathy for his suffering friend. But this is based entirely on the presumed sense of the first colon, since the second — “But who can refrain from speaking?” — sounds more like an expression of indignation (i.e. at the provocation of Job’s words in chapter 3) than one of sympathy. It is thus the second verb in the first colon, halt, that is the key to viewing the verse as an expression of concern. The standard lexica gloss the qal verb of hal as “be weary, impa- tient” or similarly; the root occurs frequently in the nipʿal (“be weary, make oneself weary”, e.g., Exod 7,18; Isa 1,14; Jer 9,4) and hipʿil (“make weary, exhaust”, e.g., Isa 7,13; Jer 12,5; Mic 6,3), but apart from this passage (see also 4,5), the qal is attested only in Gen 19,11, where it appears to have the first, more physical meaning of “weary” rather than “impatient” 5. Commentators who take it as an indicator of Eliphaz’s sympathy, however, see halt as a reference to an emotional state: in addition to the NASB’s “be- come impatient”, translations such as “offended”, “grieved”, “de- jected”, and “irritated” have been offered, with the assumption being that Eliphaz is reluctant to speak for fear of upsetting his friend, but nevertheless decides to do so in order to comfort him. But is the Joban poet really trying to portray Eliphaz as worried about causing Job emotional distress? Though most modern exe- getes are of this opinion, there is a variety of views expressed in the ancient Versions and among the traditional authorities. Rashi, for example, interprets halt as a reference to physical exhaustion 5 The Ugaritic cognate l’y (cf. KTU 1.100:68) is glossed as “to tire” (L. KOEHLER – W. BAUMGARTNER, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament [Leiden 2000] 512) or “be/become weak” (P. BORDREUIL – D. PARDEE, A Manual of Ugaritic [Winona Lake, IN 2009] 328), cf. Akkadian la’ū. In rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic yal means “to labor” or “to be tired”.