02_Burnight-co_347_370 28/10/14 10:35 Pagina 355 DOES ELIPHAZ REALLY BEGIN “GENTLY”? 355 question’s ambiguous character, set precisely in the context in which Eliphaz professes his own attitude towards Job (4,2-7), creates a ten- sion which cries out for continuation” 20. As noted above, despite this ambiguity most modern commentators read $tlsk here as “your con- fidence”, “your assurance”, or similarly. Many cite a 1965 study by Moshe Held in which he argues from the comparative philological evidence that the concrete meaning of ls,K,, representing seven of its 13 biblical occurrences (five times in Leviticus 3–4, as well as Ps 38,7 and Job 15,27), is “sinew, tendon” (rather than “loins, fat of loins” as it has been traditionally interpreted) 21. Held goes on to assert that both ls,K, and the rarer hl's.Ki must mean “strength” when used metaphorically, and so come to connote “confidence”; in his view, the much more common lysiK. (“fool”) and the hapax legomenon tWlysiK. (“stupidity”) are derived from an unrelated verb meaning “to be or become stupid” 22. While Held’s proposal that the physical meaning of ls,K, is “sinew, tendon” is convincing, his categorical assertion that ls,K, and hl'sK. i always mean “strength, confidence” when used metaphor- ically is less so, as is his proposal for a completely separate seman- tic development of “fool” from an unrelated verbal root. In the first place, though Held’s study is often quoted in support of the idea that hl's.Ki means “confidence” in Job 4,6, it is worth noting that in his discussion of this verse he is, ironically, more concerned with demonstrating the correctness of the concrete meaning “sinew” from what he assumes to be the derived meaning “strength, confidence”, rather than vice-versa. He argues that $tlsk must mean “your confi- 20 BEUKEN, “Job’s Imprecation”, 58-59. 21 M. HELD, “Studies in Comparative Semitic Lexicography”, Studies in Honor of Benno Landsberger on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday April 21, 1965 (eds. H. GÜTERBOCK et al.) (Chicago, IL 1965) 395-406, here 401-406. Cf. the Ugaritic cognate ksl and the Akkadian ka/islu. 22 See HELD, “Studies in Comparative Semitic Lexicography”, 406. He proposes that the verbal root lsk in Hebrew denotes “stupidity, bad habits, lack of manners and education, and the like” and compares it to the Akkadian saklu. His argument for a completely separate semantic development of “fool” from a different verbal root is tenuous: there is only one example of such a verb in the biblical corpus (Jer 10,8), where it is in parallelism with the denominative verb r[b, “to be brutish” (i.e. to be ‘strong and stupid”; see discussion below).