02_Burnight-co_347_370 28/10/14 10:35 Pagina 358 358 JOHN BURNIGHT placed. In Job 8,12-14, Bildad asserts that the paths of all those who forget God will “wither like plants”: So are the paths of all who forget God; And the hope of the godless will perish, Whose confidence is fragile, And whose trust a spider’s web. In Job 31,24, the context also indicates that this “confidence” is a false one (“If I have made gold my confidence [ylsk], and called fine gold my trust ... ”). Given these usages, along with the widely accepted interpreta- tion of lsk as “folly” in Ps 49,13 and Eccl 7,25, the derived mean- ing of lsk is in my opinion best interpreted as “stubborn foolishness”, i.e. an overconfident, obdurate stupidity 29. It would therefore be analogous to the biblical condemnations against those who are “stiff-necked” (e.g., Exod 32,8) or who “harden their hearts” (e.g., 1 Sam 6,6) 30. It also eliminates the need to posit two entirely separate semantic developments for “fool” and “confi- dence”, as Held proposes. To summarize the foregoing discussion, in order to interpret Eliphaz’s words to Job in 4,6 as an affirmation of his righteousness, one must assume not only an unusual use of hary to mean “rever- ence” (i.e. without an explicit reference to the deity), but also that the meaning of hlsk is the same as an already questionable derived meaning of the segholate noun lsk. Further, one of Held’s main ar- guments in support of this questionable meaning is based, ironi- cally, on Job 4,6, where he assumes regular synonymous parallelism despite the peculiar position of the waw conjunction. 29 This meaning is also appropriate for the other passage in which lsk is typically translated as “confidence” or “trust” (Ps 78,5-8). Here the term oc- curs in a charge to the Israelites to instruct their children not to forget “God’s great deeds” and be a “wayward and defiant generation with an inconstant heart” like their fathers, but instead to make God their lsk. The idea here would be similar to that of the verb llhth (“boast, glorify oneself”): on its own, the term can indicate an arrogant overconfidence (e.g., 1 Kgs 20,11), but it takes on a positive connotation when used with hwhyb as a complement (e.g., Ps 34,3, “My soul will make its boast in the LORD”). 30 Also perhaps to bl twryrv (“stubborn of heart”, e.g., Jer 13,10); cf. yryrX wnjb “sinews [?] of his belly” in Job 40,16.