02_Burnight-co_347_370 28/10/14 10:35 Pagina 364 364 JOHN BURNIGHT [Eliphaz is saying that] since the upright are never cut off prema- turely, Job should not yield to despair. If such is the undertone of this verse, then Eliphaz, while well intentioned, misunderstood Job, who is not afraid of dying but rather longs for death [...]. It was not death that Job feared, it was life 45. It is possible that Eliphaz has either not “heard” or chosen not to believe that Job wishes to die, and that he is saying what he thinks Job should find reassuring. But the belief that 4,7 is meant to comfort Job is based on the assumption that Eliphaz believes Job to be inno- cent, an assumption that is in turn based almost entirely on the highly questionable reading of 4,6 against which I have argued above. The terminology Eliphaz uses in 4,7 once again allows for an alternative interpretation: that his purpose is to rebuke Job for his outburst in chapter 3, rather than to comfort him. As Clines notes, Eliphaz does not use an explicit term for death or dying in this verse (such as a form of twm or grh); instead, the verbs are dba and wdxkn46. Both of these may be used to describe dying, of course, but it is not necessary to read them as such; it is also possible to inter- pret them respectively as “to be lost, vanish” 47 and “to be hidden” 48. I noted above that the last word of the previous verse, $ykrd (“your ways”), is in distant repetitive parallelism with wkrd in 3,23 (the man whose “way” is hidden). If the verbs in 4,7 are interpreted as “lost” and “hidden”, then they are in distant semantic parallelism with the predicate of wkrd, hrtsn (“hidden”). Just as 4,2 can be viewed as a response to the “exhaustion” imagery of 3,26 and 4,3-6 45 TERRIEN, “Job”, 936. 46 CLINES, Job 1–20, 124. Clines, however, nevertheless writes that “death is fairly clearly what he has in mind”. 47 As in, e.g., 1 Sam 9,3.20 (i.e. Saul’s asses are “lost”, they have not “perished”); Jer 50,6; Ezek 34,4.16; Ps 119,176; and commonly in Rabbinic and Modern Hebrew. Also cf. Ugaritic ’bd, which in the G-stem can be translated as “be missing, lacking, weaken, feel lost; to be lost, spoilt; to be ruined” (G. DEL OLMO LETE – J. SANMARTÍN, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition [Leiden 2003] I, 5). 48 Cf. especially Hos 5,3, where God declares that the sin of Israel is not “hidden” from him, and Ps 69,5, where the psalmist asserts that his sin is not “hidden” from God. The term occurs in six other passages in Job (6,10; 15,18.28; 20,12; 22,20; 27,11); in five of these, the sense is clearly “to be hidden”. In the sixth (Job 22,20), the context is uncertain, though the meaning appears to be “cut off”.