Job 28:3-5

New English Translation

Footnotes

1. Job 28:3 sn The text appears at first to be saying that by opening up a mine shaft, or by taking lights down below, the miner dispels the darkness. But the clause might be more general, meaning that man goes deep into the earth as if it were day.
2. Job 28:3 tn The verse ends with “the stone of darkness and deep darkness.” The genitive would be location, describing the place where the stones are found.
3. Job 28:4 tc The first part of this verse, “He cuts a shaft far from the place where people live,” has received a lot of attention. The word for “live” is גָּר (gar). Some of the proposals are: “limestone,” on the basis of the LXX; “far from the light,” reading נֵר (ner); “by a foreign people,” taking the word to means “foreign people”; “a foreign people opening shafts”; or taking gar as “crater” based on Arabic. Driver puts this and the next together: “a strange people who have been forgotten cut shafts” (see his “Problems in Job,” AJSL 52 [1935/36]: 163). L. Waterman had “the people of the lamp” (“Note on Job 28:4, ” JBL 71 [1952]: 167ff). And there are others. Since there is really no compelling argument in favor of one of these alternative interpretations, the MT should be preserved until shown to be wrong.
4. Job 28:4 tn Heb “forgotten by the foot.” This means that there are people walking above on the ground, and the places below, these mines, are not noticed by the pedestrians above.
5. Job 28:4 sn This is a description of the mining procedures. Dangling suspended from a rope would be a necessary part of the job of going up and down the shafts.
6. Job 28:5 sn The verse has been properly understood, on the whole, as comparing the earth above and all its produce with the upheaval down below.