Reading Job, part 3
Textual criticism.

There are many issues when reading Job.
One of the fairly serious ones is : Which Job are you reading ?
Just try reading the King James version and the RSV-version (and probably even the NEW RSV-version), and you will see that they differ greatly from each other at some points.
... and yet, they are both translations of the same, basic, Hebrew text.

With Job, the trouble lies not so much in the translations, but in the Hebrew.
You see, the Hebrew text is ... difficult.
There are passages in there that are well nigh impossible to get any sort of meaning out of. There are passages where every other word is one that only occur in the book of Job, and half of those are words that only occur this once.

When things like this happens, scholars turn to text-critique. Try to establish a firm text, one that is as close to "the original" as possible, and to do this, a battery of options are available.

The first one is : could there be a simple error of spelling. These texts have been handed down to us in written form, certainly, but ... errors occur. Letters are mis-read, repeated, omitted. Whole passages were repeated or omitted, not because the scribe/s were incompetent, but because they were human beings.
And when the next scribe along the line started copying, he knew, that he had to copy completely accurately, so ... a chance error was continued, now as (pardon) gospel truth.

And another couple of errors occur with the next scribe ... and the next ... and the next ...
Now, in scholar-speak, all the many possible scribal errors have each their name, and I'm not going to bore you with those. Just take my word for it, that haplography and dittography are just a few of them.

One way to deal with this is, to make a hyper-text. That's what New Testament scholars have in the Nestle-Aland edition of the New Testament. That is a text where you take many different old manuscripts of the same text, and see if there is a concensus.
When there is no consensus, you generally go with the version found in the older manuscripts ... but other options are noted in a text-critical apparatus.

Old Testament scholars don't have that ... yet. In this country we use a print-version of the manuscript usually known as the "Leningradensis", which is the oldest known manuscript containing the entire Old Testament, as we know it. There is a manuscript called the "Aleppo" which is about a century older, but that one doesn't have Genesis, since it has been in a fire. SO, we work with an annotated version of Leningradensis (which is - and you may be surprised here - a medieval manuscript from the 12th century)

ANYway. You still look at what other manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts, have, and if most of the others have a different version, you may choose to go with that.
If this one doesn't work (every script writes the same gibberish), you go to what is called "the versions" : the Septuagint (ancient Greek version of the Old Testament) and the Vulgate (Latin version of the Old and New Testament) are the most important, but there are others. You turn to those and check what they have translated.
Sometimes - quite frequently in fact - this can solve the issue.
You can see, from their translation, that they had a word added (or not there), or where the spelling error is, or that they assumed a different vocalization, simply by translating backwards.

BUT, there are pit-falls in this one too.
One of the "solid" pillars of textual critisism is, that any copyist is more likely to change gibberish to sense than the other way around ... which again means, that the - to us - gibberish text might well be the "real" thing, whereas the ancient versions changed an original text to something more easily understandable.
This rule of thumb is called the rule of lectio difficilior "the difficult reading"
So, you're back to square one, with a gibberish text.

Job is overflowing with textual problems. Words that only occur once. Strange grammar. Weird spellings. You name it, it is there.
And this makes translating Job your basic, scholarly nightmare.
To translate right, you need to know what the general trust of the piece is.
To find out what the general trust of the piece is, you need to understand what it says.
... Catch 22 ...
And caught between the rock and the hard place, I have reached the point, where I need to re-think the entire book. Need to find out what I think the book of Job is all about.
Is it about the unjust and unjustified suffering of the righteous man ? the problem which is known as theodicé ? Or might there be other issues that are as important ?
But that will have to be the next post.