Cultural Adaptation

And Job said, “May the day on which I was to be born perish, as well as the night which said, ‘A boy is conceived.’”  Job 3:2-3  NASB

Boy – The Hebraic idea of a person encompasses all of that person’s life.  This includes all the relationships, connections, obligations, heritage, and genealogy that make someone who he is.  We, on the other hand, think of individuals in stages: baby, toddler, youngster,  teenager, adult.  So, when the translators read this text in Hebrew and came across the word gābĕr, they adopted our understanding of a person at birth and choose the word “boy” when the term gābĕr actually means “man” with the connotation of “strength.”  Notice Oswalt’s important clarification:

(geber). Man. As distinct from such more general words for man as ʾādām, ʾiš, ʾenôš, etc., this word specifically relates to a male at the height of his powers. As such it depicts humanity at its most competent and capable level. Sixty-six occurrences.^[1]

Now you can appreciate Job’s declaration.  He is not saying that he wished he were never born into this world.  He is saying that his conception carried with it the future of his success, of his stature and power, and it is this that he decries.  He is not born a “boy.”  He is born a gābĕr, the strong one, the hero, the model for all of us—and it is this inevitability that has undone him.  Perhaps he would have continued, “If I had only been born a commoner, a nobody, then none of this would have happened to me.  Oh, the tragedy of being born into such a role—a friend of God—and now His plaything.”

All of this is missing when we read “boy.”  We assume that Job is speaking about our cultural definition.  He is not—and tragically we never know the magnitude of his statement.  We certainly would have recognized the greater depth of this sentence had we known that the root of his vocabulary choice was gābar—to prevail, be mighty, be great.  These are precisely the characteristics that have been stripped from him.  “The Hebrew root is commonly associated with warfare and has to do with the strength and vitality of the successful warrior.”^[2]  Job is defeated.  He is anything but gābar, and now, years after his entry into the world as the one destined to be the object of this cosmic encounter, all that he once was has been destroyed.  His choice of gābĕr rather than any other Hebrew term for child displays the irony of his situation in the same manner that his wife employed the sarcastic use of bārak.  But we should have recognized this as soon as we read qālal in a previous verse, a word that suggests “the quality of ‘slightness’,” something that Job has become.

So much for the lesson in modified translation.  What is the point of this investigation?  The point isn’t just that translators misdirect us.  It’s that the Hebrew text is full of deeper meanings, layered upon each other, that require mining, even when the English appears so obvious.

Topical Index: boy, gābĕr, man, Job 3:2-3

^[1] Oswalt, J. N. (1999). 310 גָּבַר. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., pp. 148–149). Moody Press.

^[2] Ibid.