The Book of Job can be a frustrating read for many avid Bible readers, especially in translation. What should we make of such confusing contradictions as this?:

“Behold, he will slay me; I have no hope” (Job 13:15 RSV)
“Though he slay me, I will hope in him” (Job 13:15 ESV)

So which is it? Is Job declaring that he has hope or that he has no hope?

Curse God or Bless God?

Elsewhere in Job is the famous line that his wife declaims in the face of his terrible sufferings:

“Curse God and die” (Job 2:9 ESV)
“Bless God and die” (Job 2:9, literally)

This is confusing because the Hebrew [barek] actually says the opposite of what it means. It literally says “Bless God and die,” but it means the opposite. Why? The scribes would consider it impious to tell someone to curse God, so they use a euphemism so it doesn’t sound directly bad.  The negative meaning, “curse,” would be understood but left unstated. The same thing happens in Job 1:5. The early Septuagint translators handle the problem slightly differently:

“Say some word to the Lord, and die” (Job 2:9 NETS – LXX)

While they do not translate literally (“bless”), nor do they render the euphemism’s meaning (“curse”), they offer an ambiguous translation that gets the meaning across.

The Problem of Translation

While it is possible that the writer of Job is deliberately using double-meanings and ambiguities to keep the reader guessing, struggling to read the poetry well––“It’s a feature, not a bug,” as they say––that poetic prowess does not come across in translation. Translators must pick a meaning among the various possible meanings and deliver it to their audiences unvarnished. That leads to problems. As. C.L. Seow says, “Visual poetry in Job constantly demands interpretive decisions on the part of the reader––decisions that, once made, may yet be questioned again and revised. Translations inevitably limit the expression of such poetry, for every translation commits one to a single interpretation, usually at the expense of whatever ambiguities may indeed be part and parcel of poetry. Translations do not accommodate retrospective adjustments” (Seow, “Orthography,” p. 84).

So the answer is “no,” Job does not always say what he means. In fact, sometimes he says the exact opposite. If the poetry works the way that Seow describes, then it is inviting us into a kind of literary wrestling match, where as we read, we must keep struggling to understand, developing opinions and then revising them as the reading continues.

Two Articles Treat These Matters in Job:

• McGrew, Israel. “The Hermeneutics of ברך: Septimal Structures, Alien Significations, and the Meaning of Creation in the Book of Job.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 87 (2025): 265–88. This article focuses on the use of barak in Job, revealing a sevenfold pattern, and explores the euphemistic use of the verb.
• Seow, C. L. “Orthography, Textual Criticism, and the Poetry of Job.” Journal of Biblical Literature 130 (2011): 63–85. This article is more comprehensive in scope, presenting lots of textual evidence for archaic spellings in Job, investigating particular cases to develop a theory of how the poetry deploys ambiguity in orthography (spelling) to delight/frustrate/bewilder its readers.