Job אִיּוֹב

The book of Job asks the question the friends’ arithmetic cannot answer: why do the righteous suffer? Heaven itself certifies the man — 'whole-hearted and upright, and one who feared God, and shunned evil' — and heaven itself hands him over, so that no reader can take the friends’ way out. For three cycles of speeches Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar defend the ledger: suffering proves sin. Job, sitting in the ashes, refuses to lie for God — 'Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him; But I will argue my ways before Him' — and out of his extremity coins the hopes the centuries have kept: a Witness in heaven, a Redeemer who lives. Young Elihu reframes affliction as discipline; then Hashem answers Job out of the whirlwind with no answer at all — only creation, from the corner-stone of the earth 'When the morning stars sang together' to behemoth and leviathan. Job repents in dust and ashes; and in the book’s last surprise, the God of the whirlwind sides with him against his defenders: 'you have not spoken of Me the thing that is right, as My servant Job has.' The man who argued is called My servant; the men who defended the ledger need his prayer.

This edition presents each verse word by word: the Hebrew, its transliteration, its root, its gematria, and a form-true English gloss, beneath a complete modern English translation adapted from the public-domain Jewish Publication Society version of 1917. Six classical commentaries accompany the text — Rashi (completed on the closing chapters by his school), Ibn Ezra, Ralbag (Levi ben Gershom, Gersonides), the Metzudat David and Metzudat Zion, and the Malbim.