| 16. Linguistic Exegesis The verse opens with gam {גַּם | gām} ‘also, even’, a discourse marker that intensifies Job’s claim rather than merely adding information. The chain gam-hu-li {גַּם־הוּא־לִי | gam-hû-lî} ‘even He, for me’ places the subject pronoun forward and attaches a dative phrase (“for me”), creating a personal, emphatic confession. The following nominal li-yeshuah {לִישׁוּעָה | liyešûʿāh} ‘for salvation’ functions as a predicate complement, expressing what God will be to Job (deliverance/vindication). The causal conjunction ki {כִּי | kî} embedded in ki-lo {כִּי־לֹא | kî-lōʾ} introduces the ground for that confidence: access to the divine presence is morally bounded. In the second clause, the prepositional phrase lefanav {לְפָנָיו | ləfānāyw} ‘before Him’ precedes the subject khaneph {חָנֵף | ḥānēp̄} ‘godless one’, and the verb yavo {יָבֹא | yāḇōʾ} ‘will come’ closes the clause; this ordering heightens the exclusion by foregrounding “before Him” and then naming the excluded party. The English renderings preserve the causal link (“for/because”) and the categorical negation (“will not / would not”), while expressing the Hebrew predicate structure (“for me … salvation”) as idiomatic English (“be for me salvation / be my deliverance”). |