| 15. Linguistic Exegesis The verse opens with a fronted compound subject, garei {גָּ֘רֵ֤י | gārê} ‘sojourners’ in construct with beiti {בֵיתִ֣י | bêtî} ‘my house’, joined to ve’amhotai {וְ֭אַמְהֹתַי | wə-ʾāməhōṯay} ‘and my female servants’, which together foreground the very people inside Job’s household who now distance themselves from him. The predicate is built in two parallel steps: first, the verbal clause lezar tachshevuni {לְזָ֣ר תַּחְשְׁבֻ֑נִי | lə-zār taḥšəvûnî} ‘as a stranger you consider me’, then a reinforcing verbless-style identification followed by a finite verb, nachri hayiti {נָ֝כְרִ֗י הָיִ֥יתִי | nāḵrî hāyîṯî} ‘a foreigner I have become’. The second person plural in tachshevuni {תַּחְשְׁבֻ֑נִי | taḥšəvûnî} functions as a direct address to the household group(s), while the concluding idiom be’eineihem {בְעֵינֵיהֶֽם | bə-ʿênêhem} ‘in their eyes’ specifies that this estrangement is expressed as a settled evaluation. Rendering the two descriptors “stranger” and “foreigner” in English preserves the tightening parallelism and the intensification from social distance to complete exclusion. |