Job 20:16 — ExegesisTAB

The verse opens by fronting the object rosh-petanim {רֹאשׁ־פְּתָנִים | rōʾš-pəṯānîm} ‘venom of serpents,’ placing the lethal substance in emphatic position before the verb. The imperfect yinak {יִינָק | yinnaq} ‘he will suck’ portrays an action with inevitability, fitting the poetic depiction of the wicked ingesting what destroys them. The following imperfect tahargehu {תַּֽ֝הַרְגֵ֗הוּ | tahargēhû} ‘she will kill him’ is marked as feminine singular, aligning syntactically with the feminine subject leshon {לְשׁוֹן | ləšôn} ‘tongue,’ even though the referent is the snake; this agreement heightens the personified agency of the “tongue.” The construct chain leshon efeh {לְשׁוֹן אֶפְעֶה | ləšôn ʾepʿeh} ‘tongue of a viper’ uses a body-part term to depict the fatal strike; in Hebrew imagery, the “tongue” can stand for the snake’s venom-delivering attack. English can preserve the metaphor (“tongue”) in a formal rendering, while a dynamic rendering may express the implied mechanism (“fangs”) without changing the clause’s assertion that the snake’s attack results in death.