Through want and hard hunger: the Hebrew of this verse has three lines, but Revised Standard Version reduces them to two. The word translated hard is rendered “barren” in 3.7. There the basic meaning is “stony,” and, as stony ground is unproductive, the meaning is extended to include “barren.” The same allusion to stony ground here probably suggests “skinny, gaunt.” It is here a description of the men in verse 2, which Good News Translation renders “poor and hungry.” New Jerusalem Bible says “worn out by want and hunger.”

They gnaw the dry and desolate ground is literally “those who gnaw the dry.” Good News Translation and others supply the word “roots,” which Dhorme thinks fell out of the text in copying; but this expression may be a figure of speech, dry ground representing the roots that grow in it. Revised Standard Version includes the words and desolate ground in the second line, and notes in a footnote that the Hebrew has “ground yesterday waste.” Revised Standard Version omits the words “yesterday” and “waste.” New English Bible takes dry to mean “in the desert.” Hebrew Old Testament Text Project suggests either “those who gnaw the desert” or “those who flee to the desert.” The words “ground yesterday waste” are much disputed. The word translated “yesterday” occurs in Genesis 19.34; 31.29, 42, and is translated by Good News Translation as “last night.” Pope says the alliteration in this phrase is too striking for it to be removed, and translates “by night in desolate waste.” Hebrew Old Testament Text Project suggests “darkness/groping, waste and desolation.” And the sense of this may be “They gnawed (something, perhaps roots) in the desert, where they groped in the waste and desolation of the darkness.” Although no solution to the problems of this obscure verse can be at all certain, Good News Translation is recommended as a meaningful attempt. The verse may also be rendered, for example, “These people were so poor and starved at night out in the deserts, that they would chew on dry roots in the ground.”

Quoted with permission from Reyburn, Wiliam. A Handbook on Job. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1992. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .