Problems with the Hebrew text in Job 26:12-13?

Question

Proposed correction of the Hebrew text

I know a professor of religious sciences who saw problems with Job 26:12-13 considering it a hapax, especially in the following verse.

ברוחו שמים שפרה By his wind the heavens were made fair;

He sees a problem with this structure since it escapes the parallelism in which it is inserted, his proposal is to do it like this

ברוחו שמ ים שפרה

It is based on Chaim Cohen's work, Biblical hapax legomena in the light of Akkadian and Ugaritic. Claiming that the scribes lost the original meaning of the word שפרה, which originally in the Akkadian language would mean “net” but tradition came to understand it as sweeping or beautified, he also considers שמים wrong because they would be two words that ended up joining over time and coincidentally formed a word, שמ would be by or put and ים would be sea or Yam

So it would look like this

בכחו רגע הים ובתובנתו מחץ רהב׃ ברוחו שמ ים שפרה חללה ידו נחש בריח׃

With his strength he shook the sea or Yam And with his dexterity, he harmed Rahab With his wind he caught Yam or sea in his net The primeval serpent pierced his hand

Has Judaism seen criticism of this text and how do they respond? Does anyone disagree? This professor knows Hebrew so he seems to be an authority on the subject, you can't say he doesn't understand the issue.

He has published an article about this text but it is in Portuguese, for those who don't know I'm from Brazil, I can insert the article if you want to know more in depth but you will have to know Portuguese or know someone who knows Portuguese.

Answer 1

I am not a dikduk expert but by my reading the text in front of us fits well and there's no evidence for changing it.

First, this verse, Job 26:11, is part of a sequence of verses that describes G-d's power and formation of the Earth, the Heavens, and the Water.

So 26:7 describes G-d hanging the earth on nothingness:

נֹטֶ֣ה צָפ֣וֹן עַל־תֹּ֑הוּ תֹּ֥לֶה אֶ֝֗רֶץ עַל־בְּלִי־מָֽה -- He stretched the North over chaos, he suspended the the Earth on nothingness

26:8-9 then move on to the heavens (both physical and spiritual) describing G-d's creation of clouds and his hiding of the heavenly Throne.

The four verses 26:10-13, then go back and forth discussing G-d's guidance and power over the seas and the heavens.

26:10 discusses G-ds control of the seas on Earth through the boundary between water and land and light (above the water surface) and darkness (below the water surface).

26:11 discusses G-d's power as it relates to the heavens.

26:12 turns back to the seas this time emphasizing G-d's power over the sea.

Finally, in 26:13, Job describes G-d's use of the wind to control or create beautiful boundary for the heavens (see Ibn Ezra ad loc.) The reference to the escaping serpent is relevant to both the heavens and the waters as explained by the Malbim on this verse.

In summation, the verses in Job 26:10-13 go back and forth multiple times between heaven (aka, the upper waters in Genesis 1) and seas of Earth (aka, the lower waters). The opening and closing verses focus more on G-d's guidance and control. The two middle verses focus on G-d's power.

שפרה in turn is not really a Hapax Legemon, but rather a variation on known words, as explained by Rashi and Ibn Ezra on the spot.

Answer 2

Conceptual Inertia posted a good answer on parallelism and hapax legomena. But just to add a couple of points:

Dr. Chaim Cohen (Biblical Hapax Legomena in the Light of Akkadian and Ugaritic, 1978) observed that the Hebrew "שפרה" is a possible cognate of the Akkadian "šaparru" (meaning "net"). However, this does not imply that the two words share the same meaning. Often, the definitions of cognates diverge in their respective languages, including Semitic languages as closely related as Hebrew, Akkadian, and Ugaritic.

As Rashi¹ and the Metzudas David observe in their commentaries on Job 26:13, "שִׁפְרָה" bears a similarity with the Hebrew word "שפריר" (a noun meaning "canopy", cf. Jeremiah 43:10, "וְנָטָה אֶת שַׁפְרִירוֹ") and may be a pi'el conjugation ("He canopied the heavens"). There's a degree of similarity in meaning between "canopy" and "net" that is consistent with what you'd expect of Semitic cognates.

It seems Cohen disregarded this and chose to simply apply the precise Akkadian translation of "šaparru" directly to the Hebrew in Job 26:13. Professor Naftali Herz Tur-Sinai took this further and suggested splitting שמים into two words (שָׂם יָם), which he felt would make the verse more consistent with Cohen's translation:

ברוחו שם ים שפרה

Which Prof. Tur-Sinai interprets to mean:

With His wind, He caught the sea in His net

There are a number of problems with this, however. First of all, this emendation appears highly speculative. It is ostensibly motivated to by a preference for associating a net with the sea rather than the heavens (which presupposes that Cohen's translation of "net" is compelling, which it is not), as well as a desire to impose a polytheistic Levantine mythological milieu onto Job.

Secondly, Tur-Sinai's hypothesis would require that שפרה also be emended to "בְּשִׁפְרָתוֹ" as a noun with a prepositional prefix and possessive suffix. None of this is indicated in the text.

Thirdly, Akkadian has many different words for "net", and "šaparru" carries the sense of a net used for transporting something over land rather than for catching something or for use in the water.

Incidentally, Tur-Sinai's use of the past participle "שָׂם" ("placed" or "put") seems a bit unusual in this context. In Biblical Hebrew, when "שָׂם" or other conjugations of its root operate on large features of geography or nature (the land, the sea, the sky, countries, cities, etc.), and specifically when those features are the direct object of an independent clause, they typically mean "made" or "transformed" rather than "placed" or "put" (e.g., "Who made [שָׂם] the whole world?" Job 34:13, where "world" is the direct object²).

By contrast, when describing the Almighty's physical movement of these large features of geography, the verses tend to employ a variegated assortment of different verbs, some of which appear in this very chapter (26) of Job ("נֹטֶה צָפוֹן", "תֹּלֶה אֶרֶץ", "רָגַע הַיָּם") and elsewhere ("הַמַּעְתִּיק הָרִים" in 9:5, "הַמַּרְגִּיז אֶרֶץ מִמְּקוֹמָהּ" in 9:6, "נֹטֶה שָׁמַיִם" in 9:8, as well as other conjugations of נתן, שלח, רקע, etc.). If Job 26:13 is indeed describing placing the sea into a net, one might have expected some such verb to appear. Alas, it does not.

Finally, the word "שָׁמַיִם" ("heavens") that appears in the Masoretic text of Job 26:13 also shows up hundreds of times throughout the Bible. On the other hand, there are zero Biblical appearances of word pair ("שם ים") with which Tur-Sinai wishes to replace it. This itself renders Tur-Sinai's emendation improbable.

Professor Tur-Sinai's approach to this verse seems to require a lot of unnecessary tinkering. Even if one insists on using Cohen's speculative translation of "שפרה" as "net", it would be far less linguistically problematic to just use it as is ("With His wind, the heavens are a net"³) and leave the text alone.

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¹_{Note that Rashi (on Job 26:12 and Isaiah 27:1) identifies both "רָהַב" and "נָחָשׁ בָּרִחַ" as allegorical references to Egypt, the former based on the identification provided by Isaiah 30:7 ("וּמִצְרַיִם הֶבֶל וָרִיק יַעְזֹרוּ לָכֵן קָרָאתִי לָזֹאת רַהַב הֵם שָׁבֶת")}

²_{As opposed to where the large geographical feature is the indirect object, as in Psalms 89:26, where the meaning is "placed"}

³_{Cf. Isaiah 40:22, "הַנּוֹטֶה כַדֹּק שָׁמַיִם"}