Having just finished rendering the book of Job into English, Edward Greenstein explains the great challenges it poses for translators, and the reasons for its obscure vocabulary and difficult syntax. Greenstein distinguishes the book’s framing prose narrative (the book’s first two chapters and its final eleven verses) from the poetic “core” in the middle, made up mostly of the conversations between Job and his friends:

[E]ven a cursory reading by a competent Hebraist will reveal that the book is composed overall in a peculiar Hebrew. The poet or poets responsible for the dialogical core of the work make frequent use of foreign language in order to lend verisimilitude to the conceit that the speakers are not Israelites but Transjordanians.

[Both] the prose writer of the frame tale [and] the poet (who may be one and the same) seek to set the story and dialogue in the period of the Hebrew patriarchs, and so they make use of terms and names associated with the biblical literature conveying that era and certain archaic or pseudo-archaic linguistic forms. The poet invents Hebrew words and features, sometimes to project an aura of Aramaic and sometimes because, like Shakespeare and other virtuosos, he likes to play with language.

Job is [also] a highly intertextual work, in which the interpretation of a word, phrase, or image may depend on the identification of a source—usually from the Hebrew scriptures we know and often from an earlier passage in the book of Job itself. The poet not only cross-references phraseology in the course of the back-and-forth among the interlocutors, but he twists the meaning of phrases through parody and deconstruction.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.