That the language of the poetic core of the book of Job is both rich and complex is a commonplace of scholarship. (1) One encounters in Job a greater diversity of forms and a larger density of strange and foreign words than in any other book of the Bible. Scholars have pointed in particular to a high incidence of vocabulary that can be explicated only by recourse to Arabic and to a remarkable salience of Aramaic words and features. (2) The concentration of so many apparently foreign elements in Job has led scholars to adopt one of the following three explanations. One theory holds that the largely Hebrew book of Job that we possess was written originally in another language and was then translated, though not without telltale traces, into Hebrew. Leading candidates for the source language of the allegedly translated book are Edomite (of which we have no substantial samples), Arabic, and Aramaic. (3) Yet the Hebrew of Job is highly learned and specialized, and its rhetorical uses are elegant and sometimes even intricate. (4) For these and other reasons scholars tend more recently to dismiss the theories of translation. (5)
