wasi‛a, amplum esse) - is as a cloud, so rapidly and without trace (Job 7:9; Isa 44:22), passed away and vanished. Observe the music of the expression כּעב עברה, which cannot be reproduced in translation.
Verses 16-19
Job 30:16-19 16 And now my soul is poured out within me,
Days of suffering hold me fast. 17 The night rendeth my bones from me,
And my gnawers sleep not. 18 By great force my garment is distorted,
As the collar of my shirt it encompasseth me. 19 He hath cast me into the mire,
And I am in appearance as dust and ashes.
With this third ועתּה (Job 30:1, Job 30:9) the elegiac lament over the harsh contrast between the present and the past begins for the third time. The dash after our translation of the second and fourth strophes will indicate that a division of the elegy ends there, after which it begins as it were anew. The soul is poured out within a man (עלי as Job 10:1, Psychol. S. 152), when, “yielding itself without resistance to sadness, it is dejected to the very bottom, and all its organization flows together, and it is dissolved in the one condition of sorrow” - a figure which is not, however, come about by water being regarded as the symbol of the soul (thus Hitzig on Psa 42:5), but rather by the intimate resemblance of the representation of a flood of tears (Lam 2:19): the life of the soul flows in the blood, and the anguish of the soul in tears and lamentations; and since the outward man is as it were dissolved in the gently flowing tears (Isa 15:3), his soul flows away as it were in itself, for the outward incident is but the manifestation and result of an inward action. ימי־עני we have translated days of suffering, for עני, with its verb and the rest of its derivatives, is the proper word for suffering, and especially the passion of the Servant of Jehovah. Days of suffering -
