Job 11:7

Footnotes

1. 16 The verb is מָצָא (matsa’, “to find; to discover”). Here it should be given the nuance of potential imperfect. And, in the rhetorical question it is affirming that Job cannot find out the essence of God.
2. 17 The word means “search; investigation”; but it here means what is discovered in the search (so a metonymy of cause for the effect).
3. 18 The same verb is now found in the second half of the verse, with a slightly different sense—“attain, reach.” A. R. Ceresko notes this as an example of antanaclasis (repetition of a word with a lightly different sense—“find/attain”). See “The Function of Antanaclasis in Hebrew Poetry,” 44 (1982): 560–61.
4. 19 The abstract תַּכְלִית (takhlit) from כָּלָה (kalah, “to be complete; to be perfect”) may mean the end or limit of something, perhaps to perfection. So the has “can you probe the limits of the Almighty?” The has: “have you come to the end of that which the Almighty has made?”