Job 7:15

15. Strangling Difficulty of swallowing is one of the symptoms of elephantiasis, (Bridel,) and suffocation is its usual end. (Delitzsch.) It often becomes necessary to open the jugular vein to relieve the hoarseness and the tendency to suffocation. (Avicenna.)

Life Literally, my bones. So emaciated was he that he calls his body but mere bones. Schlottmann and Umbreit render מן “than,” from, and read from my bones, and attribute to Job the thought of suicide. But there is no authority for using “bones” in the sense of hands. Umbreit’s admission “that the sufferer is represented as strangling himself in agonizing dreams,” is fatal to his theory. “There is fearful irony,” says Davidson, “in the comparison of this skeleton, impotent and helpless, his very weakness a terror to himself and his on-lookers, to the great heaven-assaulting ocean, lifting itself up in the consciousness of infinite power, or to some dragon of the prime, in which the whole energy of creation in its youth lay compressed.”