396 Christopher Hays (h)kvj. In all those instances, the dead are said to mislead, just as the friends speak falsely and deceitfully (Job 13,7) (7). The funereal atmosphere of the text is repeatedly emphasized. Job began his speech in 12,2 by saying to his friends: “Wisdom will die with you” (hmkj twmt μkm[), already introducing a comparison between the friends and the dead. Job goes on to say, “Your maxims are proverbs of ash (rpa), your defenses are defenses of clay (rmj)” — ash and clay, since they are found in the tomb, had a long history of association with the dead in the ancient Near East. Among biblical attestations of this theme, see, for rpa, Mal 3,21; Ps 102,10; for rmj, see Job 10,9; 30,19; Isa 10,6; 41,25 (8). Job foresees that he will join the friends in death (13,15), that he “will be silent and die” (v. 19). The silence of the dead is a theme found in various places in the Bible (9), and the friends are advised to keep silent (vv. 5, 13) rather than speaking falsely (v. 6). From a lexical standpoint, a troubling feature of the translation “worthless physicians” is that both terms in the phrase must be understood in comparatively rare senses. In fact, although apr is common enough as a verb, nowhere in the Hebrew Bible other than Jer 8,22 does the title apero unambiguously refer to a human healer in the medical sense (10). In instances where the G active participle of apr is used of God, it points precisely to a supernatural power, like the Rephaim (11). It is also not clear whether, in classical Hebrew, an adjectival sense of l(y)la as “worthless” (thus cognate with Akk. ul˝lu) can be separated from the more common (and usually plural) references to the μylyla as foreign gods and idols, or whether the former meaning is abstracted from the latter. Even among instances of lla that HALOT classifies as adjectival, it is clearly associated with foreign gods in texts such as Jer 14,14; Ps 96,5; and 1 Chr 16,26. If l(y)la in Job 13,4 described human doctors, that would make it (7) This sort of rhetorical move just one of a number that the Hebrew Bible uses against necromancy, which is elsewhere outlawed (Lev 19,31; 20,6.27; Deut 18,11) or portrayed as the refuge of scoundrels (1 Sam 28; 2 Kgs 21,6; 1 Chr 10,13-14). Clearly, necromancy was seen as a threat to Yahwism. (8) See also the term rp[: Ps 22,16.30; 30,10; Job 17,16; Dan 12,2. (9) E.g., Ps 94,17: “If YHWH had not been my help, my soul would soon have dwelled in silence”; Ps 115,17: “The dead do not praise YHWH, nor do any that go down into silence”; cf. Ps 6,6; 88,11; 115,17; Isa 38,18; 47,5; Jer 48,2. (10) It appears to be primarly in the intertestamental period that apero came to mean simply “doctor” (cf. Ben Sirach 10,10; 38,1). In 2 Chr 16,12, Morris Jastrow considered the idea “rather absurd” that Asa should have been censured for consulting doctors, and preferred to emend to μyar (seers) or μyaip;r]. He pointed out that the μyaip;r] are parallel with the μyItme in Isa 26,14 and Ps 88,11, and that vrd is frequently used for consulting the dead (e.g. Deut 18,11; Isa 8,19). See M. JASTROW, “Rô’ˇh and h≥˛zˇh in the Old Testament”, JBL 28 (1909) 49-50, n. 23. The emendation to μyaip;r] was noted and proposed by W. Rudolph in BHS. In Gen 50,20, the μyapr are Egyptian embalmers. While a full discussion of their title is beyond the scope of this study, it is notable that they are associated with the dead in that text, and are not healers, per se. (11) This is not the place to re-hash the extensive debate over the etymology of the biblical Hebrew μyaip;r] and their nature, nor that of the Ugaritic rpum. Suffice it to say that their status as informants and protectors from the great beyond is much more clear than their function as “healers”. See, for example, P.J. WILLIAMS, “Are the Biblical Rephaim and the Ugaritic RPUM Healers?”, The Old Testament in Its World (Leiden 2005) 266-275.