Thy hands fashioned and made me: in verse 3 Job acknowledges that he is the result of the work of the creator’s hands. See also 14.15. Fashioned and made express two closely-related process words. The two together suggest movement from bringing something into a recognizable form to giving it a specific shape, as in Good News Translation “Your hands formed and shaped me.” Made translates a word meaning “cut out or hew” and depicts God as carving a statue, and consequently the verb is related to the noun “idol.” Thy hands is a part standing for the whole and may be expressed “You formed me and shaped me.” From a poetic point of view it is desirable to retain the figure of God’s hands at work; for example, “Your own hands created me and formed this body of mine.”

And now thou dost turn about and destroy me is literally “together round about and yet you destroy me.” Instead of “together” the Septuagint and Syriac have “afterwards.” Hebrew Old Testament Text Project rates “altogether, round about” as “B” and concludes that these words belong to the preceding verb. Line a is then understood from the Hebrew to mean “you made every bit of me,” and the second line “and now you destroy me.” In this way a satisfactory rendering is made from the Hebrew and is little different from Revised Standard Version. This line may also be restructured to say, for example, “After creating me, you waste it all and destroy me,” or “You create me, then go on to destroy me.”

Quoted with permission from Reyburn, Wiliam. A Handbook on Job. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1992. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .