This verse has been modified in many ways to give a clearer sense. Its meaning appears to be that God’s impartiality is shown in the way he destroys everyone alike.

In a moment they die: they seems to refer to the rich and the poor in the previous verse. The verb translated die is plural and so is best expressed with the pronoun they, as in Revised Standard Version; Good News Translation has adjusted it to the singular, “A man may … die,” which in English refers to a general truth, not a specific instance, and therefore may be understood of either the rich or the poor. However, the form of Revised Standard Version may be clearer for most languages. Many scholars take at midnight, the first words of line b in Revised Standard Version, to be included in line a, as in Good News Translation, “at night.” This gives a better balance of lines in the Hebrew.

At midnight the people are shaken and pass away: Revised Standard Version keeps at midnight with the second longer line. Dhorme evens up the line lengths by shifting and pass away to line a. People as the subject of are shaken is uncertain, since the Hebrew verb always refers to violent physical shaking of the earth, as in 2 Samuel 22.8, and it is not used figuratively. Some suggest that two letters of the verb have fallen out, and that its last two letters should have been joined to the following subject, which then reads “the rich,” as in verse 19b; thus the verb and its subject would be “perish the rich.” New Jerusalem Bible follows this with “they perish—these great ones—and disappear.” Are shaken is often changed to get “expire,” or divided differently so as to mean “he strikes the rich.” Good News Translation seems to accept this change in word division, but keeps the people in the form of “men”: “God strikes men down….” And pass away has the sense of “disappear, perish, die.”

And the mighty are taken away by no human hand: the mighty, as in 24.22, is singular and refers to a ruler, a powerful person. Taken away is plural, like the verbs in the preceding lines, and means “remove, depose, set aside, do away with.” The thought is related to deposing a tyrant, or perhaps killing him, as in Good News Translation. By no human hand is literally “not with a hand,” an idiom meaning “effortlessly, easily, with the flick of a finger.” Verse 20 may also be rendered, for example, “Suddenly death comes in the middle of the night, and God strikes people down and destroys them. He gets rid of the ruler with hardly any effort.”

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 .