Verses 15-20 compare Job’s friends to treacherous desert stream beds that give hope to traveling caravans but in the end lead them to their deaths. Line a of verse 15 is a simile in which torrent-bed matches freshets in line b. Line b is not the intensification of line a but rather serves as an extension of the simile in line a.

My brethren are treacherous as a torrent-bed: Job addresses his friends as My brethren. In 19.13 the same term includes all of Job’s kinsmen, but here he uses this expression of close relationship to refer ironically to his visitors. Good News Translation says “But you, my friends.” Job is speaking sarcastically because he has no reason to look on them as being brotherly or friendly. Treacherous here means fickle, undependable, deceptive. In Jeremiah 15.18 the brook whose waters fail is called “deceitful.” Torrent-bed translates the Hebrew nachal, which refers to the stream beds in the Middle East that carry off rain and ground water, but in the hot season may be completely dried up. Because they may be running with water one month and completely dry the next, they are deceptive and even treacherous for travelers. As freshets that pass away: freshets, an archaic English word for streams, translates the Hebrew for “like river beds streams,” where the plural of nachal from line a is used again. They refer to dry stream beds, or as Good News Translation makes explicit in the text, those “that go dry when no rain comes.” If such dry stream beds are unknown, an explanatory note may be required for the reader, or “when no rain comes,” as Good News Translation says, may be used in the text.

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 .