senseless impropriety: something so empty of good sense that it is also unfitting and offensive
This word turns up only three times, and each time someone is looking at a fault and deciding what to call it. The Hebrew names the fault with a taste image. The word beside it in the same family (תָּפֵל) describes food with no salt, the thing Job has in mind when he asks whether what is tasteless can be eaten. Turn that picture on a person's conduct, or on a charge someone makes, and you get something flat, empty, and impossible to respect.
Where translators divide is over what the emptiness amounts to. Some hear a moral fault, something unfitting and offensive, which is why many Bibles read "wrongdoing" or "wrong" at Job 1:22. Others hear a mental fault, a want of sound sense, which is why older versions read "foolishly" and why the ancient Greek and Latin translators reached for their words for folly. One Greek translator working in the second century put the plain word "unsalted" at Jeremiah 23:13, so the taste picture was still audible in the word long after the books were written.
The three verses do different work with it:
- In Job 1:22 the narrator clears Job by saying he never laid this fault at God's door, which quietly admits that a sufferer might.
- In Job 24:12 the suffering Job says God lays no such charge while the wounded cry out for help, and readers have long felt the sting of that against the opening chapter.
- In Jeremiah 23:13 God says this is what he saw in the prophets of Samaria, one line before naming something worse in the prophets of Jerusalem (שַׁעֲרוּרָה).
What holds the three together is that the word is always something charged, ascribed, or seen in somebody. It is never used of food, of taste, or of spit. Those belong to the family it came from, not to this word.
Whether Job 24:12 originally read תִּפְלָה, or the identically spelled תְּפִלָּה, "prayer," as the Peshitta presupposes.
- majorityThe received Hebrew text stands as the harder reading: God "lays no charge of wrong" while the wounded cry out. Symmachus (moria) and Theodotion (aphrosyne) both translated a word for folly here, so both knew this text.; R. Gordis, The Book of Job (Jewish Theological Seminary, 1978); N. C. Habel, The Book of Job, OTL (Westminster, 1985), 360; J. E. Hartley, The Book of Job, NICOT (Eerdmans, 1988); J. Marbock, "תָּפֵל / תִּפְלָה," ThWAT 8 (1995): 728-732; M. P. Sciumbata, "תִּפְלָה," Semantics of Ancient Hebrew Database (2009, updated 2024)
- minorityThe Syriac tradition presupposes "prayer," yielding "God does not heed their prayer," which recovers the original; some who take this reading also change the verb from "lay" to "hear."; S. R. Driver and G. B. Gray, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Job, ICC (T&T Clark, 1921), II:169; E. Dhorme, A Commentary on the Book of Job (Nelson, 1967); D. J. A. Clines, Job 21-37, WBC 18A (Nelson, 2006)
Disputed
Whether תִּפְלָה names a moral fault (impropriety, unseemliness), a mental one (senselessness, irrationality), or an insult (reproach, spittle).
- majorityIt names moral impropriety: conduct, or a charge, that is unfitting, and especially unfitting when directed at God's character.; BDB, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1906), 1074, s.v. תִּפְלָה; HALOT (Brill), IV:1634-35, s.v. תִּפְלָה; D. J. A. Clines, ed., Dictionary of Classical Hebrew VIII (Sheffield Phoenix, 2011), s.v. תִּפְלָה; S. R. Driver and G. B. Gray, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Job, ICC (T&T Clark, 1921), II:10-11; J. E. Hartley, The Book of Job, NICOT (Eerdmans, 1988); D. J. A. Clines, Job 1-20, WBC 17 (Word, 1989), 2
- minorityIt names a failure of sound sense, the opposite pole of טַעַם, which covers both "taste" and "discernment"; the Greek revisers, the Vulgate, and the medieval Jewish etymologists all read it this way.; M. P. Sciumbata, "תִּפְלָה," Semantics of Ancient Hebrew Database (2009, updated 2024); J. Marbock, "תָּפֵל / תִּפְלָה," ThWAT 8 (1995): 728-732 = TDOT XV (Eerdmans, 2006); W. McKane, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Jeremiah 1-25, ICC (T&T Clark, 1986), 573-574; B. Kedar-Kopfstein, "Synasthesien im biblischen Althebraisch," ZAH 1 (1988): 47-60, at 54
- minorityIt names an insult or reproach, from an Arabic root meaning "to spit," so that giving תִּפְלָה to God at Job 1:22 is the exact opposite of giving him glory.; M. H. Pope, Job, AB 15, 3rd ed. (Doubleday, 1973), 17, 178; N. H. Tur-Sinai, The Book of Job: A New Commentary (Kiryath Sepher, 1957)