▼ The pronoun is emphatic implying that Zophar indicates that God indeed knows Job’s sin even if Job does not.

▼ The expression is literally “men of emptiness” (see Ps 26:4). These are false men, for שָׁוְא (shav^e’) can mean “vain, empty, or false, deceitful.”

▼ E. Dhorme (Job, 162) reads the prepositional phrase “to him” rather than the negative; he translates the line as “he sees iniquity and observes it closely.”

▼ Some commentators do not take this last clause as a question, but simply as a statement, namely, that when God sees evil he does not need to ponder or consider it – he knows it instantly. In that case it would be a circumstantial clause: “without considering it.” D. J. A. Clines lists quite an array of other interpretations for the line (Job [WBC], 255); for example, “and he is himself unobserved”; taking the word לֹא (lo’) as an emphatic; taking the negative as a noun, “considering them as nothing”; and others that change the verb to “they do not understand it.” But none of these are compelling; they offer no major improvement.