Translations
How much less man, that is a worm? and the son of man, which is a worm?
how much less a frail man, who is but a maggot? And the son of man, who is but a worm!"
how much less mortal man, who is but a maggot? And the son of man, who is nothing but a worm!"
how much less man, who is but a maggot, and the son of man, who is but a worm!”
Footnotes
Rimah (rotting worm/maggot) and tola'at (worm/crimson worm) form a devastating synonymous parallelism, reducing humanity to the lowest imaginable creature. But tola'at is no ordinary word: it is the identical term in Psalm 22:6—'I am a tola'at, not a man'—the psalm of dereliction that begins 'My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?' Bildad deploys tola'at as a term of contempt; the suffering psalmist wears it as a cry of anguish; and Jesus inhabits it on the cross as the incarnate Son who became the lowest of the low. Compounding the typology, the tola'at worm was literally crushed to produce the crimson/scarlet dye used in priestly garments and atonement rites—a detail that gives the word quiet but extraordinary resonance with sacrificial imagery. F.O.G. translates enosh as frail man and ben-adam as son of man to maintain deliberate echoes of the messianic title, inviting the reader to hear Bildad's insult as an unwitting prophecy.
