Job 6:18

they go to nothing Rather, they go up into the waste. The expression go upin Heb. is used when no ascent in the strict sense is meant; it signifies to go inland, into the interior of a region. The streams of these brooks flow out and wind into the desert and are consumed by the heat or lost in the sand. A somewhat different sense is drawn from the words by many writers. The word paths, Job 6:18, is the same as troopsor caravans, Job 6:19, and they assume that the reference to the caravans is already made in Job 6:18, rendering: the caravans that go by the way of them(the streams) turn aside, they go up into the desert and perish. In favour of this interpretation it is urged that there is something unnatural in the use of the same word in different senses in two consecutive verses; and that it is customary in the Poets to express a general idea first (Job 6:18) and then to particularize and exemplify it (Job 6:19). On the other hand Ibn Ezra has already remarked that it is not usual for caravans to leave the route and "turn aside" in search of water, a route is selected and formed rather because water is found on it. The danger of the caravan is that it be exhausted before it reach the place where water is known to be, or, as here, that the water may be found dried up.