“They come to an end without hope”
My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle; they come to an end without hope. (Job 7:6 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A plain statement that life is short and hopeless.
The cultural key
The English keeps the picture of a weaver's shuttle flying back and forth, but loses a double meaning the Hebrew carries. The word rendered 'hope,' tiqvah, is also the ordinary word for the 'thread' or 'cord' on a loom. So Job's line works two ways at once: 'my days come to an end without hope,' and 'my days come to an end when the thread runs out.' The despairing sense and the weaving image are fused in a single word. The shuttle races through the loom until the thread is spent, and then the work simply stops, exactly as Job feels his days racing to an abrupt, hopeless end. A modern reader hears only the flat statement that life is short; the first hearer caught the loom-thread pun that ties the metaphor together and turns 'no thread left' into 'no hope left.'
Recovered meaning
Job's 'come to an end without hope' hides a Hebrew pun: the word for 'hope' also means the weaver's 'thread.' His days end like a shuttle when the thread runs out, fusing the loom image with his despair in one word the English cannot carry.