Indeed, he draws you away from the brink of
distress to a broad (צַר) place where there is no
constraint (מוּצָק); your table is laid out with
rich food. (Job 36:16 | 1985 JPS Tanakh)
Commenting on
“strait and narrow” in the Hebrew Bible, Paul Y. Hoskisson wrote that the OT
does contain an analogous, synonymous word
pair to strait and narrow. But, as far as I can determine, it does not contain
an analog to straight and narrow. The Hebrew word pair tswr/tsrr and tswq mean,
respectively, “distress(ed), strait(en)(ed), narrow, slim, constrain(ed),” etc.
and “siege, constrict; strait(en)(ed), constrain(ed), narrow,” etc. For
example, these two word roots stand behind the King James translation of Job
36:16 (with the corresponding English words in italics), “Even so would he have
removed thee out of the strait (tsār) into a broad place, where there is no
straitness (mūtsāq).” (Other examples follow below in which these two roots are
used in even more narrowly parallel structures.) In every instance that I could
find in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament where this word pair occurs, no
matter what form the roots take, tswr/tsrr always comes before tswq, just as
strait in English nearly always comes before narrow when the two are bound in
the same phrase. (Straightening
Things Out: The Use of Strait and Straight in the Book of Mormon, pp.
63-64)
