The First Discourse of Eliphaz.
The eldest of the three friends proceeds to reprove Job. “And Eliphaz the Temanite answered and said, Should one attempt a word to thee, wilt thou be grieved?
And yet to hold back from speaking, who is able?
Lo, thou hast corrected many,
And slack hands hast thou strengthened,
The stumbling one thy speech did raise,
And sinking knees thou didst confirm;
But now it cometh to thee, and thou art grieved,
It toucheth thee, and thou art confounded.
[Is] not thy fear thy confidence,
And the uprightness of thy ways thy hope?
Remember, I pray thee, who perished being innocent?
Or where have the upright been blotted out?
So far as I have seen, they that plough iniquity,
And they that sow trouble, reap the same.
By the breath of God they perish,
And by the blast of His nostrils they are consumed.
The roaring of the lion, and the voice of the dark lion,
And the teeth of the young lion are broken;
The strong lion perisheth for lack of prey,
And the whelps of the lioness are scattered.
And to me there stole a word,
And mine ear caught a whisper from it,
In thoughts from visions of the night,
When deep sleep falleth on man;
Shuddering befell me, and trembling,
Which shook the multitude of my bones;
And a spirit glideth before me:
The hairs of my body bristled up.
It stood there—I discerned not its appearance—
An image before mine eyes:
Silence I and a voice I hear,
Is a mortal more just than God?
Is a man purer than his Maker?
Behold, His servants He trusteth not,
And to His angels He ascribeth error;
How much more those who dwell in houses of clay,
The foundation of which [is] in the dust,
Which are crushed as though moths!
From morning to evening they are destroyed;
Before any one marketh it they perish for ever.
Is not their cord in them torn away?
They die, and not in wisdom.
Call now: is there any that will answer thee?
And to which of the holy ones wilt thou turn?
For grief killeth a fool,
And jealousy slayeth the simple.
I have seen a fool taking root,
And suddenly I cursed his habitation.
His sons are far from help,
And are crushed in the gate without deliverance;
Whose harvest the hungry one devoureth,
And taketh it off even out of a thorn-hedge,
And the thirsty swalloweth up their wealth.
For evil goeth not forth of the dust,
And trouble doth not sprout out of the ground;
But man is born to trouble,
As the sparks of flame make high their flight.
For my part, then, I would turn to God (El),
And to God (Elohim) would I commit my cause,
Who doeth great things and unsearchable,
Who giveth rain on the face of the earth,
And sendeth water on the face of the fields,
To set the low on high,
And raise up the mourning to prosperity.
He breaketh to pieces the devices of the crafty,
So that they can do nothing to purpose;
He taketh the wise in their craftiness,
And the counsel of the cunning is overturned.
By day they run against darkness,
And as in the night they grope at noon-day.
And He saveth the poor from the sword out of their mouth,
And from the hand of the strong;
So there is hope to the poor,
And iniquity shutteth her mouth.
Lo, happy the man whom God correeteth:
Therefore despise not the chastening of the Almighty.
For He woundeth, and bindeth up,
He smiteth and His hands make whole.
In six troubles He will deliver thee,
And in seven no evil shall befall thee.
In famine He hath redeemed thee from death,
And in war from the hand of the sword.
In the scourge of the tongue thou art hidden,
And fearest not destruction when it cometh;
At destruction and at famine thou shalt laugh,
And thou shalt not be afraid before beasts of the earth.
For with the stones of the field is thy covenant,
And the wild beasts of the field are at peace with thee.
And thou knowest that thy tabernacle [is] peace,
And thou shalt oversee thy place and miss nothing.
And thou shalt know that thy seed [is] great,
And thine offspring as the green herb of the earth.
Thou shalt go to the grave in a full age,
As the heap of sheaves mounteth up in its season.
Lo, this we have searched out; so it [is];
Hear it and mark [it] well for thyself.”
Such is the opening speech of the elder of the three interlocutors who henceforth proceed to sit in judgment on Job, and are successively answered by him. Unquestionably the gravest of them is Eliphaz, and this first utterance of his lets us into his character and style. Every word may be true in itself; all is said with the utmost dignity and force; yet it is misapplied and one-sided, and hence, in effect, erroneous as a whole. Eliphaz assumes that God at the present time is displaying His government, and exactly measures prosperity or adversity to men’s deserts. This is false ground, and vitiates the application, especially to one like Job given up to be assailed by Satan, and tried to the end (not “the bitter,” but the sweet) by God.
Hence, though the pious sage stands revealed in every sentiment, though ripe experience and moral grandeur are everywhere felt, though the spiritual and the natural worlds contribute their full quota to the argument, though the reproach is as yet mild, and the exhortation appears to be that of faithful friendship and earnest piety, there underlies it an assumption of conscious hidden guilt on Job’s part, which could not but aggravate his grief, and which did not fail to call forth his too bitter resentment.
Eliphaz begins with a glance at Job’s former profession of righteousness, but it is to reprove him for his actual failure in endurance. Ignorant of himself, and feebly realizing the accumulated and overwhelming pressure on Job, he is honestly astounded at his outburst; and then lays down his law of present retribution, but rather to rouse him from his wild despair to the language of piety than to condemn him as impious. If godly fear was his, as Eliphaz trusted yet, why was it not his confidence why was not the uprightness of his ways his hope? It is plain that Eliphaz was as ignorant as Job of the source, and character, and aim of the trial then going on. All he sees is the necessary triumph of righteousness, and the irretrievable ruin of the wicked; and this by figures taken not only from men, but the wildest of beasts crushed under God’s hand.
Next Eliphaz sets forth in mysterious and awful style an oracle of the night, which impressed his own soul with the folly of earthly, sinful, weak, man’s pretension to be more just than God by arraigning His dispensations.
In the beginning of chapter 5 Eliphaz proceeds in a strain of deepening severity, and not without a claim of superior moral judgment. On whom could Job call, if not on God, against whom he was rather murmuring? For himself he saw the sudden and inevitable ruin of the prosperous fool and of all pertaining to him. Job should therefore accept his suffering from God, and turn to Him with supplication, who is not merely great beyond creature search, but bountiful, and this morally to the abject, as surely as He confounds the crafty and the strong. Eliphaz finally counsels submission to the chastening hand of God, who would surely deliver from all evil, and bless him with all good; and this in the name, not merely of himself, but of his friends, on whose entire agreement he reckons with assurance.
It is to be noticed that the Holy Ghost is pleased to endorse the language of Eliphaz, and this not merely in the earlier revelations but in the fullest light of the New Testament, as we may see in the apostle’s use of it to the Corinthians and to the Hebrews. Indeed the issue in the book itself was the remarkable (and probably by himself unexpected) seal of the truth of his closing words, which no doubt at that time fell coldly on the ear and heart of the sufferer.
How natural it is, especially for those who believe in a present moral government of God, to look for a perfect manifestation of His mind in the maintenance of right and the judgment of wrong in the world as it is! No doubt this was strongest among the Jews, who might have expected it justly under the theocracy Jehovah was pleased to establish in their midst. But in truth it is a truth indigenous to every land, and common to all ages, and found in every circumstance and grade of life. Here the three friends of Job more and more yield to it, and Job, who suffered from his allowance of it, was kept from it mainly by the unswerving consciousness of his own integrity, but none the less writhing under the inexplicable web of inflicted misery, the more poignantly felt because he never doubted that God somehow bad to do with it all, and righteousness pleads that evil should be punished and good dwell in peace and honor. Whoever learns till he is taught of God that His children must wait in faith, and suffer patiently in the exercise and trial of their faith, till God has His rights in the return and reign of His Anointed? Then, and not before, shall we reign with Him.