1. THEN answered Eliphaz the Temanite, and said, 2 Should a wise man make answer with vain knowledge,

And fill his belly with the east wind?

3. Should he reason with unprofitable talk, Or with speeches wherewith he can do no good?

4. Yea, thou doest away with fear, And restrainest devotion before God.

5. For thine iniquity teacheth thy mouth, And thou choosest the tongue of the crafty.

6. Thine own mouth condemneth thee, and not I; Yea, thine own lips testify against thee.

7. Art thou the first man that was born? Or wast thou brought forth before the hills?

8. Hast thou heard the secret counsel of God? And dost thou limit wisdom to thyself?

9. What knowest thou, that we know not? What understandest thou, which is not in us?

10. With us are both the grayheaded and the very aged men, Much elder than thy father.

11. Are the consolations of God too small for thee, Even the word that is gentle toward thee?

12. Why doth thine heart carry thee away? And why do thine eyes flash?

13. That thou turnest thy spirit against God, And lettest such words go out of thy mouth.

14. What is man, that he should be clean? And he which is born of a woman, that he should be righteous?

15. Behold, he putteth no trust in his holy ones; Yea, the heavens are not clean in his sight

16. How much less one that is abominable and corrupt, A man that drinketh iniquity like water!

17. I will shew thee, hear thou me: And that which I have seen I will declare:

18 (Which wise men have told From their fathers, and have not hid it;

19. Unto whom alone the land was given, And no stranger passed among them:)

20. The wicked man travaileth with pain all his days, Even the number of years that are laid up for the oppressor.

21. A sound of terrors is in his ears; In prosperity the spoiler shall come upon him:

THE three friends have now spoken, and Job has replied to them all in turn. The first series of the discussion closed with the last chapter, and the second commences with the one before us. In this the friends add scarcely anything to what they had already urged, betraying man- ifest signs of exhaustion. The speeches are of equal number as before, but so much shorter that this section of the debate occupies only seven chapters, as against eleven in the first de-

22. He believeth not that he shall return out of darkness, And he is waited for of the sword:

23. He wandereth abroad for bread, saying, Where is it? He knoweth that the day of darkness is ready at his hand:

24. Distress and anguish make him afraid; They prevail against him, as a king ready to the battle:

25. Because he hath stretched out his hand against God, And behaveth himself proudly against the Almighty;

26. He runneth upon him with a stiff neck, With the thick bosses of his bucklers:

27. Because he hath covered his face with his fatness, And gathered fat upon his loins;

28. And he hath dwelt in desolate cities, In houses which no man inhabited, Which were ready to become heaps.

29. He shall not be rich, neither shall his sub- stance continue, Neither shall their possessions be extended on the earth.

30. He shall not depart out of darkness; The flame shall dry up his branches, And by the breath of his mouth shall he go away.

31. Let him not trust in vanity, deceiving him- self: For vanity shall be his recompense.

32. It shall be accomplished before his time, And his branch shall not be green.

33. He shall shake off his unripe grape as the vine, And shall cast off his flower as the olive.

34. For the company of the godless shall be bar- ren, And fire shall consume the tents of bribery.

35. They conceive mischief, and bring forth in- liquity, And their belly prepareth deceit.

bate. Kitto.—The arguments employed by the three friends remain throughout in sub- stance the same. But up to this time the three have been content with general statements, which were, of course, partially true; now they step forward to a direct and personal attack. Job’s speeches appear to them to be a damning proof of his impiety, and they do not hesitate to denounce him as a rebel against God. In at- tempting to maintain their new position, the three friends stray further and further from the truth, and, as is natural, grow visibly angry.

Wounded self-love shows behind their zeal for God, and, as always happens, their bigotry grows more intense with the rise of personal feeling. Job, on the other hand, becomes every moment calmer and more collected as the accusations assume a more direct form. Before, he had been confused and divided, as one who fights in the dark where friend and foe are indistinguishable. But as the charges are brought personally home to him he feels more and more the falsehood implied in them, and is more and more confirmed in his innocence. “He had before known that he was innocent, and now he feels the strength that lies in innocence, as if God were beginning to reveal Himself within him, to prepare the way for the outward manifestation of Himself.” The theme chosen by the speakers suits their indignant mood. Abandoning all attempt to comfort Job with the promises that wait on repentance, they concentrate all their powers on the description of the doom of wicked men. It is an awful picture, none the less true because of the falsehood of its application. The type of wickedness selected is one intended to cover the case of Job. It is the Oriental chieftain grown great and rich by successful violence and rapine (15:27, 28; 18:7; 20:6-15). The successive steps of the tyrant’s ruin are graphically described, from the first stings of the guilty conscience that disturbs the serenity of his proud prosperity to the oblivion that at last overwhelms and buries his infamous name (15:20 sq.; 18:7 sq.; 20). A few delicate touches serve to detect the individual peculiarities of the three. Eliphaz is still the most dignified and considerate, and although he assumes an air of superiority, he tries to make his words less direct while he supports them with the weighty authority of tradition. He dwells chiefly on the terrors which haunt a guilty mind, painting, with a vividness of touch which no poetry has surpassed, the coward fears that attend an evil conscience. Bildad, whose taste for brevity makes Job’s lengthy speeches especially offensive to him (18:2), follows with a description of the godless man, which is a masterpiece of poetic idealizing, and teems with images that have enriched literature forever (vs. 6-14). Zophar, the most angry and the least able to disguise his wounded vanity, pursues the same theme in a series of vigorous figures, which display at the same time the narrowness of his mind. Aglen.

Job’s demeanor under his sufferings only confirmed the conclusions which his sufferings themselves compelled them to draw. They see in Job a type both of the calamities that befall the wicked and of their rebellious impatience under them. In this way the thoughts of the friends are drawn away from heaven to earth. God is no more their theme, but man, especially the wicked man as history and experience show him to be dealt with in the providence of God. The effect of this change is naturally to draw the arguments of the friends closer around Job, and bring the debate to a crisis. For though the object of the three friends in drawing their dark pictures of the heaven-daring sinner and his fate is to awaken Job’s conscience and alarm him, that he may turn from his evil, their arguments are now of a kind that can be brought to the test of experience, and Job, so soon as he can be induced to grapple with them, has little difficulty in disposing of them. A. B. D.

Chap. 15. It has now become the turn of Eliphaz, who opened the former debate, to speak again. He begins with bitter sarcasms and reproaches, and strongly censures Job’s doctrine of the indiscriminate distribution of happiness and misery, as tending to undermine religion, and to discourage prayer. The drift of the whole speech is to vindicate Providence, to condemn Job as a manifest object of the Divine wrath on account of his wickedness, and to terrify him, if possible, into a confession of his guilt. Kitto.—The speech of Eliphaz is harsh and sarcastic, and assumes Job’s guilt as proven by his own lips. 1-6: He reproves his presumption in despising the wisdom of his elders, disregarding the consolations of God and arraigning His judgments, forgetful of man’s utter corruption and his own abomination. 7-16: Then, under cover of quoting axioms of wise antiquity, he describes the actual condition, feelings, and struggles of Job, in which he sees a proof of his wickedness, and a token of his final destruction. The discourse has not a word of comfort, nor the suggestion of a hope. It marks a considerable change in the spirit of the speaker, and brings the question much nearer to an issue. He does not indeed accuse Job of renouncing God, but of rebelling against Him (vs. 4, 13, 25, 26), and denounces his attempts to vindicate himself, and hold fast his integrity, as vain, impious and hypocritical.

2. Vain knowledge. Literally, “knowledge of wind,” empty, noisy, and turbulent; the turn of expression is highly sarcastic, it has what may be called a grim humor; the words of Job are like wind, his whole inner man is inflated, torn, and in a state of turmoil, as though possessed by storm winds from the burning desert. The word “belly” is a necessary because literal translation of the original, which means in Hebrew physiology the innermost nature of man, the seat of thought, intelligence, and reflection. Cook.

A wise man with vain knowledge.

There is oftentimes a great deal of knowledge where there is but little wisdom to improve that knowledge. It is not the most knowing Christian but the most wise Christian that sees, avoids, and escapes Satan’s snares. Knowledge without wisdom is like mettle in a blind horse, which is often an occasion of the rider’s fall, T. Brooks.—Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for what they know. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom. Anon.

4. He charges him with impiety and irreligion. “Thou castest off fear”—that is, “the fear of God, and that regard to Him which thou shouldst have; and then thou restrainest prayer.” See what religion is summed up in—fearing God and praying to Him; the former the most needful principle, the latter the most needful practice. Where no fear of God is no good is to be expected; and those who live without prayer certainly live without God in the world. Those who restrain prayer prove that they cast off fear. Surely those have no reverence of God’s majesty, no dread of His wrath, and are in no care about their souls and eternity, who make no applications to God for His grace. Those who are prayerless are fearless and graceless. H.

This text helps us to put our finger on the cause of a great deal that is amiss in all of us. It is very likely, it is all but certain, that the reason of all our trouble and discouragement, and want of growth and health is that we are doing just the thing that Job’s unkind friend accused him of in the text—“restraining prayer before God.” A. K. H. B.—In proportion to their importance, who gives as much time to prayer as to business; as much thought to their Bibles as merchants to their ledgers; as much trouble to cultivate their souls as husbandmen expend in ploughing and sowing and weeding the soil, and reaping the crop? No wonder that even those who are saved make such slow progress in the Divine life. T. G.

Hundreds of millions are paying homage to insensible substances, phantasms, or devils. Many millions are literally making to themselves an amusement and a sport of shows and vain ceremonies of a religion pretended to be in homage to the true God. But come to what is accounted the most privileged, instructed, and Christianized portion of mankind. There are millions of them that practise no worship, no prayer at all in any manner; they are entirely “without God in the world.” Assemble them in imagination, and look upon them! To say to but one of these, in the full and entire sense, “Thou restrainest prayer!” is pronouncing upon him an awful charge, is predicting an awful doom. You are pronouncing that he habitually scorns the Almighty, his soul, and the happiness of eternity; that he deliberately keeps himself detached from all that could save him from perdition! J. F.—Drexellius tells us of a vision that a religious man had at his prayers in the congregation. He saw a several angel at the elbow of every one present, ready to write down his petitions; those who prayed heartily their angels wrote down their suits in gold; those that prayed but coldly and carelessly their angels wrote, too, but it was with water; those that prayed customarily, only from the teeth outward, had their angels by them, who seemed to write, but it was with a dry pen, no ink in it. Such as slept had their angels by them, but they laid their pens by. Such as had worldly thoughts their angels wrote in the dust. And such as had envious and malicious spirits their angels wrote with gall. If this be so, I fear few angels have written this day in golden letters; but the pens of the others have gone very fast. Have a care how thou prayest, if thou wouldst have them written with the golden pen. N. Rogers.

Neglect of reading the Bible is a powerful hindrance to our prayers. In these pages we commune with God. In these chapters we find the promises. Here stand the invitations to God’s presence. Reading here we are better prepared to pray. Reading here makes us feel like praying. Here is revealed God’s will, according to which our requests are to be shaped. Here are the Saviour’s directions for the duty. And if we shut up all this from eye and thought, we cut off the living springs that give life and elasticity to prayer. The man cannot be found who rejects his Bible and is faithful in his closet. If he think he can pray as well without the inconvenient delay of first bringing into contact with his mind the thoughts of God as recorded here, he is preparing to stifle and restrain prayer. And this is the way in which prayer often declines with individuals and with a whole church. R. S. S.—How many prayers this deception has precluded: “I shall be in a better tone of feeling; my thoughts more composed; there will be less liability to interruption; such an affair I shall have disposed of and discharged from my mind. It were even irreverent to approach the Divine majesty just as I now feel”! As if that commanded serious effort required in such approach were not one of the best expedients for putting the mind in order. And then, what does experience say as to the actual occurrence and improvement of that expected better season? How soon does the seasonable hour come, when the first is easily let to slide by as unseasonable? Is there a disposition to give a ready allowance to pleas for deferring or cutting very short? What a test of the habitude of the heart is there in this! J. F.

We may have as much of God as we will. Christ puts the key of the treasure chamber into our hand, and bids us take all that we want. Whose fault is it that Christian people generally have such scanty portions of the free riches of God? Prayers unaccompanied by effort are not answered. Many ask who do not seek. There must be continuous desire and effort. That implies that the answers do not always come immediately. The best gifts grow slowly, more than forty and six years is the temple of a Christ-like nature in building. Therefore patient continuance in waiting on the Giver is the final condition of receiving His highest gifts. A. M.

5. Thine iniquity. Eliphaz can attribute Job’s bold words only to high-handed defiance of God; there is no room in his system for honest doubt and inquiry. Even Job’s assumption of honesty, as would seem from the next line, looks to him like craft.

7. Job’s ideas so strike out from the beaten path that he talks like one with a new source of knowledge. His assertion that he knows all that they have told him, and his contempt of their philosophy, is galling to Eliphaz.

11. Consolations of God—such is the name that Eliphaz gives to his admonitions, a name that evidently rankles in Job’s mind. J. F. G. —The force of self-complacency can hardly go further than in this assumption of being God’s agent of consolation to Job. V.

14-16. Eliphaz repeats here what he has already said (4:18 seq.), but he does it intentionally, since he wishes still more terribly to ascribe human uncleanness to Job. He first refers to the hereditary infirmity and sin in human nature (v. 14), and next (v. 16) to man’s own free choice of that which works his destruction. He uses the strongest imaginable words to describe one actually and originally corrupted. It is further said of him (man) that he drinks up evil like water—a figure which implies that he lusts after sin, and that it is become a necessity of his nature, and is to his nature what water is to the thirsty. Even Job does not deny this corruption of man (14:4), but the inferences which the friends draw in reference to himself he cannot acknowledge. Delitzsch.—Does it follow that Job is a hypocrite and a wicked man, which is all that he denied? By no means. Though man, as born of a woman, is not clean, yet, as born again of the Spirit, he is. H.

20-35. Here begin the words of the fathers, Eliphaz brings up this lurid picture of the wicked in order to counteract Job’s intimations that the wicked are prospered while the righteous suffer. Such intimations, in direct contradiction to the conclusions of wisdom, seem to open the door to all kinds of violence and infidelity; it lets down the barriers of doubt and admits indefinable riotings of extravagant doctrine. So Eliphaz, who gives the tone to the others, desires to put himself strongly on record for God; hence this purely theoretical picture of the wicked, drawn not for truth, but for theological consistency, and erring grossly by exaggeration; see, for instance, v. 29, which Job will show to be palpably untrue. J. F. G.

25,26. The wicked man (v. 20) bids defiance to God, and to His authority and power. Tell him of the Divine law and its obligations; he breaks those bonds asunder and will not have, no, not Him that made him, to restrain him or rule over him. Tell him of the Divine wrath and its terrors; he bids the Almighty do His worst, he will have his will, he will have his way in spite of Him, and will not be controlled by law, or conscience, or the notices of a judgment to come. He stretches out his hand against God in defiance of Him and of the power of His wrath. God is indeed out of His reach, but he stretches out his hand against Him, to show that if it were in his power he would ungod Him. Sinners in general run from God; but the presumptuous sinner, who sins with a high hand, runs upon Him, fights against Him, and bids defiance to Him; and it is easy to foretell what will be the issue.

27. He covers his face with his fatness. This signifies both the pampering of his flesh with daily delicious fare, and the hardening of his heart thereby against the judgments of God. The gratifying of the appetites of the body, feeding and feasting that to the full, often turns to the damage of the soul and its interests. Why is God forgotten and slighted, but be-

cause happiness is placed in the delights of sense? H.