1. THEN answered Eliphaz the Temanite, and said,

2. If one assay to commune with thee, wilt thou be grieved?

But who can withhold himself from speaking?

3. Behold, thou hast instructed many,

And thou hast strengthened the weak hands.

4. Thy words have upholden him that was falling,

And thou hast made firm the feeble knees.

5. But now it is come unto thee, and thou faintest;

It toucheth thee, and thou art troubled.

6. Is not thy fear of God thy confidence,

And the integrity of thy ways thy hope?

7. Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being innocent?

Or where were the upright cut off?

8. According as I have seen, they that plow iniquity,

And sow trouble, reap the same.

9. By the breath of God they perish,

And by the blast of his anger are they consumed.

10. The roaring of the lion, and the voice of the fierce lion,

And the teeth of the young lions, are broken.

11. The old lion perisheth for lack of prey,

In his first utterance, chap. 3, Job has not complained of injustice; as yet, and before his friends have stung and wounded him, he makes no questioning of Providence—but why was life given him at all, if only for this? Sick in mind and sick in body, but one wish remains to him, that death will come quickly and end all. It is a cry from the very depths of a simple and single heart. But for such simplicity and singleness his friends could not give him credit; possessed beforehand with their idea, they see in his misery only a fatal witness against him. Job had sinned and he had suffered, and this wild passion was but impenitence and rebellion. Froude.

And the whelps of the lioness are scattered abroad.

12. Now a thing was secretly brought to me, And mine ear received a whisper thereof

13. In thoughts from the visions of the night, When deep sleep falleth on men,

14. Fear came upon me, and trembling, Which made all my bones to shake.

15. Then a spirit passed before my face; The hair of my flesh stood up.

16. It stood still, but I could not discern the appearance thereof;

A form was before mine eyes:

There was silence, and I heard a voice, saying,

17. Shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall a man be more pure than his Maker?

18. Behold, he putteth no trust in his servants; And his angels he chargeth with folly:

19. How much more them that dwell in houses of clay,

Whose foundation is in the dust,

Which are crushed before the moth!

20. Betwixt morning and evening they are destroyed:

They perish for ever without any regarding it.

21. Is not their tent-cord plucked up within them?

They die, and that without wisdom.

The third and last trial of Job is brought about by the harsh suspicions, the cruel reproaches, and the unjust charges of his friends. Their contention was, that under the righteous government of God there is always in this life an exact agreement between sin and punishment, and that the calamities of Job could only be accounted for on the assumption of great criminality on his part. The three friends were right in affirming that there is a close connection between sin and suffering. Our present life is passed under the moral government of God, and he must be blind who cannot trace in it the judicial dealing of God with men. Nay, it is only when we see in the course of history a continuous judgment of the world, that our faith in a final judgment can be rational and strong. The future life is not the beginning, but the completion of our existence. There is no break in the continuity of our being. If sin does not even here work ruin, then there exists no hell; if salvation and happiness do not even here wait upon righteousness, then there exists no heaven. Scripture knows nothing of a God who only rises to power when this life is ended. Its God is from beginning to end a living God; and both in His retributive judgments and in His bestowing of present blessing He is ever enforcing His own great principle, that “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” There was truth, therefore, in the contention of the friends: their error consisted in applying this principle, without any qualification, to Job. It never occurred to them that suffering might be inflicted as a test of virtue, or that it might be sent to lay bare the hidden defects of a godly life. E. Bayley.

Every word uttered by his friends finds its way to the sufferer’s heart. He is wounded by their harshness, stung by their censures, exasperated by their reproaches, and driven into antagonism by their arguments. They are the professed advocates of religious obligation. They represent the cause of God, enforcing His claims on Job and justifying His ways with him in a spirit that repels him, with assumptions that experience does not sanction, and which his own inner consciousness falsifies. The unfairness with which they plead God’s cause place him under additional temptation to reject that cause itself. The hopeless variance which they assume or create between God’s justice and Job’s integrity, for which latter he nevertheless has the testimony of his own conscience which he cannot surrender or falsify, tends to place before his mind a distorted image of the character of God. God appears to be torturing him for crimes which he has not committed, to be relentlessly pursuing him as an implacable foe, and without justice or reason to be employing His resistless power to crush him to the earth. This is the phantom which his friends are constantly setting before him, this false notion of God as unjust and pitiless toward him; and this his own intolerable sufferings, for which he cannot himself otherwise account, seem to rivet upon him. This phantom, apparently so real, he is incessantly obliged to fight, or it would drive him to absolute despair and force him to give up his confidence and trust in God, and thus throw him completely into the tempter’s snare. This is the point around which the conflict in Job’s soul so fearfully rages. This is the very acme and crisis of the temptation. This unwelcome apparition, which his friends are constantly bringing up and dressing out before him, of a God of arbitrary power, whose justice, as they assert it, would be rank injustice, and who seems devoid of pity—this it is which fills him with the deepest anguish. His heart is all laid open before us, down to its lowest depths, in his discourses with his friends. We see all the tumult of his soul in its conflicting emotions.

We have reason to believe that these friends of Job were eminent, wise, and good men. The whole tenor of their speeches shows that they were concerned both for the honor of God and for the spiritual welfare of Job. They advocate and approve what is good, they reject and condemn the bad. Their discourses sparkle with gems of morality and religious truth. Their reasoning is fallacious, indeed, because built on false though specious premises; but their arguments are coherent and strongly put. They fail to convince or to confute Job, but it is from no want of skill in advocacy. It is a matter of personal consciousness about which they contend. No subtleties and no cogency of demonstration can convict him of offences of which his own conscience pronounces him innocent. They misinterpret the ways of Providence, and fail to explain the mystery of Job’s sufferings. But this is from no mental incapacity. Job can see no farther into this dark dispensation than they can. He knows that they are mistaken. But he no more understands the real state of the case than they do. The fact is that the enigma is insoluble by the unaided reason of man. God can alone declare the purpose of His afflictive dispensations, and this He had never yet revealed. These distresses of Job were to afford the occasion of shedding the first rays of light upon it. W. H. G.

The great debate is divided into three circles of speeches: (1) chaps. 4-14; (2) chaps. 15-21; (3) chaps. 22-31. Each of these three circles contains six speeches, one by each of the three friends in succession, with a reply from Job. In the last round, however, the third speaker, Zophar, fails to come forward. This is a confession of defeat; and Job, resuming the thread of his reply to Bildad, carries it through a series of chapters, in which, with a profound pathos, he contrasts his former greatness with his present misery, protests his innocence before Heaven, and adjures God to reveal to him the cause of his afflictions. A. B. D.

In the first round of debate, each of the three friends addresses the unhappy chief, and he replies to each in succession, concluding with an appeal from their judgment to God. They assert that the righteous God blesses the just, and punishes the unjust. Job replies that it is not uniformly so seen; that he himself, for example, while just, is made to suffer; and that, in point of fact, the just often endure wrong, and the wicked are allowed to triumph. The philosophy of those Arabian sages was too narrow for the case; and Job, in his last address, told them plainly that they were “physicians of no value,” and that he appealed from them to that very God on whose providence they dilated with such confidence. At the same time he was sore perplexed, for he, like his friends, had been wont to connect all suffering with punishment for sin, and knowing himself free from presumptuous sin, he passed through a dreadful intellectual strife and moral agony. D. F.—Job’s disputing with God is as terrible as it is pitiable. It is terrible, because he uplifts himself, Titan-like, against God; and pitiable, because the God against whom he fights is not the God he has known, but a phantom which his temptation has presented to his dim vision—a phantom in no way differing from the inexorable ruling Fate of the Greek tragedy. D.

Speech of Eliphaz, chaps. 4 and 5.

Eliphaz, who speaks first in each dialogue, is evidently the oldest of the three, as he is the most dignified, the calmest, and the most considerate. He is the only one whose words (at the outset) convey sympathy with the pain they inflict. He comes forward under a sense of duty and with an apology. Aglen.—It is the most elaborate discourse of the friends, and anticipates substantially their whole argument. It is the argument that everything in the world comes by justice and desert; that punishment has its sufficient cause in sin, open or secret; and that thus in God’s wrath we may read and measure man’s wickedness. This is what Job has always accepted as the fundamental principle of the Hebrew philosophy; nor is it to be called untrue, so much as inadequate and aside from the present case. Of course it can have but one implication. To talk of sin and punishment now, though in ever so general terms, is merely to accuse Job of sin. It is meaningless otherwise. So little is this implication disguised that forthwith Job is solemnly admonished to make his peace with God—as if he had ever been at war with God! But there is the tell-tale leprosy; the friends cannot get over that. If it does not mean that some one has sinned, it seems to mean something about God which it were impiety to think of. J. F. G.

It is not to be denied that the arguments of Eliphaz are weighty, and are urged with much force of sentiment and beauty of language, wanting mainly correctness of application. He points out the inconsistency of a good man repining under calamity; and since he now so outrageously complained who had often exhorted others to fortitude, it might well raise a doubt whether he were the good man he seemed. He then advances the doctrine maintained by the friends throughout the book—that misery implies guilt, and insinuates that the sins of Job are the true cause of his affliction. This view he enforces not only by his own observation and experience, but by a remarkable vision with which he had been favored, but which is much less clearly applicable to his argument than he supposes. He admits that the wicked may seem for a time to be prosperous, but he contends that this is unstable and transitory, and that we had but to wait to see the end. It might well have been asked, on his own ground, why the afflictions of the apparently righteous might not also be transitory, and why not in their case also wait to see the end before finally deciding? He has enforced notions of the justice of God which he cannot reconcile with the sufferings of the righteous, and therefore he argues that all who suffer are wicked. Yet God is not inexorable, and if the sufferer confess the hidden guilt, and humble himself under the hand that smites, prosperity may yet be restored to him. Kitto.

Chap. 4: 3, 4. Job instructed not only his own, but he instructed others. He did not confine his doctrine and advice to his own walls, but the sound thereof went wherever he went. He instructed many. Caryl.—Further, by deeds of helpfulness as well as words of sympathy, he encouraged, comforted, and upheld the weak and fainting everywhere. Strange that, with this knowledge of Job’s long-tried character and beneficent life, Eliphaz could so instantly turn and rend the friendship of years with such harsh words and cruel judgment. B.

5. He makes too light of Job’s afflictions—“It touches thee.” The very word that Satan himself had used, chap. 1: 11. Had Eliphaz felt one half of Job’s afflictions, he would have said, “It smites me, it wounds me;” but speaking of Job’s afflictions, he makes a mere trifle of it—

“It touches thee, and thou canst not bear to be touched.” Men in deep distress must have grains of allowance and a favorable construction put upon what they say; when we make the worst of every word we do not as we would be done by.

6. How unkindly does he upbraid him with the great profession of religion he had made, as if it were all now come to nothing, and proved a sham—“Is not thy fear, thy confidence, thy hope the uprightness of thy ways? Does it not all appear now to be a mere pretence? For hadst thou been sincere in it God would not thus have afflicted thee, nor wouldst thou have behaved thus under the affliction.” This was the very thing Satan aimed at, to prove Job a hypocrite and disprove the character God had given of him: when he could not himself do this to God, but He still saw and said, Job is perfect and upright, then he endeavored by his friends to do it to Job himself, and to persuade him to confess himself a hypocrite: could he have gained that point, he would have triumphed. But by the grace of God Job was enabled to hold fast his integrity, and would not bear false witness against himself. Those that pass rash and uncharitable censures upon their brethren, and condemn them for hypocrites, do Satan’s work, and serve his interest more than they are aware of. H.

7. We may and often do err in attempting to read God’s providence from the wrong end, by asking what God means by it, instead of inquiring what lesson we ourselves may learn from it. We may err in reading God’s providence for others instead of for ourselves. We will greatly err if we say that those eighteen upon whom the Tower in Siloam fell were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem: but we will likewise err if we deny that that lamentable accident had any moral significance at all. It was certainly meant as a warning to those on whom it did not fall, and it was for them to read its lesson for themselves. We may err in directing too exclusive attention to what we call special providences, and thinking too little of ordinary and every-day Divine protection. If a railway accident occurs, by which many are severely injured and some escape unhurt, we tell these last that they have great cause to thank God, which no doubt they have, but we probably forget that we ourselves have still greater cause to do so, inasmuch as we have travelled often and without accident. James Smith.

8. He that sows evil shall reap evil; he that soweth the evil of sin shall reap the evil of punishment. So Eliphaz told Job that he had seen, “they that plough iniquity and sow wickedness reap the same.” And that either in kind or quality, proportion or quantity. In kind, the very same that he did to others shall be done to him; or in proportion, a measure answerable to it. So he shall reap what he hath sown, in quality or in quantity; either in portion the same, or in proportion the like. T. Adams.—Everything reaps its own harvest, every act has its own reward, and before you covet the enjoyment which another possesses, you must first calculate the cost at which it was procured. For instance, the religious tradesman complains that his honesty is a hindrance to his success; that the tide of custom pours into the doors of his less scrupulous neighbors in the same street, while he himself waits for hours idle. My brother, do you think that God is going to reward honor, integrity, high-mindedness, with this world’s coin? Do you fancy that He will pay spiritual excellence with plenty of custom? Now consider the price that man has paid for his success. Perhaps mental degradation and inward dishonor. His advertisements are all deceptive; his treatment of his workmen tyrannical; his cheap prices made possible by inferior articles. Sow that man’s seed, and you will reap that man’s harvest. Cheat, lie, advertise, be unscrupulous in your assertions, custom will come to you. But if the price is too dear, let him have his harvest and take yours; yours is a clear conscience, a pure mind, rectitude within and without—will you part with that for his? Then why do you complain? F. W. R.—Bountiful gifts of a gracious Providence, wealth and abundance, splendid opportunities for good, intellectual endowments, rare talents, or, in humbler life, openings for advancement and usefulness which might have led to distinction, are through the perverse folly of their possessors worse than wasted, and dark shadows are thrown across what should have been the brightness of a happy life. And then men speak of their bad luck, and murmur against the providence of God; as if one could sow the wind and not reap the whirlwind, or cut off the shadow of sin, remorse and shame and death. Bishop Hervey.

It is a hard truth that the fruit of forgiven sin does not die with the death of the tree that bore it. Even though we may find pardon for our errors, others must suffer for them, and we ourselves must also be sufferers notwithstanding our pardon. As Faber says of evil habits, so it might be said of single evil deeds: “Habits of sin, even when put to death as habits, leave many evil legacies behind them.” No truth is surer than that “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” The real measure of a planted seed is its prospective crop. Beware of any sowing except for a harvest you would rejoice in. H. C. T.

If you waste your youth, no repentance will send the shadow back upon the dial, or recover the ground lost by idleness, or restore the constitution shattered by dissipation, or give again the resources wasted upon vice, or bring back the fleeting opportunities. If you forget God and live without Him in the world, fancying that it is time enough to become “religious” when you “have had your fling”—even were you to come back at last—and remember how few do—you could not obliterate the remembrance of misused years, nor the deep marks which they had left upon imagination and thought, and taste, and habit. The wounds can all be healed indeed; for the good Physician, blessed be His name, has lancets and bandages, and balm and anodynes for the deadliest, but scars remain even when the gash is closed. There is an aspect in which it is true that the very greatness of the previous sin may become the occasion for the loftiest devotion and the lowliest trust in a pardoned man. The effects may be so modified as to contribute to the depth and power of his Christian character. But even when the grace of God so modifies them, they remain. And though in some sense it be true that pardon is better than innocence, the converse is true, that innocence is better than pardon. “I would have you simple concerning evil”—for even when forgiven, it leaves on character and memory many a trace of weakness, many a painful record. A. M.

What growth is in the natural world, habit is in the moral. There is the same certainty in its laws, the same slowness and often imperceptibleness in its advance, the same immutability in its results. The causes remaining in operation, there is the same certainty of perfection, and the point of perfection once reached, the point where all the processes ever intended to be applied have accomplished their work, there can be no more change, in kind, forever. The season of these processes we call, in moral things, probation; the result is as immutable as that of seed time and harvest in natural things. When the processes are done, there can be no more change. A good man, when all the processes are finished, can never become a bad man, and a bad man, when all the processes are finished, can never become a good man. The world of processes and probations being finished, and character once completely formed, in one of its two moulds, there can be no change forever. Such is the certainty and immutability of habit, the certainty of its laws and processes, the immutability of its results. Cheever.

10,11. The sudden destruction of the wicked is thrown by Eliphaz into another graphic figure, the breaking-up and dispersion of a den of lions. There are five words used for lion in these verses, some of which are epithets taken from the characteristics of the lion; they are: Lion, roaring lion (rather than fierce lion), young lion, and strong (or, old) lion, and lioness—the whelps of the lioness. Between the lion and the wicked whom Eliphaz describes there are two points of resemblance: first, their strength or power; and second, their inherent violence of nature. This is the kind of men on whom afflictions fall that are final. The picture of the breaking-up of the lion’s home is very graphic; in the midst of the strong lion’s roaring and tearing of his prey, by a sudden stroke his roaring is silenced and his teeth dashed out; thus disabled he perishes for lack of prey; and the whelps, having no provider, are scattered abroad. The reality of the figure is seen in the breaking-up of the home of the wicked (5:2-5).

4:12-21 and 5:1-7. Having expressed his wonder that a righteous man like Job should fall into such utter despair under afflictions, forgetting that to the righteous affliction is but a discipline, Eliphaz seeks to draw Job back to consider what is the real cause of all affliction. This is the imperfection of man, an imperfection which he shares indeed with all created beings, in the highest of whom to God’s eye there is limit and possible error. And this being so, murmuring can only aggravate his affliction by provoking the anger of God. The passage falls into two divisions. In the first (vs. 12-21), Eliphaz contrasts the holiness of God with the imperfection of all creatures, even the pure spirits on high, and much more a material being like man, and thus indirectly suggests to Job the true secret of his troubles. In the second (5:1-7), having laid this broad foundation, he builds on it a warning to Job against his murmurs. Only the wicked resent God’s dealing with them, and by doing so bring increased wrath upon themselves till they perish.

14-16. Eliphaz depicts graphically the circumstances in which he received the message from heaven. In the dead night, in the midst of his perplexing thoughts upon his bed, a supernatural terror suddenly seized him. Then he was conscious of a breath passing before him (v. 15). Then he seemed to perceive a figure in his presence, too dim, however, to be discerned; and at last a whisper of a voice gave utterance to the awful words that expressed the relations of man to God (v. 16). A. B. D.

16. It stood, but I discerned not its aspect, a form before mine eyes, a hush, and I heard a voice. The terms are the most vague and indefinite that could be found; there was a form, yet shapeless and undistinguishable, a voice, but scarcely audible, or audible only to the inner sense. Milton takes from this his representation of Death:

“If shape it could be called that shape had none Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb; Or substance might be called that shadow seemed.”

17. The voice answers the inward question, What account can be given of the apparent inequalities in God’s ways? Only that every man is essentially unjust in his sight, and therefore liable to punishment. Eliphaz seems to represent himself, and doubtless with truth, as having once been beset by doubts, which were cleared up by a revelation so dim and mysterious in its form as to be scarcely distinguishable from the inner movements of his consciousness. Cook.

The vision itself—as the description of a supernatural visitation, and of its effects upon the witness, is the most remarkable in the languages of men. There is nothing like it, or that comes near it. The reason is, that this is the description of a true vision by the man to whom it came; whereas all other descriptions, the best of them, are ideal. Eliphaz describes, in that simplicity of eloquence which thrills the deepest, because it is beyond the reach of art, what he himself saw—what he himself felt; and from the manner in which he speaks, we know that he did see, did feel, as he describes. We have numerous highly wrought poetical descriptions of supernatural appearances, but they all fail in some point or other—all want “keeping.” They are either obscure in the aim at a cloudy sublimity, or they are petty in the minuteness of their details. The vision of Eliphaz is in the highest degree sublime—un-approachably sublime, without being obscure, and circumstantial, without being mean. “It is impossible,” says Barnes, “to conceive anything more sublime than the whole description. It was midnight. There was silence and solitude all around. At that fearful hour the vision came, and a sentiment was communicated to Eliphaz of the utmost importance, and suited to make the deepest possible impression. The time; the quiet; the form of the image, its passing along, and then suddenly standing still; the silence; and then the deep and solemn voice—all were fitted to produce the profoundest awe."

The vision asserts plainly enough that all men are sinners—that even the purest are far from being clean—and affirms the absolute rectitude of God, and the impiety of arraigning His moral government of the world. The just deduction from this would have been, that, seeing all men were sinners, all were with equal justice open to punishment, without any imputation upon the justice of God; and hence, the ground for the special condemnation of Job as a sinner, because he was a sufferer, would be taken away. But Eliphaz, in eagerly availing himself of the statement that men were open to punishment for sin, as applicable to his argument against Job, puts out of view the correlative statement that all men were sinners. We need not be very severe upon Eliphaz for this, or suppose him to have been intentionally disingenuous. Men have not, even to this day, lost the habit of seeing only so much of an authoritative declaration as can be made to fall in with their preconceived opinions. Kitto.

17. More just than God. A man may be a man and yet be unjust, but God cannot be God and yet be unjust. A man may be a man and yet be impure, but God cannot be God and yet be impure; so that justice and purity are not accidents or qualities in God, but His very essence and being. Destroy or deny the justice and purity of God, and you put God out of the world as much as in you lies; for He cannot be God unless He be both just to others and pure to Himself. Caryl.

The ghost is asking this question still: “Shall mortal man be more just than God?” Our age is baffled by the same perplexities which alarmed Job and his friends. It is from God Himself that man derives the terrors which scare him. The alarm, the fear, the awe, the moral misery—these are the assertion of the Divine within the soul. To the alarmed conscience now God comes by the Saviour, not by an apparition. The conscience is calmed amid its highest terrors by the “blood of sprinkling” and by the night-breezes of Gethsemane. From the darkness of Calvary comes a consolation to dispel all evil spirits and all night fears. E. P. Hood.

18. God is eternally holy, the fountain of holiness; the creatures are derivatively and by participation holy. God is eminently and transcendently so; the creatures in a finite degree. God is immutably so; it is impossible it should be otherwise; but no creature is out of an abso-

tute possibility of sin. In this sense it is here said that “He putteth no trust in His servants, and His angels He charged with folly;” and (15:15), “He putteth no trust in His saints; yea, the heavens are not clean in His sight.” Archbishop Tillotson.—The object of this whole argument is to show, that if confidence could not be reposed in the angels (because of the necessary limitations of their nature), and if all their holiness was as nothing before God, little confidence could be placed in man, and that it was presumption for him to sit in judgment on the equity of the Divine dealings. Barnes.—It is not meant that the good spirits positively sin, as if [to] sin were a natural necessary consequence of their creatureship and finite existence, but that even the holiness of the good spirits is never equal to the absolute holiness of God, and that this deficiency is still greater in spirit-corporeal man. Delitzsch.