Job15chapter 15

The politeness is finished. Eliphaz now says Job fills his belly with the east wind — the sirocco, the scorching wind off the desert that withered crops and frayed tempers, the most useless and destructive air anyone in that region knew. He accuses Job of casting off fear and restraining prayer, which in that culture was the definition of a godless man.

He appeals to a new authority: age and pedigree. Both the grey-headed and the very aged are on our side, he says, older than your father. Then he cites wise men who received wisdom from their fathers, 'unto whom alone the earth was given, and no stranger passed among them' — a claim that this teaching comes down an unmixed line, uncontaminated by foreign ideas. In a world of tribal traditions, purity of transmission was itself an argument.

The portrait of the wicked man that fills the second half is drawn from the anxieties of a violent age. He travails with pain all his days; a dreadful sound is in his ears; in prosperity the destroyer comes on him; he does not believe he will return out of darkness; he wanders abroad for bread asking where it is; trouble makes him afraid 'as a king ready to the battle'.

The physical detail is deliberately ugly: he covers his face with his fatness and makes collops of fat on his flanks. In a hungry world, visible fat meant a man who had eaten well at someone else's expense. And the closing images are agricultural failure — a vine shaking off its unripe grapes, an olive casting its blossom, and the tents of bribery consumed by fire.