Job4chapter 4

Job 4:1-6

Eliphaz opens with a question that already answers itself, who can withhold himself from speaking, so his gentleness is a formality before the argument begins. He reminds Job of the counsel Job himself once gave the weak and the falling, thou hast strengthened the weak hands, and then turns that very memory into an accusation at verse five, but now it is come upon thee, and thou faintest. Henry notes the unkindness of measuring a man's own medicine against him the moment he needs it himself. Gill reads the question of verse six, is not this thy fear, thy confidence, as Eliphaz already doubting whether Job's religion was ever more than a comfortable theory.

Job 4:7

Eliphaz states the friends' whole case in a single question, remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being innocent, the claim that suffering proves guilt worked backward into a promise that innocence guarantees safety. Clarke notes the question is meant to be unanswerable, yet the reader of chapter one already holds the counterexample sitting in the ashes in front of him. Wesley calls the appeal to observation itself the flaw, since Eliphaz has seen only what suffering he has witnessed and never what heaven permits unseen.

Job 4:8-9

Eliphaz supports his doctrine with a farmer's proverb, they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same, sowing and reaping standing in for sin and its punishment. By the blast of God they perish extends the figure to a direct act of judgment, breath and wind doing what the plow and harvest only pictured. Barnes notes that the observation is true as a general rule of providence and false as a universal law applied without exception to one man's case.

Job 4:10-11

The lion images widen the doctrine from farming to power: the roaring lion, the fierce lion's voice and the young lion's teeth are all broken together, and the old lion perishes for lack of prey while her whelps are scattered. Delitzsch reads the fivefold naming of the lion as deliberate excess, strength named every way it can be named only to be dismantled every way in turn. Gill takes the picture as Eliphaz's claim that no strength, however fierce or established, stands against God's judgment on the wicked.

Job 4:12-14

Eliphaz turns from proverb to private experience, now a thing was secretly brought to me, and mine ear received a little thereof, introducing the vision that will carry his doctrine's authority. The setting is deep sleep and midnight, the hour thoughts from the visions of the night names directly, and fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake describes a physical terror before any word is spoken. Davidson notes that Eliphaz stakes his whole argument on this private experience rather than on any word of Scripture, since none had yet been given him to appeal to. Henry observes that fear and trembling before an unnamed presence is itself evidence of nothing certain, since terror can attend a true visitation or a troubled imagination alike.

Job 4:15-17

A spirit passed before my face and stood, its form indiscernible, until a voice out of the silence asked the doctrine's climax, shall mortal man be more just than God, shall a man be more pure than his maker. Gill reads the spirit as a true angelic messenger, God's own answer confirming what Eliphaz already believed. Delitzsch treats the spirit's identity as left open by the text itself, a voice whose sentence is sound in itself without settling whether the messenger who spoke it was sent from God. The words themselves are true, and the book's own crux is whether Eliphaz then applied a true word to a false case.

Job 4:18-21

Eliphaz pushes the doctrine further down: if God puts no trust in his own servants and charges his angels with folly, how much less can men of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, escape being crushed before the moth. Clarke reads the moth as the frailest of all creatures set as the measure of how quickly a house of clay is destroyed, from morning to evening, without any regarding it. Wesley notes the final line, they die, even without wisdom, as Eliphaz's own conclusion drawn ahead of the evidence, since neither he nor Job yet knows why this particular man is dying.