Job4chapter 4

Eliphaz is from Teman, a district of Edom with a reputation across the region for wisdom — Jeremiah later asks whether counsel has perished from Teman. He speaks first because he is the eldest and the most respected, and he begins with real courtesy, reminding Job that he has strengthened many weak hands in his time.

His authority rests on two things his world respected. The first is the settled principle that the innocent do not perish and the upright are not cut off — plough trouble, reap trouble. This was not a private opinion; it was the standard wisdom of the whole ancient Near East, taught in Egypt and Mesopotamia as well as in Israel, and it is mostly what the Book of Proverbs also says.

The second is a night vision. He describes a spirit passing before his face, the hair of his flesh standing up, a form he cannot make out, and a voice in the silence. Dream and vision oracles were a recognised channel of revelation in that world, and claiming one was a claim to unarguable authority. Hearers were meant to notice that the content of the vision — that no mortal is righteous before God, that even the angels are charged with folly — is true as far as it goes, and is being used to answer a question it was not addressed to.

The lion imagery in the middle uses several different words for lion — the roaring one, the fierce one, the old one, the whelps — a poetic sweep meaning the whole predatory household. His point is that the strongest wicked are broken and scattered anyway.