Eliphaz Speaks
4 1 Then Eliphaz the Temanite answered: 2 "If someone ventures a word with you, will you grow weary? Yet who can hold back from speaking? 3 Look, you have instructed many, and you have strengthened weak hands. 4 Your words have lifted up the one stumbling, and you have made firm the buckling knees. 5 But now it comes to you, and you are weary; it touches you, and you are dismayed. 6 Is not your fear of God your confidence, and the integrity of your ways your hope? 7 Remember now: who, being innocent, ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed? 8 As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same. 9 By the breath of God they perish, and by the blast of his anger they are consumed. 10 The roar of the lion, the voice of the fierce lion, the teeth of the young lions — they are broken. 11 The strong lion perishes for lack of prey, and the cubs of the lioness are scattered. 12 Now a word was brought to me in secret; my ear caught a whisper of it. 13 Amid troubling thoughts from visions of the night, when deep sleep falls on people, 14 dread came upon me, and trembling, and it made all my bones shake. 15 A spirit glided past my face; the hair on my body stood on end. 16 It stood still, but I could not make out its shape. A form was before my eyes; there was silence, then I heard a voice: 17 'Can a mortal be righteous before God? Can a man be pure before his Maker? a a v17 Eliphaz frames God as a distant judge before whom no mortal can stand — the register the three friends will never break free from, and the framing the book's closing chapters expose as not knowing our Father. 18 Look, he puts no trust in his servants, and he charges his angels with error; 19 how much more those who dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, who are crushed like a moth. 20 Between morning and evening they are shattered; unnoticed, they perish forever. 21 Is not their tent-cord pulled up within them? They die without ever gaining wisdom.' b b v21 The tent-cord image pictures life as a tent: when the cord is pulled up, the whole structure collapses and is gone.