Job 4:1-21 - Eliphaz's First Response To Job

¹ Then Eliphaz the Temanite replied: ² Should anyone try to speak with you
when you are exhausted?
Yet who can keep from speaking?
³ Indeed, you have instructed many
and have strengthened weak hands.
⁴ Your words have steadied the one who was stumbling
and braced the knees that were buckling.
⁵ But now that this has happened to you,
you have become exhausted.
It strikes you, and you are dismayed.
⁶ Isn’t your piety your confidence,
and the integrity of your life your hope?
⁷ Consider: who has perished when he was innocent?
Where have the honest been destroyed?
⁸ In my experience, those who plow injustice
and those who sow trouble reap the same.
⁹ They perish at a single blast from God
and come to an end by the breath of His nostrils.
¹⁰ The lion may roar and the fierce lion growl,
but the fangs of young lions are broken.
¹¹ The strong lion dies if it catches no prey,
and the cubs of the lioness are scattered.

¹² A word was brought to me in secret;
my ears caught a whisper of it.
¹³ Among unsettling thoughts from visions in the night,
when deep sleep descends on men,
¹⁴ fear and trembling came over me
and made all my bones shake.
¹⁵ A wind passed by me,
and I shuddered with fear.
¹⁶ A figure stood there,
but I could not recognize its appearance;
a form loomed before my eyes.
I heard a quiet voice:
¹⁷ “Can a person be more righteous than God,
or a man more pure than his Maker?”
¹⁸ If God puts no trust in His servants
and He charges His angels with foolishness,
¹⁹ how much more those who dwell in clay houses,
whose foundation is in the dust,
who are crushed like a moth!
²⁰ They are smashed to pieces from dawn to dusk;
they perish forever while no one notices.
²¹ Are their tent cords not pulled up?
They die without wisdom.

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