Job 4: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Eliphaz the Temanite, the first of Job's three friends to speak, answers him. He reminds Job that he once steadied other people who were failing, and then argues from what he has seen that the innocent do not perish and that people who sow wrong reap it. He describes a night vision in which a shape stood before him and a voice asked whether a mortal can be more righteous than God, saying that God finds fault even with his angels, and far more with people made of dust who die without wisdom.

Claim by Claim

1. 4:1
   • Eliphaz the Temanite answered.
   • Eliphaz spoke.
2. 4:2
   • Eliphaz asks whether Job will be wearied if someone attempts a word with him.
   • Eliphaz asks who is able to hold back from speaking.
3. 4:3
   • Eliphaz says Job has instructed many.
   • Eliphaz says Job has strengthened weak hands.
4. 4:4
   • Eliphaz says Job's words have raised up the one who was stumbling.
   • Eliphaz says Job has braced knees that were buckling.
5. 4:5
   • Eliphaz says that now it has come upon Job and he is weary.
   • Eliphaz says that it touches Job and he is dismayed.
6. 4:6
   • Eliphaz asks whether Job's fear of God is his confidence.
   • Eliphaz asks whether Job's hope and the integrity of his ways are the same.
   • The verse pairs the four terms ambiguously: Job's reverence with his confidence, and his hope with the uprightness of his ways, or all four as one list.
7. 4:7
   • Eliphaz tells Job to remember.
   • Eliphaz asks who ever perished while innocent.
   • Eliphaz asks where the upright were destroyed.
8. 4:8
   • Eliphaz says he has observed that those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same.
9. 4:9
   • They perish by the breath of God.
   • They are consumed by the wind of God's anger.
10. 4:10
    • The roaring of the lion and the voice of the fierce lion are silenced.
    • The teeth of the young lions are broken out.
11. 4:11
    • The old lion perishes for lack of prey.
    • The cubs of the lioness are scattered.
12. 4:12
    • A word was brought to Eliphaz secretly.
    • Eliphaz's ear received a whisper of it.
13. 4:13
    • This happened amid disquieting thoughts from visions of the night.
    • This happened when deep sleep falls on men.
14. 4:14
    • Fear and trembling came upon Eliphaz.
    • It made the multitude of his bones shake.
15. 4:15
    • A spirit passed before Eliphaz's face.
    • The hair of his flesh bristled.
    • The word rendered spirit can also mean a wind.
16. 4:16
    • It stood still.
    • Eliphaz could not recognize its appearance.
    • A form was before his eyes.
    • There was silence.
    • Eliphaz heard a voice.
    • The voice spoke.
17. 4:17
    • The voice asks whether a mortal can be righteous compared with God.
    • The voice asks whether a man can be pure compared with his Maker.
    • The comparison is ambiguous: it can mean more righteous than God, or righteous in God's presence.
18. 4:18
    • God puts no trust in his servants.
    • God charges his angels with error.
19. 4:19
    • Those who dwell in houses of clay are far less trustworthy.
    • Their foundation is in the dust.
    • They are crushed before the moth.
    • The phrase is ambiguous: they are crushed like a moth, or crushed sooner than a moth.
20. 4:20
    • They are shattered from morning to evening.
    • They perish forever with no one regarding it.
21. 4:21
    • Their cord is pulled up within them.
    • The word is ambiguous: it can mean their tent cord or their excellence.
    • They die.
    • They die without wisdom.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

4:1

Eliphaz is the first of Job's three friends to reply to him. Teman was a district of Edom, south-east of the Dead Sea, with a reputation in the ancient world for wisdom (compare Jeremiah 49:7), so the name marks Eliphaz out as a sage rather than merely an acquaintance. He is answering the outburst Job has just made in chapter 3.

4:2

"Assay" here has nothing to do with testing metals; it is the old English verb meaning to attempt or venture. "Commune with thee" means simply to speak with you. "Wilt thou be grieved" asks whether Job will find the attempt too painful or wearying to bear.

4:3

Drooping hands and buckling knees are stock Hebrew images for loss of nerve, not for physical illness. Eliphaz means Job used to be the man who put courage back into frightened people.

4:4

"Upholden" is the old past participle of uphold, meaning held up or kept from falling. Knees that give way are the companion image to the drooping hands of the previous verse: both describe a body failing under despair, and both are used across the Hebrew Bible for people who have lost their nerve.

4:6

"Fear" here translates a Hebrew term for reverence toward God (piety, the whole of a person's religious life), not fright. The verse can be read two ways, and translators divide: either "your piety is your confidence and your blameless life your hope" (a statement), or a question, "isn't your piety what you rely on?" Either way the point is that Job's record ought to be his security.

4:7

Eliphaz is appealing to what almost everyone in his world took for granted, that disaster is the visible payment for wrongdoing and that the innocent are not destroyed. "Cut off" is a common Hebrew phrase for being killed or wiped out, often suddenly. The whole book is built around testing this assumption against Job's case.

4:8

Farmers plow up the soil, plant seed, then gather in whatever they planted. Eliphaz uses that picture: people who work at causing harm end up harvesting harm.

4:9

In Hebrew the word for nose or nostrils doubles as the word for anger, because anger was pictured as hot, snorting breath. The same term ruach covers breath, wind and spirit, so "the breath of God" is also "the blast of God", a storm wind that flattens what it hits.

4:10

Hebrew uses five different words for lion across these two verses, a display of vocabulary rather than five different animals. Lions were a standard image for violent, predatory people; the picture of a lion whose teeth are smashed and whose cubs scatter is a picture of a powerful man's household destroyed.

4:11

"Whelps" are cubs. A lion that cannot catch prey starves, and its cubs scatter because there is no one to feed them, so the picture is of a powerful family line collapsing into nothing within a single generation.

4:12

The Hebrew verb suggests something furtive, a word slipped or stolen to him rather than openly delivered, and the noun rendered "whisper" means a mere scrap or faint rustle of sound. Eliphaz is claiming a revelation, but stressing how little of it he caught.

4:13

The "deep sleep" is a specific Hebrew word for a heavy, God-sent trance, the same word used of the sleep that fell on Adam in Genesis 2:21 and on Abram in Genesis 15:12. It marks what follows as more than an ordinary dream.

4:15

The Hebrew word here, ruach, means wind, breath, or spirit, and the verb can mean glide or blow past. The line is genuinely ambiguous: a spirit-being passing his face, or a draft of wind that made his hair stand on end. Ancient and modern readers have taken it both ways.

4:16

The Hebrew reads roughly "silence, and a voice I heard," which can be understood as a hush followed by speech, or as a single phrase, a hushed, murmuring voice. The word for "form" is a rare one used elsewhere of a likeness or shape that can be seen but not identified.

4:17

The Hebrew preposition allows two readings that pull in different directions: "Can a mortal be more righteous than God?" or "Can a mortal be righteous before God?", that is, can anyone be found in the right when standing in God's presence. The word for "mortal" is one that carries the sense of frailty and death built into it.

4:18

"Those who serve him" here means the heavenly court, the angels named in the second half of the line, not human worshipers. The word translated "fault" or "folly" is uncertain in Hebrew; suggestions range from error and unreliability to something like straying. The argument is from the greater to the lesser: if even heavenly beings fall short, humans certainly do.

4:19

"Houses of clay" means human bodies, made from the ground and returning to it, as in Genesis 2:7 and 3:19. The last clause is obscure in Hebrew and can be read as "crushed like a moth" (as easily as one crushes a moth) or "crushed before the moth" (destroyed sooner than a moth is). Either way the point is how little force it takes.

4:20

"From morning to evening" is an idiom for the span of a single day: they are gone between sunrise and sunset, with no one keeping count.

4:21

The Hebrew word here can mean either a tent-cord or what is left over, an excess or excellence. So the line is either "is not their tent-cord pulled up?" (the image of a collapsing tent, a nomad's whole dwelling gone in a moment) or "does not whatever is best in them depart?" The rendering keeps the wording open because the Hebrew is.