Job 5: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Eliphaz finishes the speech he began in chapter 4. He tells Job that anger and envy destroy the fool, that trouble does not grow up out of the ground on its own, and that he himself would take his case to God. He then praises God for lifting the low and thwarting the crafty, and promises that the man who accepts God's correction will be rescued from trouble after trouble and live to old age. He closes by saying he and his friends have looked into this and found it true.

Claim by Claim

1. 5:1
   • Eliphaz tells Job to call out.
   • Eliphaz asks whether anyone will answer Job.
   • Eliphaz asks to which of the holy ones Job will turn.
2. 5:2
   • Vexation kills the fool.
   • Envy slays the simple one.
3. 5:3
   • Eliphaz says he has seen a fool taking root.
   • Eliphaz says he suddenly cursed the fool's dwelling.
4. 5:4
   • The fool's children are far from safety.
   • The fool's children are crushed in the gate.
   • There is no one to deliver them.
5. 5:5
   • The hungry eat the fool's harvest.
   • The hungry take the harvest even from among the thorns.
   • The thirsty pant after their wealth.
6. 5:6
   • Affliction does not come forth from the dust.
   • Trouble does not sprout from the ground.
7. 5:7
   • Man is born to trouble.
   • Man's being born to trouble is like sparks flying upward.
8. 5:8
   • Eliphaz says he would seek God.
   • Eliphaz says he would lay his cause before God.
9. 5:9
   • God does great things that cannot be searched out.
   • God does marvellous things without number.
10. 5:10
    • God gives rain upon the earth.
    • God sends waters upon the fields.
11. 5:11
    • God sets the lowly on high.
    • God lifts mourners to safety.
12. 5:12
    • God frustrates the plans of the crafty.
    • The hands of the crafty cannot achieve success.
13. 5:13
    • God catches the wise in their own craftiness.
    • The counsel of the cunning is carried headlong.
14. 5:14
    • The crafty meet with darkness in the daytime.
    • The crafty grope at noonday as though it were night.
15. 5:15
    • God saves the needy from the sword.
    • God saves the needy from the mouth of the crafty.
    • God saves the needy from the hand of the strong.
16. 5:16
    • The poor have hope.
    • Injustice shuts her mouth.
17. 5:17
    • The man whom God reproves is blessed.
    • Eliphaz tells Job not to despise the discipline of the Almighty.
18. 5:18
    • God causes pain.
    • God binds up.
    • God wounds.
    • God's hands heal.
19. 5:19
    • God will deliver Job in six troubles.
    • In seven troubles no evil will touch Job.
20. 5:20
    • In famine God will redeem Job from death.
    • In war God will redeem Job from the power of the sword.
21. 5:21
    • Job will be hidden from the scourge of the tongue.
    • Job will not be afraid of destruction when it comes.
22. 5:22
    • Job will laugh at destruction and famine.
    • Job need not fear the beasts of the earth.
23. 5:23
    • Job will have a covenant with the stones of the field.
    • The beasts of the field will be at peace with Job.
24. 5:24
    • Job will know that his tent is at peace.
    • Job will inspect his dwelling.
    • Job will miss nothing.
25. 5:25
    • Job will know that his offspring will be many.
    • Job's descendants will be like the grass of the earth.
26. 5:26
    • Job will come to the grave in full vigor.
    • Job's coming to the grave will be like a sheaf of grain brought in at its season.
27. 5:27
    • Eliphaz says they have investigated this.
    • Eliphaz says it is so.
    • Eliphaz tells Job to hear it.
    • Eliphaz tells Job to know it for himself.

Words Worth Explaining

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

5:1

This is Eliphaz, the first of Job's three friends, continuing the speech he began in chapter 4. The "holy ones" (KJV "saints") are not holy people but heavenly beings, the members of God's court, what later readers would call angels. Eliphaz's point is that there is no one in that court Job can appeal to as an advocate.

5:2

The "simple" man is the gullible one, in Hebrew wisdom writing, a person who is easily talked into things and has no settled judgment, not someone of low intelligence.

5:3

The Hebrew here is ambiguous and translators split over it. It can mean that Eliphaz himself pronounced the curse (as the King James and this rendering take it), or simply that the fool's household was suddenly cursed, with no one named as doing it.

5:4

Legal cases were heard at the gateway of a walled town, where the elders sat to judge. "Crushed in the gate" means losing in court, with no relative or patron standing up to speak on your behalf.

5:5

A farmer would pile cut thorn branches around a crop as a makeshift fence; "taking it even from among the thorns" means the plunderers strip the harvest right out of its protection. The word rendered "robbers" is uncertain in Hebrew: it has also been read as "the thirsty" or as "a snare," and no reading is secure.

5:6

A proverb about origins: trouble is not something that germinates by itself out of the soil the way a weed does. What follows in verse 7 supplies the contrast.

5:7

The Hebrew phrase is literally "the sons of Resheph fly upward." Resheph was a name for flame (and, in older Canaanite usage, a god of plague and fire), so the image is usually taken as sparks or flames shooting up from a fire; some read it instead as birds of prey. Either way the point is inevitability: this is simply what happens.

5:8

"Commit my cause" is courtroom language. A "cause" is a legal case, and to commit it is to hand it over to the judge for a ruling. Job has been demanding a hearing, and Eliphaz is telling him where to file it.

5:12

"Devices" means schemes or plots, and "enterprise" means the thing a person sets out to do. Neither word carries its modern sense here.

5:13

"Froward" is a lost English word meaning twisted, contrary, bent away from what is straight. "Carried headlong" means swept away in a rush, like debris in a flood.

5:15

The Hebrew of this line is broken and hard to construe; "from the sword, from their mouth" may mean the sword that is in the mouths of the powerful: that is, ruinous speech pictured as a weapon.

5:16

"Iniquity" means wrongdoing, and here it is spoken of as a person who is forced to shut her mouth. The "her" is not a comment on anyone; Hebrew nouns carry grammatical gender, and this one is feminine.

5:17

The word behind "happy" describes an enviable, well-placed condition rather than a cheerful feeling. "Chastening" translates a word used of a father training a son: correction meant to instruct, not merely to punish.

5:19

"Six... and seven" is a standard Hebrew way of counting (name a number, then go one higher) used to mean "however many there turn out to be." The same pattern appears elsewhere in Hebrew poetry (three and four, seven and eight).

5:20

"Redeem" is a family and commercial term: to pay the price that buys a relative, a slave, or forfeited property back out of another's hands.

5:21

The word is the one used for a whip or lash. Slander is pictured as a beating administered with the tongue.

5:22

Wild animals were an ordinary danger, not an exotic one. Lions, bears and wolves took livestock and sometimes people, and a herdsman living in tents had no walls between himself and them.

5:23

Stones were the enemy of anyone farming in that country; clearing them out of a field was constant labor. A "league" is a covenant or treaty, so the picture is of a formal peace agreement with the very things that normally work against you, the stones and the wild animals both.

5:24

"Tabernacle" here simply means tent; Job and his neighbors are pictured living the herding life of tent-dwellers. The last phrase turns on a Hebrew verb whose basic sense is "to miss": you take stock of your household and nothing has gone astray. The King James translates it with its other, moral sense, "sin."

5:25

"Seed" is the standard King James word for offspring and descendants, the people who come after you.

5:26

"Corn" in 1611 English meant grain of any kind, not maize; a "shock" is a stack of cut sheaves left standing in the field. The word behind "full age" is rare and disputed: it may mean old age, or bodily vigor still unspent.

5:27

"We" is the voice of the wise and their inherited tradition. Eliphaz is closing with the standard formula of a teacher handing on a settled result: we have examined this, and it holds.