Job 15:16

Job 15 is Eliphaz’s second speech, and it opens the second round of the friends’ speeches. His first (Job 4–5) was gentler. Since then he has heard Job’s long reply in Job 12–14, where Job held to his integrity, asked God to show him the cause of his suffering, and in Job 14 lamented the shortness of life and longed for death. Eliphaz has already dismissed Job’s words as windy knowledge and accused him of undermining piety (Job 15:2–6), and now his questions grow sharper.

Eliphaz and his friends hold that God always rewards the righteous with blessing and punishes the wicked with suffering in this life. On that view Job’s losses can only mean a great sin, and when Job keeps protesting his innocence, his complaints look to them like pride and rebellion. The book’s opening chapters (Job 1) tell us that Job’s suffering is a trial whose cause was hidden from Eliphaz. The rest of this speech describes the end of the wicked man, painting Job in those colours, and Job answers him in Job 16.

Eliphaz asks this to mock Job, charging him with talking as though his wisdom reached back to the first day of mankind. “Art thou the first man that was born? or wast thou made before the hills?” Both questions expect the answer no, and they work by deliberate exaggeration. The word for man, ʼâdâm, is the ordinary word for a human being or for mankind, and “the first man” points back to Adam, whom God formed of the dust of the ground (Genesis 2:7). The verb yâlad, in the form used here, means “be born”. Job came into the world by birth like everyone else, so his knowledge, like ours, began when his life began.

With this question Eliphaz accuses Job of speaking as though he had been admitted to God’s private council. The word for “secret”, çôwd (also written sod), means a council or company of people deliberating closely together, and the counsel they share. It comes from yâçad, to set or found, and in its reflexive sense to sit down together and consult. Scripture pictures the LORD in his heavenly council. Micaiah said, “I saw the LORD sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing by him on his right hand and on his left” (1 Kings 22:19), and Jeremiah asks, “For who hath stood in the counsel of the LORD, and hath perceived and heard his word?” (Jeremiah 23:18). To claim a hearing in that council is to claim a place that belongs to God’s own servants of his choosing.

The word for God in this verse is ʼĕlôwahh, a singular noun meaning God (or, of other nations, a god), which Strong’s calls probably a lengthened form of ʼêl.

“Dost thou restrain wisdom to thyself?” The verb gâraʻ comes from a root meaning to scrape off, to diminish or to withhold, and here it means to keep something back for oneself. Eliphaz pictures Job hoarding wisdom, as though truth were his alone and the wisdom of the elders counted for little. Bildad had already urged Job to ask of the former age and learn from the fathers (Job 8:8–10).

The irony is plain. Eliphaz accuses Job of claiming to know God’s secrets, and in the same breath he presumes to know why Job is suffering, which was exactly the thing God had kept hidden from all of them. Some things God keeps to himself: “The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever” (Deuteronomy 29:29). Isaiah asks, “Who hath directed the Spirit of the LORD, or being his counsellor hath taught him?” (Isaiah 40:13–14), and Paul breaks into praise: “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!” (Romans 11:33–36). Job, for his part, longed to find God and lay his case before him (Job 23:3–5), the cry of a man who knew he lacked the answer.

Eliphaz now sets the friends’ knowledge beside Job’s and finds Job’s wanting. He uses two verbs. Yâdaʻ is the common verb to know, and it covers knowledge gained by experience and close acquaintance. Bîyn means to understand or discern, to tell things apart and make sense of them. The second line says the first again in other words, as Hebrew poetry often does, and the repetition presses the point home: whatever Job knows, they knew first. With it Eliphaz waves away Job’s experience, his questions and his claim of innocence.

The end of the book shows how partial their understanding was, and how much Job, for all his struggles, came to see of God’s majesty. God’s ways stand far above every human scheme: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD” (Isaiah 55:8–9). Proverbs gives the right posture: “Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5–6), for “the LORD giveth wisdom: out of his mouth cometh knowledge and understanding” (Proverbs 2:6). Paul says that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men” (1 Corinthians 1:20–25).

Eliphaz came to comfort a grieving friend and stayed to judge him. Scripture asks something gentler of us: “weep with them that weep” (Romans 12:15).

Eliphaz leans on the honour Scripture gives to age, and uses it to silence Job. “With us are both the grayheaded and very aged men, much elder than thy father.” Sîyb, grayheaded, comes from a root meaning to become aged and describes hair turned gray or white. Yâshîysh means an old man, one who is very old. “Much elder” is built from kabbîyr, much, and yôwm, day, so these men are older by many days. The comparison with Job’s father, ʼâb, makes Job a younger man by a whole generation, and in a culture that honoured parents and elders that was meant to end the debate. Eliphaz, himself an elder, may count himself among these men.

Scripture does honour age. The law says, “Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honour the face of the old man” (Leviticus 19:32). Proverbs calls gray hair a glory: “The hoary head is a crown of glory, if it be found in the way of righteousness” (Proverbs 16:31), and “the beauty of old men is the grey head” (Proverbs 20:29). The condition in the first of those proverbs matters. Later in this very book the young man Elihu answers the friends: “Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgment” (Job 32:9). Wisdom comes from God and begins with fearing him: “Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding” (Job 28:28), and “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). That fear can be found at any age, and it is the counsel of the old that carries it which deserves our honour.

“Are the consolations of God small with thee?” The word tanchûwm comes from nâcham and means compassion, solace and comfort. The name of God here is ʼêl, which means God and is also given the sense of strength and might. Eliphaz means that God has offered Job comfort and Job treats it as a small thing. He most likely counts the friends’ own counsel among God’s consolations, and perhaps the discipline of suffering itself, which he expects to bring Job to repentance.

There is a sad irony in this. Eliphaz speaks of God’s comfort while handing Job accusation. The comfort God truly gives comes from his own heart: he is “the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; who comforteth us in all our tribulation” (2 Corinthians 1:3–4). The psalmist says, “In the multitude of my thoughts within me thy comforts delight my soul” (Psalm 94:19), and in the valley of the shadow of death, “thy rod and thy staff they comfort me” (Psalm 23:4). God’s comfort reaches into suffering and works through it, as tribulation works patience, experience and hope (Romans 5:3–5), and the God of all grace, after his people “have suffered a while”, will “make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you” (1 Peter 5:10).

“Is there any secret thing with thee?” The word behind “secret”, ʼaṭ, comes from a root that may mean to move softly. Elsewhere it is used as an adverb, gently or softly, and once for necromancers, named for their soft muttering. In the KJV’s reading the line speaks of something kept hidden, and in Eliphaz’s mouth it hints at a concealed sin. His reasoning is simple: Job suffers greatly, and he denies any open wrongdoing, so the sin must be a secret one. Job’s answer runs through the whole dialogue: “My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go” (Job 27:6).

“Why doth thine heart carry thee away? and what do thy eyes wink at,” Eliphaz now turns from Job’s words to Job’s inner life. The heart, lêb (also written lev), is the whole inner person in Hebrew: thought, will, conscience and choice as well as feeling. The verb lâqach means to take, seize or carry away, so Eliphaz pictures Job’s heart sweeping him off, overcome by pride or bitterness. The verb râzam means to wink or to flash, of the eyes, and Eliphaz reads the look in Job’s eyes as contempt for the friends’ counsel and defiance toward God. Proverbs describes the wicked man in similar terms: “He winketh with his eyes” (Proverbs 6:12–13).

Scripture does teach that the heart drives everything else: “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life” (Proverbs 4:23), and Jesus says that what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart (Matthew 15:18–19). Eliphaz has explained suffering by a man’s own doings since his first speech, where he said that “man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward” (Job 5:7).

People ask whether Eliphaz had any ground at all for this charge. Job was wrestling hard, and some of his words were bold, as when he said, “Surely I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to reason with God” (Job 13:3). What Eliphaz got wrong was the cause. He read anguish and a longing to be vindicated as pride, and God’s verdict at the end shows whose reading was right (Job 42:7). Only God sees the depths of a human heart.

Verse 12 ends with a comma in the KJV and runs straight into this charge: “That thou turnest thy spirit against God, and lettest such words go out of thy mouth?” The verb shûwb means to turn back or return, and it is also used of things that pass or subside, so the word itself leaves the question of purpose open. Eliphaz uses it to say that Job has set his spirit against God. Rûwach means wind, breath or spirit, and here it is Job’s inner disposition, his attitude toward God.

“Such words” are all Job’s laments and arguments. The word millâh means a word, or collectively a discourse, or a topic, and comes from mâlal, to speak. “Lettest … go out” is yâtsâʼ, to go or come out, and “mouth” is peh. Eliphaz sees an inner rebellion and the words that pour out of it.

He has forgotten how Job first met his losses: “In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly” (Job 1:22). And when his wife urged him to curse God, “In all this did not Job sin with his lips” (Job 2:10). Words do matter greatly, for “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21), but Eliphaz has mistaken a broken spirit for a rebellious one.

Eliphaz asks this to say that every human being falls short of the purity God requires. “What is man, that he should be clean? and he which is born of a woman, that he should be righteous?” The word for man here, ʼĕnôwsh, is a noun meaning man, men, mortal or people. “Born of a woman” is a common biblical way of speaking of the human condition, with its mortality and frailty, shared by everyone who has ever been born.

Zâkâh, to be clean, means to be translucent, and figuratively to be innocent. It covers both ritual purity, being fit to come before God in worship, and moral blamelessness. Tsâdaq, to be righteous, means to be right in a moral or legal sense, to be just, upright or in right standing. The two lines ask the same question from two sides: can a mortal be pure, and can he be in the right before God?

Here Eliphaz says what the rest of Scripture says. “They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one” (Psalm 14:3). Paul quotes the same truth: “There is none righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10–12), and he sums it up, “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). “By one man sin entered into the world” (Romans 5:12), and every child of Adam shares it. So the cleansing we need must come from God: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9).

“Behold, he putteth no trust in his saints; yea, the heavens are not clean in his sight.” Eliphaz means that God measures even his holy ones by his own purity, and by that measure their holiness is something they have received from him. The verb ʼâman is the word behind trusting and believing, and in its simplest form it means to support or foster. Here it speaks of what God relies on, and he relies on nothing in creation as though it were pure in itself.

The word for saints, qâdôwsh, means holy, sacred, set apart. “Clean” in this verse translates zâkak, to be transparent or clean, free of stain, which is a different Hebrew word from the zâkâh of verse 14 though the KJV gives both the English “clean”. The heavens were to Israel the highest and brightest part of creation, yet before God’s eye, ʻayin, “in his sight”, they fall short of his purity. Isaiah heard the cry, “Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory” (Isaiah 6:3).

“How much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water?” Here the argument of verse 15 lands. If the holy angels and the heavens fall short of God’s purity, how much further does man fall? Tāʿēḇ, abominable, means to loathe or detest, and it describes what is abhorrent. Its family of words runs through Leviticus and Deuteronomy for practices God abhors, such as idolatry, sexual perversion and dishonest dealing. ʼÂlach, filthy, means to muddle, and so to become morally corrupt, foul and tainted.

The verb shâthâh means to drink, literally or in a figure. To drink iniquity like water is to take in sin as readily and as often as a thirsty man drinks, with as little thought as he gives to a cup of water. Eliphaz puts it as strongly as language allows, and the picture is of an appetite. The Bible says the same of the heart: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). Psalm 14:3, quoted above, uses the English word “filthy” for the whole race as well. The story runs back to the fall in Genesis 3, and Romans 3 declares that all have sinned.

Jesus turns the picture of thirst the other way: “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled” (Matthew 5:6).

Eliphaz was right about man and wrong about Job. What he says in verses 14 to 16 agrees with the whole Bible: all have sinned, and no one can make himself clean before God. His error lay in the use he made of it. He turned a truth about every human being into proof that Job’s suffering must be the punishment of some particular, hidden sin, and he presumed to know the reason for a trial God had kept to himself. God’s verdict on the friends at the end of the book (Job 42:7) shows that sound doctrine, aimed in the wrong direction and spoken without compassion, can misrepresent God and wound the person it was meant to help.

Every claim Eliphaz denies to Job is true of Jesus Christ. Eliphaz asks scornfully whether Job was made before the hills. Of the Son John says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and “All things were made by him” (John 1:1–3). The Son was before the hills because he made them. He is also the last Adam, head of a new humanity: “The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45). Paul calls him “the power of God, and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24), the wisdom that Proverbs pictures beside God at creation, and he says that in Christ “are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3).

Eliphaz mocks the idea that Job has heard the secret of God. In Christ the secret has been opened. Paul speaks of “the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ” (Colossians 2:2), and Jesus says, “neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him” (Matthew 11:27). The Son is “the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3), and he “of God is made unto us wisdom” (1 Corinthians 1:30). The wisdom Eliphaz accuses Job of hoarding, God gives freely in Christ: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally” (James 1:5).

Eliphaz appealed to gray hairs, and when Jesus taught, the people found that “he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (Matthew 7:29). Eliphaz claimed to understand suffering from a distance. Christ understands it from within, as “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3), and he brings the consolations of God in his own person: “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4). Nothing hidden can part those who trust in him from the love of God (Romans 8:38–39).

Eliphaz charged Job with a heart carried away and eyes full of scorn. Jesus’ heart was wholly given to his Father’s will: “For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me” (John 6:38). His eyes looked on the crowds with pity: “when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them” (Matthew 9:36), and with holy zeal when he drove the traders out of his Father’s house (John 2:15–16). Yet he too was misjudged and accused, and the high priest cried, “He hath spoken blasphemy” (Matthew 26:65–66). He “did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth” (1 Peter 2:22).

Eliphaz asks how one born of a woman could be clean. Christ is the one man “made of a woman” (Galatians 4:4) who was tempted in all points as we are, “yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), and “he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). To the one who believes, God counts faith for righteousness (Romans 4:5), and he presents his people “holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight” (Colossians 1:22), the very sight before which Eliphaz said the heavens are unclean. Man drinks iniquity like water, and Christ offers living water in its place (John 4:10): “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink” (John 7:37–38).

These verses set our wisdom in its place. We were born yesterday and made long after the hills, and God’s counsel belongs to him. The friends’ failure shows that age, tradition and sound doctrine all fall short when they are used to explain away another person’s pain. The wisdom that pleases God begins in the fear of the LORD and stays humble before what he has kept hidden.

The verses also tell the truth about us. Every one of us is born of a woman, and none of us can make himself clean. Eliphaz used that truth as a weapon, and God uses it to bring us to Christ, in whom the unclean are washed and made righteous in his sight.

And they show us God’s own comfort, which is far greater than the friends’ consolations. He hears the lament of a suffering servant, he vindicated Job, and in his Son he has come close to every sorrow. When we sit beside someone who is suffering, the gentlest thing we can bring is that same patience and love.