Job 4:11

Job has lost his children and his wealth (Job 1), and then his health. His three friends came and sat with him in silence (Job 2:13), and when Job at last spoke, it was to curse the day he was born and long for the peace of death (Job 3). Eliphaz answers first. He is apparently the most respected of the three, and he begins with care, recalling Job’s past wisdom and strength (Job 4:2–6). Then, in verse 7, he comes to the heart of his case, and these five verses set it out.

Eliphaz is a Temanite, most likely from Teman, a city in Edom known for its wise men (Jeremiah 49:7). The book sets Job in the land of Uz, among the men of the east, a people renowned for wisdom. The wisdom of that world tied a person’s conduct closely to his lot in life, so that righteousness brought blessing, prosperity and protection, and wickedness brought judgment and calamity. Eliphaz speaks from inside that understanding, and he believes with all his heart that he is stating a law God has set in the world. He rests it on what he has seen with his own eyes and on a revelation he goes on to describe (Job 4:12–17). His speech fills two chapters and opens the long debate between Job and his friends that runs from Job 4 through Job 31.

We hear him with knowledge he lacks. The book opens by calling Job “perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil” (Job 1:1), and God himself says the same of him (Job 1:8). Job’s suffering came as a test of that integrity, in a scene hidden from everyone on earth. So the man Eliphaz is quietly accusing is himself the living answer to Eliphaz’s rule, and that irony runs under every line of these verses.

Eliphaz asks this sure that Job will search his memory and come back empty-handed. “Remember, I pray thee” is courteous, and it appeals both to Job’s own memory and to what everyone has observed. The question is rhetorical. It asserts what Eliphaz takes to be self-evident, and because it presumes agreement, anyone who answers otherwise has to prove his case. The second line, “or where were the righteous cut off?”, says the same again in other words, as Hebrew poetry often does, and the repetition presses his conviction home.

Each word carries weight. “Perished” is ʼâbad, which properly means to wander away or lose oneself, and so to be lost or to perish. Scripture uses it of lost animals and lost property as well as of people, and here it means a man’s complete ruin. The same verb comes back in verse 9, where the wicked perish by the blast of God, and in verse 11, where the old lion perisheth, and it ties the argument together: the innocent are kept, and the wicked perish. “Innocent” is nâqîy, clean, guiltless or exempt, the man free of guilt. “Righteous” here is yâshâr, straight or upright, the man whose life runs true to God’s ways. “Cut off” is kâchad, a verb that can mean to hide or conceal and, in its strong sense, to destroy or cut down. Here it is the end of a man’s life, family or prosperity, which is exactly what Job has just suffered.

Eliphaz means the question as a gentle accusation. If the innocent are always kept from ruin, then a ruined man must be guilty, and his way back is to confess his sin and seek God. This is the premise from which all three friends argue, and the rest of the book takes it apart. It contradicts what God has said of Job, and the man listening to it is the proof.

“Even as I have seen” grounds the argument in experience. Eliphaz speaks as a man who has watched this law at work through a lifetime, and that gives his words the ring of certainty.

He then draws on the farming that everyone around him knew. To plow is chârash, a verb meaning to engrave or plow, and used figuratively, as here, plowing stands for setting wrong things in motion. What is plowed is iniquity, ʼāwen, a word for trouble and sorrow as well as for wickedness. To sow is zâraʻ, to scatter seed, and figuratively to spread something abroad. What is sown is wickedness, ʻāmâl, which can mean toil, trouble or mischief, often of an oppressive kind. The two lines say nearly the same thing, and both describe people who go about evil on purpose. Then comes the harvest. To reap is qâtsar, a verb that means to cut short and so to harvest grain, and “reap the same” (qāṣar ʼōtô) means that the crop is of the same kind as the seed. Those who sow trouble harvest trouble.

This is a truth Scripture teaches again and again. “He that soweth iniquity shall reap vanity” (Proverbs 22:8). “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” (Hosea 8:7). Paul writes, “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap”, and goes on to set sowing to the flesh, which reaps corruption, beside sowing to the Spirit, which reaps life everlasting (Galatians 6:7–8). Sin has bitter results, both as the natural fruit of wrong choices and as the work of a just God who made his world with a moral order in it.

Eliphaz’s error lies in the direction he reads the principle. He starts from the harvest. Job’s ruin is plain to see, so Eliphaz reasons back to a seed of wickedness that he has to suppose. The principle tells us where sin leads, and the book of Job shows that sorrow can also grow from other roots than the sufferer’s own sin.

Verse 9 says what becomes of the people of verse 8. “Blast” is nᵉshâmâh, a word for breath, a puff of wind, the vital breath of a living thing, even divine inspiration. Here it is a hot, forceful blast, like a scorching wind, and it is enough to end them. They “perish”, the same ʼâbad as verse 7, and they are “consumed”, kâlâh, a verb that means to end, cease, be finished or consume. The wicked are brought to an end.

“The breath of his nostrils” speaks of God in human terms. God is Spirit, and speaking of his nostrils makes his anger near and real to us. The point is the ease of it, since a single breath from God is all it takes. Scripture speaks of his power this way elsewhere. “At the blast of the breath of thy nostrils” the foundations of the world were laid bare (Psalm 18:15), the promised King will slay the wicked “with the breath of his lips” (Isaiah 11:4), and the Lord will consume the lawless one “with the spirit of his mouth” and destroy him “with the brightness of his coming” (2 Thessalonians 2:8).

In verses 10 and 11 Eliphaz turns to a picture. In his world the lion was the great symbol of strength, ferocity and royal authority, and kings and rulers were often pictured as lions, sometimes with their tyranny in view. Lions lived in the dry lands around Teman, so his hearers would feel the force of it. Here the lions stand for the wicked in their power, the oppressors who prey on others.

Verse 10 piles up three ways of naming a lion and three marks of its power. The “roaring” is shᵉʼâgâh, the deep sound a lion makes to terrify its prey, and in the picture it stands for the boasts and threats of the powerful. The “fierce lion” is shachal, a word for the lion used in poetry, probably from a root meaning to roar, and its “voice” adds to the menace. The “young lions” (kᵉphirim) are active hunters, and their teeth are the real means of harm. One verb governs all three: “are broken”. It is nâthaʻ, in a passive form, “broken” or “torn out”. A lion whose teeth are torn out is harmless, however loudly it roars.

Verse 11 carries the picture to its end. The “old lion” (layish) “perisheth”, once more ʼâbad, “for lack of prey”. “Lack” is bᵉlîy, a word for failure or want, used to mean “without”, and “prey” is ṭereph, something torn, so prey or food, and elsewhere even a fresh leaf. The great beast dies because the supply it lived on has failed. Its strength always depended on what it could seize, and when God cuts that off, its strength fails with it. Then “the stout lion’s whelps are scattered abroad”. “Stout lion” is lâbîyʼ, and “whelps” is bên, the ordinary word for “son”, so these are the lion’s sons. The judgment reaches past the old lion to its offspring and to all that would carry on its power.

The Psalms pray in the same images. “Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth” (Psalm 58:6). “Thou hast broken the teeth of the ungodly” (Psalm 3:7). “Break thou the arm of the wicked and the evil man” (Psalm 10:15). The wicked man digs a pit and falls into it himself, and his mischief returns on his own head (Psalm 7:15–16). The ungodly are like chaff that the wind drives away, and “the way of the ungodly shall perish” (Psalm 1:4–6). “As the whirlwind passeth, so is the wicked no more” (Proverbs 10:25), and “the destruction of the transgressors and of the sinners shall be together” (Isaiah 1:28). Psalm 73 looks from the prosperity of the wicked to their end. God sees those who devour others, he defends the oppressed, and in his own time he breaks the strength of the oppressor.

Eliphaz spoke true things about God and drew a false verdict about Job. Sowing and reaping are real, God does judge the wicked, and the power of oppressors is broken in the end. Wisdom says, “Behold, the righteous shall be recompensed in the earth: much more the wicked and the sinner” (Proverbs 11:31). Eliphaz takes this measure of truth about how God governs his world and hardens it into a law that holds in every single case. Then he reads it backwards, from Job’s suffering to Job’s sin.

The rest of Scripture makes room for what his rule forbids. A psalmist watched the wicked prosper while he himself was plagued all day long (Psalm 73:3–14), and Jeremiah asked the LORD, “Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?” (Jeremiah 12:1). When the disciples asked whose sin had made a man blind, Jesus answered, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (John 9:1–3). In a fallen world suffering comes for many reasons, among them spiritual warfare, the testing of faith, the refining of character and the showing of God’s glory. Paul writes that “tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope” (Romans 5:3–5). God’s thoughts and ways are higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8–9), and when he answers Job out of the whirlwind (Job 38–41), he shows a wisdom far above anything the friends had grasped.

Job 1 has already told us why Job suffered: his integrity was being tested. At the end of the book the LORD says to Eliphaz, “My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath” (Job 42:7). Eliphaz’s confident system broke down on the very case it was meant to explain.

Eliphaz asks, “who ever perished, being innocent?” and the gospel answers with one name. Jesus, “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), was wholly innocent, and he was “cut off out of the land of the living” (Isaiah 53:8). He died for the sins of others: “For 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). His death answers Eliphaz’s premise once for all, and his resurrection is the final vindication of the righteous.

Verse 8 finds its fulfilment in him too. Sinless himself, he reaped the harvest of our sin on the cross, where the sentence Paul names fell on him: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23). By his resurrection he opened a new harvest of forgiveness and life. Those who belong to him now sow to the Spirit, as Paul says in Galatians, and in them the righteousness of the law is fulfilled (Romans 8:4).

The blast of verse 9 points to him as well. He bore God’s wrath against sin on the cross, so that “we shall be saved from wrath through him” (Romans 5:9). The breath of God that ends the wicked is also the breath of life, and the risen Jesus “breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost” (John 20:22). At his coming the same Lord will destroy the lawless one by the breath of his mouth.

The lions of verse 10 find their great example in the devil, who “as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8). At the cross Christ “spoiled principalities and powers” (Colossians 2:15), and for those united to him by faith the adversary’s teeth are broken, with his power to accuse and condemn taken away. “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26).

And where the old lion’s whelps are scattered, Christ gathers his own. He is “the Lion of the tribe of Judah” (Revelation 5:5), and he conquered by giving himself as the sacrifice for sin. He feeds his people as the bread of life (John 6:35) and gives them living water (John 4:10), so that his own are fed for ever, where the old lion starved for lack of prey.

These verses give us real comfort about God. He sees the plowing and sowing of the wicked, his breath ends them, and the teeth of every oppressor will be broken in his time. Those who suffer under cruelty have his word that the lion’s strength is temporary.

They also show how true words can wound. Eliphaz came to comfort his friend, and he arrived with a theory that had already decided Job was guilty. The book that records his speech also records God’s verdict on it, and it teaches that compassion sits with the sufferer in humility, with prayer and steady presence, trusting God’s justice and goodness even where his reasons are hidden. The principle of sowing and reaping that Eliphaz misused still speaks to our own lives, where it calls us to look at what we ourselves are sowing, while the judging of other people’s sorrows belongs to God.

Above all, the passage shows us a God whose justice is sure and whose ways are higher than ours, who let his own innocent Son be cut off so that the guilty might live.