Job 4

Job 4 opens the first cycle of debate between Job and his three friends (chapters 4–14). After Job laments in Job 3, cursing the day of his birth, Eliphaz is the first to speak. His opening speech continues through Job 5.

Outline

• Verses 1–6: Eliphaz observes that Job once instructed many and upheld the weak, yet now that the same trouble has come upon him, he is dismayed. He then asks whether Job's fear of God is not his confidence, and the uprightness of his ways his hope.
• Verses 7–11: He asks who has ever perished being innocent. Those who plow iniquity and sow wickedness reap the same, he says, and they perish by the breath of God. He compares them to lions whose teeth are broken and who perish for lack of prey.
• Verses 12–16: He recounts a vision he saw in the night, during deep sleep. A spirit passed before him; he trembled, and the hair of his flesh stood up. Before a form he could not discern, he heard a voice in the silence.
• Verses 17–21: The voice declares that a man cannot be more just than God or more pure than his Maker. God puts no trust even in His servants and His angels; how much less in those who dwell in houses of clay, who are destroyed between morning and evening and die without wisdom.

Key Verses

• Job 4:7: "Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being innocent? or where were the righteous cut off?" (KJV). Here Eliphaz's reasoning, which treats suffering as the consequence of sin, first comes to light.
• Job 4:8: "Even as I have seen, they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same." This proverb about reaping what one sows resembles expressions in Hosea 8:7 and Galatians 6:8–10.
• Job 4:17: "Shall mortal man be more just than God? shall a man be more pure than his maker?" This question recurs several times in the later debate.

People and Places

• Job: The suffering protagonist of the book. In this chapter he is the one being addressed.
• Eliphaz: One of Job's three friends. He speaks first in each of the three cycles of debate.
• Teman: Eliphaz's place of origin, a region of Edom. Jeremiah 49:7 mentions it in connection with wisdom.

Interpretive Considerations

• At the end of the book, God says that the friends have not spoken of Him what is right, as Job has (Job 42:7–10). For this reason, interpreters broadly agree that the words of this chapter should not be read straightforwardly as divine teaching. Many, however, hold that Eliphaz wrongly applied to Job's situation statements that are true in themselves, such as verse 17. In the New Testament, Paul also quotes Eliphaz's words (Job 5:13) in 1 Corinthians 3:19.
• Interpretations of the night vision differ. Some regard it as a revelation from God, while others see it as a personal experience of Eliphaz's of uncertain origin. The text does not identify the spirit.
• Some interpreters connect verse 18 with the fall of the angels, but the text does not refer to any specific event.
• The reasoning that treats suffering as the direct result of sin is often read alongside John 9:1–3, where Jesus rejects such a view regarding a man born blind.

In the Korean Church

In sermons on suffering and comfort, Eliphaz's words are frequently cited as an example of "false comfort" that is quick to assign a cause to a sufferer's pain.