Job 4

Eliphaz

¹Then Eliphaz the Temanite replied:

²“If someone ventures a word with you, will you be impatient?

But who can keep from speaking?

³Think how you have instructed many,

how you have strengthened feeble hands.

⁴Your words have supported those who stumbled;

you have strengthened faltering knees.

⁵But now trouble comes to you, and you are discouraged;

it strikes you, and you are dismayed.

⁶Should not your piety be your confidence

and your blameless ways your hope?

⁷“Consider now: Who, being innocent, has ever perished?

Where were the upright ever destroyed?

⁸As I have observed, those who plow evil

and those who sow trouble reap it.

⁹At the breath of God they perish;

at the blast of his anger they are no more.

¹⁰The lions may roar and growl,

yet the teeth of the great lions are broken.

¹¹The lion perishes for lack of prey,

and the cubs of the lioness are scattered.

¹²“A word was secretly brought to me,

my ears caught a whisper of it.

¹³Amid disquieting dreams in the night,

when deep sleep falls on people,

¹⁴fear and trembling seized me

and made all my bones shake.

¹⁵A spirit glided past my face,

and the hair on my body stood on end.

¹⁶It stopped,

but I could not tell what it was.

A form stood before my eyes,

and I heard a hushed voice:

¹⁷‘Can a mortal be more righteous than God?

Can even a strong man be more pure than his Maker?

¹⁸If God places no trust in his servants,

if he charges his angels with error,

¹⁹how much more those who live in houses of clay,

whose foundations are in the dust,

who are crushed more readily than a moth!

²⁰Between dawn and dusk they are broken to pieces;

unnoticed, they perish forever.

²¹Are not the cords of their tent pulled up,

so that they die without wisdom?’