and life to the bitter in soul? (iii. 20.)
And now Job’s friends are shaken out of their composure. They have been meditating on Job’s calamity, which is so difficult to reconcile with their previous high opinion of him; for they are the representatives of orthodoxy, of the orthodoxy which received the high sanction of the Deuteronomic Tōra, and which connected obedience and prosperity, disobedience and adversity. Still it is not a stiff, extreme orthodoxy which the three friends maintain: calamity, as Eliphaz represents their opinion (v. 17; comp. 27), is not always a punishment, but sometimes a discipline. The question therefore has forced itself upon them, Has the calamity which has befallen our friend a judicial or a disciplinary, educational purpose? At first they may have leaned to the latter alternative; but Job’s violent outburst, so unbecoming in a devout man, too clearly pointed in the other direction, and already they are beginning to lose their first hopeful view of his case. One after another they debate the question with Job (Eliphaz as the depositary of a revelation, Bildad as the advocate of tradition, Zophar as the man of common sense)—the question of the cause and meaning of his sufferings, which means further, since Job is not merely an individual but a type,[[9]] the question of the vast mass of evil in the world. This main part of the work falls into three cycles of dialogue (ch. iv.-xiv., ch. xv.-xxi., ch. xxii.-xxxi.) In each there are three pairs of speeches, belonging respectively to Eliphaz and Job, Bildad and Job, Zophar and Job. Eliphaz opens the debate as being the oldest (xv. 10) and the most experienced of Job’s friends. There is much to admire in his speech; if he could only have adopted the tone of a sympathising friend and not of a lecturer—
Behold, this have we searched out; so it is;
hear thou it, and know it for thyself (v. 27)—
he might have been useful to the sufferer. At the very beginning he strikes a wrong key-note, expressing surprise at his friend’s utter loss of self-control (vattibbāhēl, ver. 4), and couching it in such a form that one would really suppose Job to have broken down at the first taste of trouble. The view of the speaker seems to be that, since Job is really a pious man (for Eliphaz does not as yet presume to doubt this), he ought to feel sure that his trouble would not proceed beyond a certain point. ‘Bethink thee now,’ says Eliphaz, ‘who ever perished, being innocent?’ (iv. 7.) Some amount of trouble even a good man may fairly expect; though far from ‘ploughing iniquity,’ he is too weak not to fall into sins of error, and all sin involves suffering; or, as Eliphaz puts it concisely—
Man is born to trouble,
as the sparks fly upward (v. 7).
Assuming without any reason that Job would question this, Eliphaz enforces the moral imperfection of human nature by an appeal to revelation—not, of course, to Moses and the prophets, but to a vision like those of the patriarchs in Genesis. Of the circumstances of the revelation a most graphic account is given.
And to myself came an oracle stealthily,
and mine ear received the whisper thereof,