Scripture Daily

Context No. 202 of 4322 · Job

Context · Reflection

Job 15:17-35: in context

17“I will show you, listen to me; that which I have seen I will declare 18(which wise men have told by their fathers, and have not hidden it; 19to whom alone the land was given, and no stranger passed among them): 20the wicked man writhes in pain all his days, even the number of years that are laid up for the oppressor. 21A sound of terrors is in his ears. In prosperity the destroyer will come on him. 22He doesn’t believe that he will return out of darkness. He is waited for by the sword. 23He wanders abroad for bread, saying, ‘Where is it?’ He knows that the day of darkness is ready at his hand. 24Distress and anguish make him afraid. They prevail against him, as a king ready to the battle. 25Because he has stretched out his hand against God, and behaves himself proudly against the Almighty, 26he runs at him with a stiff neck, with the thick shields of his bucklers, 27because he has covered his face with his fatness, and gathered fat on his thighs. 28He has lived in desolate cities, in houses which no one inhabited, which were ready to become heaps. 29He will not be rich, neither will his substance continue, neither will their possessions be extended on the earth. 30He will not depart out of darkness. The flame will dry up his branches. He will go away by the breath of God’s mouth. 31Let him not trust in emptiness, deceiving himself, for emptiness will be his reward. 32It will be accomplished before his time. His branch will not be green. 33He will shake off his unripe grape as the vine, and will cast off his flower as the olive tree. 34For the company of the godless will be barren, and fire will consume the tents of bribery. 35They conceive mischief and produce iniquity. Their heart prepares deceit.”

Eliphaz is Job's oldest friend and the first to speak. This is his second speech, and by now his patience has gone. This passage is his account of how the world works, delivered to a man sitting in ashes who has lost his children.

He opens by claiming pedigree for the teaching: what I have seen I will declare, what wise men have told, handed down from their fathers, from a time when no stranger passed among them. Untainted tradition. Then the doctrine: the wicked man writhes in pain all his days, dread sounds are in his ears, in prosperity the destroyer comes upon him. He does not believe he will return from darkness. He wanders abroad for bread, asking where is it.

The description is vivid and long and completely wrong about the man in front of him. Eliphaz is describing the inner life of the wicked, and every line is a portrait of Job's current condition, offered as evidence of what Job must be. His theology has no category for an innocent man in ruins, so the ruin becomes the proof. He is not lying and he is not cruel by intention. He is applying a rule that fits most cases to the one case it does not fit. Where am I applying something generally true to a person whose situation it does not describe?

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