Job 4 / 42
- 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 are destroyed; at the blast of his anger they perish.
- 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 men,
- 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 a 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?'