Eliphaz: The Innocent Prosper

¹ Then Eliphaz the Temanite replied:

² “If one ventures a word with you, will you be wearied?

Yet who can keep from speaking?

³ Surely you have instructed many,

and have strengthened their feeble hands.

⁴ Your words have steadied those who stumbled;

you have braced the knees that were buckling.

⁵ But now trouble has come upon you, and you are weary.

It strikes you, and you are dismayed.

⁶ Is your reverence not your confidence,

and the uprightness of your ways your hope?

⁷ Consider now, I plead:

Who, being innocent, has ever perished?

Or where have the upright been destroyed?

⁸ As I have observed, those who plow iniquity

and those who sow trouble reap the same.

⁹ By the breath of God they perish,

and by the blast of His anger they are consumed.

¹⁰ The lion may roar, and the fierce lion may growl,

yet the teeth of the young lions are broken.

¹¹ The old lion perishes for lack of prey,

and the cubs of the lioness are scattered.

¹² Now a word came to me secretly;^*

my ears caught^* a whisper of it.

¹³ In disquieting visions in the night,

when deep sleep^* falls on men,

¹⁴ fear and trembling came over me

and made all my bones shudder.

¹⁵ Then a spirit^* glided past my face,

and the hair on my body bristled.

¹⁶ It stood still,

but I could not discern^* its appearance;

a form loomed before my eyes,

and I heard a whispering voice:

¹⁷ ‘Can a mortal be more righteous than God,

or a man more pure than his Maker?

¹⁸ If God puts no trust in His servants,^*

and He charges His angels with error,

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

whose foundations are in the dust,

who can be crushed like a moth!

²⁰ They are smashed to pieces from dawn to dusk;

unnoticed, they perish forever.

²¹ Are not their tent cords^* pulled up,^*

so that they die without wisdom?’