Bible Commentaries
Job 15

Verses 1-35

Job 15:2 . Fill his belly with the east wind; a hot dry wind, the least favourable to vegetation. This is an angry figure of speech, equivalent to a declaration that Job’s defence was a mere storm of words. Instead of being a suppliant for mercy, he accuses him of unfounded confidence.

Job 15:5 . Thy mouth uttereth thine iniquity; or blasphemy against the hand that afflicted so good a man unjustly.

Job 15:7 . Art thou the first man? Wert thou born before Adam, or begotten before the hills? Shultens. Eliphaz here cautions Job to reason with greater deference and modesty; for he had received traditions from the sons of Noah, who walked the earth as heirs, and no stranger passed among them.

Job 15:11 . Are the consolations of God small with thee? The spiritual consolations of peace, joy and hope; for he had no temporal consolations. Our translators very much follow Montanus, who asks, “Are not the consolations of God small with thee?” Is there any secret thing with thee? Hebrews a secret word, viz. of confession of some secret sin which thy pride will not let thee utter, And he intimates that if Job did not confess this sin, he should be as an exile and a vagabond upon the earth: Job 15:20-21.

Job 15:15 . He putteth no trust in his saints, or in angels, as most of the ancient authorities read. Bede has here a good remark to preachers in taking texts; that these are not the words of Job, nor of other inspired men, but of Eliphaz. Yea the ethereal heavens are not clean, compared with him, a pure, an invisible, and eternal mind.

REFLECTIONS.

In this battle of argument we are now come to sharp words and hard blows. Eliphaz’s reproaches are good in themselves, had they been applied to another person, and made the reprehensions of a criminal case, No man should be treated as a culprit, till he is first found guilty. He presumes that Job had cast off all fear, had ceased from prayer, and was hardening his soul in specious pleas of innocence, which implicated the divine Being as unjust, in the tremendous character of his visitations. He claims the opinion and support of all holy patriarchs, equal in age to the father of Job, as coinciding with him in the severity of his censures.

Eliphaz, who was oldest of the three, presumes farther, that Job must, like other wicked men, have a dreadful sound in his ears, for his great sin in accounting himself holy before God, when the heavens are not clean in his sight. And dreadful is the portrait he draws of a character loaded with crimes, and seeking to hide himself from the eyes of God and of man. And who would not weep at the sight of a man consummately wicked; a man, who has gone the round of crimes in blasphemy, seduction, and fraud. Yet he is suffered to live, a terror to himself, and a man from whom the public hide their faces. He shall not depart out of darkness, and the flames shall dry up his branches.