Job 4:1-21
4 And Eliphaz the Temanite answered
2 “Shall we try a word to you? you will be impatient,but who can keep in words?
3 Here you have been schooling manyand nerving slack hands;
4 Your words set a stumbling man on his feetand you braced failing knees;
5 Now that it comes to you you are impatient;it touches you and you are disconcerted.
6 Is not your piety your relianceand your conscientious life your hope?
7 Remember: what innocent man has perished,where were upright men annihilated?
8 * As I see it, those who plow villainyand sow trouble reap it;
9 They perish by God’s breath,are made an end of by the air from his nostrils.
10 The lion’s roar, the voice of the king of beasts,and the two-year-old lion’s teeth, are broken,
11 The great lion perishes for lack of prey,and the lioness’s cubs lose touch with each other.
12 * “And a word once stole upon me,my ear took in a whisper of it,
13 In thoughts brought by night visionswhen trances fall on men.
14 * A terror beset me, and a quaking,and terrified every bone in me,
15 And a breeze ran over my face,made the hair on my flesh prickle up:
16 ** It stood there, but I could not make out what it looked like;There was a form before my eyes,I heard a hushed voice:
17 ‘Is a human being to be more in the right than God,a man to be cleaner than his Maker?
18 * Why, he does not trust his own servantsand charges his angels with frailties;
19 How much more those who inhabit houses of clay!such as have their foundations on the earthand are beaten down before a moth,
20 Between morning and evening they are shattered,are lost for all time without anyone’s noticing it.
21 A fiber pulls out within themand they die unaccountably.’
Footnotes
^ 4:8 Or have seen, those
^ 4:12 Lit. a word stole
^ 4:14 Lit. terrified the manyness of my bones
^ 4:16 Lit. it stood, but
^ 4:16 Lit. heard a silence and voice
^ 4:18 (last half) Unc.
