Job 4

¹ Eliphaz of Teman spoke next. He said:

² If one should address a word to you, will you endure it? Yet who can keep silent?

³ Many another, once, you schooled, giving strength to feeble hands;

⁴ your words set right whoever wavered, and strengthened every failing knee.

⁵ And now your turn has come, and you lose patience too; now it touches you, and you are overwhelmed.

⁶ Does not your piety give you confidence, your blameless life not give you hope?

⁷ Can you recall a guiltless man that perished, or have you ever seen good men brought to nothing?

⁸ I speak of what I know: those who plough iniquity and sow the seeds of grief reap a harvest of the same kind.

⁹ A breath from God will bring them to destruction, a blast of his anger will wipe them out.

¹⁰ The lion’s roar, his savage growls, like the fangs of lion cubs are broken off.

¹¹ For lack of prey the lion dies at last, and the whelps of his lioness are scattered.

¹² Now, I have had a secret revelation, a whisper has come to my ears.

¹³ At the hour when dreams master the mind, and slumber lies heavy on man,

¹⁴ a shiver of horror ran through me, and my bones quaked with fear.

¹⁵ A breath slid over my face, the hairs of my body bristled.

¹⁶ Someone stood there – I could not see his face, but the form remained before me. Silence – and then I heard a Voice,

¹⁷ ‘Was ever any man found blameless in the presence of God, or faultless in the presence of his Maker?

¹⁸ In his own servants, God puts no trust, and even with his angels he has fault to find.

¹⁹ What then of those who live in houses of clay, who are founded on dust? They are crushed as easily as a moth,

²⁰ one day is enough to grind them to powder. They vanish for ever, and no one remembers them.

²¹ Their tent-peg is snatched from them, and they die for lack of wisdom.’