Bible Commentaries

Job 22:5. Is not thy wickedness great? This speech of Eliphaz is cruel, and very much embittered; for it was mere suspicion that Job had robbed the widow, and stripped the naked. Job replies to it more fully in chap. 29., especially with regard to the widow and the destitute.

Job 22:7. Thou hast not given water to the weary, to the traveller, when he and his beasts were fainting with thirst, in a dry and parched land. Withholding water in such a case was reckoned a cruelty of the worst description.

Job 22:15-16. Wicked men—whose foundation was overflown with a flood, in the days of Noah. The general succession of biblical critics are agreed on this reference, which is more fully noted in Job 26:5.

Job 22:30. He shall deliver the island of the innocent. What island? The Hebrew is obscure. The LXX read, “He shall deliver the innocent, and save thee because of the purity of thy hands.” Eliphaz thought that Job might yet regain perfect rectitude.

REFLECTIONS.

“My goodness extendeth not unto thee, but to the saints that are in the earth.” Eliphaz, by pleading for the poor, cuts Job to the quick; for the aged and the sick have a right to bread, the earth being the Lord’s. Religion is love, and charity is the first fruit of love. But before he pierced his friend with those deep wounds, he should have been sure that he was guilty. The angels are afraid of railing accusations.

The next argument of Eliphaz is founded on the deluge of Noah, which happened when the earth was in the greatest prosperity. “Hast thou marked the way of wicked men,—whose foundations were overflown with the flood?” Oh what a time to an atheistical and epicurean world! They scoffed at the ark, and filled up the measure of their sins. The finest day turned black with rain and tempest, never known before, and the rising tides on gaining the hills washed them away, blaspheming against God, and cursing their seducers to atheism and crimes. Take heed, oh infidel christian age, for those thunderbolts of Jehovah are for the warning of posterity. From these awful characters of God, in his longsuffering goodness in the days of Noah, in his great mercy and faithfulness to that patriarch, and in his righteous vengeance on the wicked, we may learn what are his moral perfections, as discovered in the government of the world. Let us therefore aim at a life conformable to his laws, to become acquainted with the glorious person and offices of Christ, and with his work of regeneration: “for this is life eternal, to know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.”