Job 15 explained: Eliphaz Says the Wicked Always Suffer

Your words are hot air (vv. 1-6)

Eliphaz calls Job's speeches empty wind and says they weaken reverence for God, because if good people can suffer like this, why would anyone stay devout? He claims Job's own words prove his guilt.

Who do you think you are? (vv. 7-13)

He mocks Job as if Job claimed to be the first human ever born or to sit in God's private council, and says the wisdom of older men backs the friends. The gentle words Job is rejecting most likely mean the friends' own advice, which Eliphaz presents as comfort from God.

No human is pure (vv. 14-16)

Eliphaz repeats an idea from his first speech: if God does not fully trust even heavenly beings, no mortal can be clean before him. He borrows Job's phrase "born of woman" from the previous chapter to turn it back on him.

The wicked live in dread (vv. 17-26)

Drawing on his own experience and on wisdom passed down from ancestors, he says a wicked person is haunted by fear even when life looks good. This answers Job's claim that robbers often prosper, and pictures the wicked as a soldier charging at God behind a shield.

Their prosperity withers (vv. 27-35)

With images of a well-fed body, ruined towns, scorched branches and a vine dropping unripe grapes, he says the wicked lose their wealth and children and die early. The fire and lost offspring sound like pointed hints at Job's own losses in chapter 1.

Key verse: Job 15:20

Where Christians differ

Christians differ on how much of Eliphaz's teaching to accept as true in itself, since lines like verse 14 echo other parts of the Bible, yet at the book's end God says the friends did not speak rightly about him.

Something to think about

When someone's suffering doesn't fit your explanation of how the world works, which do you tend to question first: the explanation or the person?