Job
4
- Then Eliphaz the Temanite replied:
- "If someone ventures a word with you,
will you be impatient? But who can keep from speaking ?
- Think how you have instructed many, how
you have strengthened feeble hands.
- Your words have supported those who stumbled;
you have strengthened faltering knees.
- But now trouble comes to you, and you are
discouraged; it strikes you, and you are dismayed.
- Should not your piety be your confidence
and your blameless ways your hope ?
- "Consider now: Who, being innocent,
has ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed ?
- As I have observed, those who plow evil
and those who sow trouble reap it.
- At the breath of God they are destroyed;
at the blast of his anger they perish.
- The lions may roar and growl, yet the teeth
of the great lions are broken.
- The lion perishes for lack of prey, and
the cubs of the lioness are scattered.
- "A word was secretly brought to me,
my ears caught a whisper of it.
- Amid disquieting dreams in the night, when
deep sleep falls on men,
- fear and trembling seized me and made all
my bones shake.
- A spirit glided past my face, and the hair
on my body stood on end.
- It stopped, but I could not tell what it
was. A form stood before my eyes, and I heard a hushed voice:
- 'Can a mortal be more righteous than God?
Can a man be more pure than his Maker ?
- If God places no trust in his servants,
if he charges his angels with error,
- how much more those who live in houses of
clay, whose foundations are in the dust, who are crushed more readily than
a moth !
- Between dawn and dusk they are broken to
pieces; unnoticed, they perish forever.
- Are not the cords of their tent pulled up,
so that they die without wisdom ?'
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