1   Then Eliphaz the Temanite began:

2   If one ventures to speak with you, will you lose patience?
For who could hold his tongue any longer?
3   Think how once you encouraged those who faltered,
how you braced feeble arms,
4   how a word from you upheld the stumblers
and put strength into weak knees.
5   But now that adversity comes upon you, you lose patience;
it touches you, and you are unmanned.
6   Is your religion no comfort to you?
Does your blameless life give you no hope?
7   For consider, what innocent man has ever perished?
Where have you seen the upright destroyed?
8   This I know, that those who plough mischief and sow trouble
reap as they have sown;
9   they perish at the blast of God
and are shrivelled by the breath of his nostrils.

First cycle of speeches
10   The roar of the lion, the whimpering of his cubs, fall silent;
the teeth of the young lions are broken;
11   the lion perishes for lack of prey
and the whelps of the lioness are abandoned.


12   A word stole into my ears,
and they caught the whisper of it;
13   in the anxious visions of the night,
when a man sinks into deepest sleep,
14   terror seized me and shuddering;
the trembling of my body frightened me.
15   A wind brushed my face
and made the hairs bristle on my flesh;
16   and a figure stood there whose shape I could not discern,
an apparition loomed before me,
and I heard the sound of a low voice:
17   ‘Can mortal man be more righteous than God,
or the creature purer than his Maker?
18   If God mistrusts his own servants
and finds his messengers at fault,
19   how much more those that dwell in houses whose walls are clay,
whose foundations are dust,
which can be crushed like a bird's nest
20   or torn down between dawn and dark,
how much more shall such men perish outright and unheeded,
21    ^note die, without ever finding wisdom?’

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