Job 4

New International Version

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

New International Version