Job 4:8

8. Even as ( so far as)… they that plough iniquity A principle profoundly true, everywhere a matter of observation, and often expressed in a like figure. The error of Eliphaz is, that he perverts it. He makes great suffering an evidence and a measure of personal sin. He intimates that all suffering is the harvest of wrong doing, which was not true, for instance, in the case of Job. He is right when he says that all sin will sooner or later be punished; he is wrong when he reasons that the individual can have no suffering that does not spring from his own sins. Illustrations abound. Thus AEschylus:

Nothing worse,

In whatever cause, than impious fellowship;

Nothing of good is reaped: for when the field

Is sown with wrong, the ripen’d fruit is death. Septem, 602.

Cicero cites a Latin proverb, “As you sow you will reap.” De Orat., 2:94. The Institutes of Manu teach the Hindu that all diseases are the punishment of past offences, and they assign a particular disease to each particular crime. Chap. 11. The teaching of the sacred books of the Chinese would, perhaps, be more readily accepted by Eliphaz: “The good or evil which Heaven sends to men depends upon their virtue.” Shoo-King, IV, ch. 4. Striking instances might be adduced in illustration of the thought that to the very field where iniquity was perpetrated retribution often comes. The grandson of Ahab is himself slain by treachery in the portion of the field of Naboth the Jezreelite. 2 Kings 9:25-26. Hoffman was the first to remark, that, according to Acts 1:18, Judas must have met his end in the very field he bought with the price of a Saviour’s blood. All sin is seminal. Seed of every kind carries within itself the germ, and as some say the form, of the future growth. Sin is essentially retributive. It embodies the elements of retribution. Change of place and lapse of time do not affect their vitality. “Sin ( peccasse) is the first and greatest punishment of those that sin. Nor is any wickedness unpunished: since in wickedness is the punishment of wickedness.” SENECA, Epist, 97.