Job 4:17

Second strophe The purport of the revelation whose faintest whisper Eliphaz heard, Job 4:17-21. Job 4:17; Job 4:17 contains the thesis which the subsequent portion of the disclosure illustrates.

17. Man Geber, the mighty one, forms a climax with mortal man, ( enosh,) sickly man; the latter being a collective word for the entire race. The root of this word man ( enosh) involves moral disease, as in Jeremiah 17:9, where a participial form ( anush) is translated desperately wicked.

More just than God The Septuagint, ( εναντιον ,) Rosenmuller, and the Germans generally, render מן , min, before God.

Thus, “Is a mortal just before God? Is a man pure before his Maker?” They base their translation on the objection of Codurcus, that no one was ever so foolish as to suppose that man is more just than God. The Hebrew, however, will admit also of the rendering of the text, which is that of the Chaldee and the Vulgate more just than God. This view Conant judiciously defends: “Whoever censures the course of Providence by complaining of his own lot (as Job had done) claims to be more just than God, the equity of whose government he thus arraigns.” With this view agrees that of Hengstenberg. Each complaint over too hard a fate is a pretension that we may be more just than God; that we may have received less from God than we have given him. Such pretensions Job had made by his murmurings against the divine dispensations. These pretensions are refuted in what follows by adducing the sinfulness of our race. Compare H. Melville’s sermon, ( in loc.,) “The Spectre’s Sermon a Truism.”