Job 4:21

21. Excellency יתר . Among its significations is also that of a cord, for instance, of a tent. The language is now generally regarded as figurative. The mysterious soul holds up the body as a cord does the tent: if that be torn away ( נסע ) the body dies, just as a tent, with its cord broken, falls to the earth. Dillmann happily renders the passage. “Is it not so, if their cord in them is torn away they die?” Renan observes, “The image is a familiar one among the Semitic races for expressing death. The body is compared to a tent, the soul to the cord which sustains the tent.” Isaiah 38:12. “ In them is neither superfluous nor awkward, (against OLS.,) since it is intended to say that their duration of life falls in all at once, like a tent when that which in them corresponds to the cord of a tent (that is, the soul) is drawn away from it.” Delitzsch. If we keep in view that there is nothing so excellent as the soul, and that the Scriptures sometimes connect with its removal the idea of force, we may retain the word excellency, and translate, Is not their excellency (that is) in them torn away? The spirit makes more definite the excellency to which he refers by adding in them.

Even without wisdom Literally, and not in wisdom. In folly they lived, in folly they died. The lessons ever before them the vanity of human life, the weakness and sinfulness of our mortal state, the relations of perishable man to an imperishable God, the necessity of some kind of preparation for another life they had not heeded. The race of man dies without wisdom! Thus with a sense of pain closes this remarkable vision of Eliphaz. To him, one of nature’s noble children, was granted a revelation which was afterward denied to the more enlightened brothers of Dives. The vision impressed upon him these momentous truths: 1. The existence of a God; 2. That God was the maker of Man 1:3 . The impurity of the human heart; 4. The possible existence of unembodied spirit, which must have suggested the immortality of his own soul. The painful question cannot fail to arise, whether this sage of the desert yielded his soul to this divine call of mercy? Did it exert a reforming power over his inner nature, guiding its out-goings to Him who should afterward come? or did he sink down into the vast deep of moralizings that encompass every thoughtful being? Literature every where abounds in profound reflections upon this weird and ephemeral life of ours. Lamentably do they fail to lead the soul to the pursuit of Him who is himself wisdom and righteousness.