Job 6

JOB’S FIRST REPLY.

The response of Job contains a touching appeal to man, (chap. 6,) and a much more touching one to God, (chapter 7,) appeals which Ewald calls the “monologue of despair.” His miserable condition is such that he leaves for the present the consideration of the cold didactic argument of Eliphaz. He defends his lamentation, (chap. 3,) as the natural outburst of a heart broken by sorrow, but admits that he had spoken imprudently. Instead of the balm of friendship and the life-giving streams of sympathy, he finds a captious disposition to take advantage of his words of sorrow that had been pressed out of a bleeding heart. In his appeal to God he pleads the shortness and vanity of life, the inexorableness of death, his own insignificance, as reasons for release from the burden of the divine visitations. What there is of argument, as respects the reasoning of Eliphaz, in these impassioned remonstrances of Job, is, that his sufferings are vastly in excess of those that legitimately spring from man’s naturally sinful estate; and as he is conscious of his innocence of all overt guilt, there still is wanting a solution for his extreme sufferings. Eliphaz has represented premature death to be the punishment of the wicked; on the contrary, Job declares death to be his only hope a declaration that conduces to the entanglement which afterward becomes inextricable, so far as the four disputants are concerned. This surging sea of doubt, foreboding, wailing, and despair, which again quite overwhelms Job, casts up some unmistakable pearls of great beauty, among which is the prolonged description of false and treacherous friendship.