Job 22:30

30. The island of אי נקי , not guiltless. This Hebrew word i ( not) our translators altogether mistook. Here it has a negative sense, as in I-chabod, no-glory. The verse should read

He shall deliver him that is not guiltless,

And he shall be saved by the pureness of thy hands.

Our own purity of life under God becomes a powerful agency for the conversion of others. (Psalms 51:13.) So little do we know of our spiritual needs, that we are quite as ready to exhort others as to care for ourselves. At the very moment that these words of noble counsel fell from his lips, Eliphaz needed the prayers of some upright man, which Job himself (Job 42:8) finally offered. The reader cannot but be touched with a feeling of regret as this high-minded son of Teman passes from the scene, commissioned as he was from God to deliver an exhortation that for beauty of sentiment, purity of thought, and depth of spiritual knowledge, is without compare in the Old Testament Scriptures. He stands forth the lofty peer of Balaam, free (the reader may trust) from his failing; the only one of “THE THREE,” at all worthy to grapple with Job in the solution of the dark problem of evil. In argument, however, he lacked self-control, and allowed himself to follow his friends in vituperation and to surpass them in calumny. Eliphaz spoke of God “the thing that was not right,” by perverting the facts of human life, and by setting forth an imperfect retribution, as worthy of the righteousness of God.