Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Job · About this commentary
Eliphaz: Happy Is the Man God Corrects
Job 5:17-27
17 “Behold, happy is the man whom God corrects. Therefore do not despise the chastening of the Almighty. · WEB
The offer is a complete recovery on terms, and it fails because it requires the sufferer to accept a diagnosis that is not true.
The speech ends where the friends will keep ending: with a promise, conditional on something Job is presumed to need.
Behold, happy is the man whom God corrects. Therefore do not despise the chastening of the Almighty Job 5:17. Read on its own it is sound, and Scripture says the same elsewhere Proverbs 3:11–12. Suffering can be instruction, and refusing to learn from it wastes it.
What makes it fail here is a premise the reader can check and Eliphaz cannot. Correction implies a fault to correct, and the second council said that Job was ruined without cause Job 2:3. The offer requires Job to accept a diagnosis that God himself has already rejected.
The picture that follows is generous and specific. God wounds and binds up Job 5:18; deliverance in six troubles and in seven; safety in famine, in war, from the scourge of the tongue Job 5:19–21. Then the promises turn domestic, and they are the cruellest thing in the chapter without meaning to be.
You will know that your tent is in peace. You will visit your fold, and will miss nothing. And: you will know also that your offspring will be great Job 5:24–25.
Every one of those was true of Job three chapters ago. The flock, the household, the children — he had exactly the life being offered to him as a reward for repentance, and he had it while he was blameless. The promise on offer is a description of what he has lost, held out as though he had never had it.
The last picture is a good death: coming to your grave in a full age, like a shock of grain comes in its season Job 5:26. A harvest gathered when ripe, which is the opposite of ten young people under a collapsed roof.
And the speech closes on a claim of method. Behold, we have researched it. It is so. Hear it, and know it for your good Job 5:27.
The plural is the tell. He is not offering his own conviction but the settled findings of a group, and he presents them as verified. That confidence is what God will name at the end of the book when he says these men have not spoken of him rightly Job 42:7 — not that they were unfeeling, but that they were sure.
settled What this mark means