Job 15 Bible study: Your own mouth condemns you

Every word of this chapter after its first verse is Eliphaz's: "Then Eliphaz the Temanite answered" (15:1). It is his second speech; his first ran through chapters 4-5, and Job has just answered Zophar (chapters 12-14). He opens with questions about Job's words: "Should a wise man answer with vain knowledge, and fill himself with the east wind?" (15:2), and "Should he reason with unprofitable talk, or with speeches with which he can do no good?" (15:3). Then he speaks straight to Job: "Yes, you do away with fear, and hinder devotion before God" (15:4) (tap fear), "For your iniquity teaches your mouth" (15:5), and "Your own mouth condemns you, and not I. Yes, your own lips testify against you" (15:6) (tap condemns). Keep in mind whose words these are. At the end of the book the LORD says to Eliphaz, "My wrath is kindled against you, and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job has" (42:7). The book doesn't say which of Eliphaz's words the LORD has in view, so these notes never treat what Eliphaz says as the book's own verdict. They don't throw out every word either: other Scripture also asks how anyone can be clean before God, and the honest questions below set 15:14 beside it.

Job 15:8→leads toJohn 15:15

Eliphaz asks Job, "Have you heard the secret counsel of God? Do you limit wisdom to yourself?" (15:8). Jesus said, "But I have called you friends, for everything that I heard from my Father, I have made known to you" (John 15:15). John doesn't name Job or Eliphaz, so setting the two side by side is a reading. It rests on a shared subject, hearing what is in God's counsel and whether it is kept to oneself, and not on the words friends or servants in John 15:15. Some hear the same subject in both: what is heard from God, and whether it is kept to oneself or made known. Eliphaz asks whether Job has heard God's secret counsel and whether he keeps wisdom to himself (15:8); Jesus says that everything he heard from his Father he has made known to those he calls friends (John 15:15). Others read each in its own setting: Eliphaz's question is about Job, and goes on, "What do you know that we don’t know?" (15:9); Jesus was speaking of himself and those he calls his friends (John 15:14-15), and said nothing of Job. Neither reading makes Jesus' words an answer to Eliphaz or a verdict on Eliphaz or on Job, and neither says Job had claimed to hear God's counsel.

סוֹדsodsay SOHD

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "council, counsel". Strong's: "a session, i.e. company of persons (in close deliberation); by implication, intimacy, consultation, a secret assembly". "Have you heard the secret counsel of God?" (15:8): the WEB's secret counsel is this one word. It comes three times in the Hebrew of Job, and Job has it twice later. "All my familiar friends abhor me" (19:19), where the Hebrew behind familiar friends has this word. And "when the friendship of God was in my tent" (29:4), where the friendship of God is, in Hebrew, the same two words as Eliphaz's the secret counsel of God, sod Eloah. Jeremiah asks, "For who has stood in the council of the LORD, that he should perceive and hear his word?" (Jeremiah 23:18), with this word for council and the verb of 15:8's heard for hear. A psalm says, "The friendship of the LORD is with those who fear him" (Psalm 25:14), where friendship is this word.