Job 4 Bible study: Who ever perished, being innocent?

Every word of this chapter after its first verse is Eliphaz's: "Then Eliphaz the Temanite answered" (4:1). He is the first of "Job’s three friends" (2:11) to speak, after the days when "no one spoke a word to him" (2:13) and after Job's own words in chapter 3, and his speech runs on through chapter 5 with no new heading. He begins with a question: "If someone ventures to talk with you, will you be grieved? But who can withhold himself from speaking?" (4:2). He remembers what Job used to do: "Behold, you have instructed many, you have strengthened the weak hands" (4:3). "But now it has come to you, and you faint" (4:5). Then he asks, "Isn’t your piety your confidence? Isn’t the integrity of your ways your hope?" (4:6) (tap piety, integrity). Keep in mind whose words these are. At the end of the book the LORD says to Eliphaz, "you have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job has" (Job 42:7). The book doesn't say which of his 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: Paul quotes a saying from the next chapter of this same speech with "it is written" (1 Corinthians 3:19; see Job 5:13), though he doesn't name Eliphaz or Job, and the WEB words the two a little differently.

Job 4:7→leads toJohn 9:3

Eliphaz asks, "Remember, now, who ever perished, being innocent? Or where were the upright cut off?" (4:7), and says, "According to what I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble, reap the same" (4:8). When Jesus saw "a man blind from birth" (John 9:1), his disciples asked, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" (John 9:2). Jesus answered, "This man didn’t sin, nor did his parents, but that the works of God might be revealed in him" (John 9:3). Jesus doesn't name Job or Eliphaz, so setting them side by side is a reading, resting on a shared subject: whether someone's suffering shows their sin. Some read the two together: the disciples looked for a sin behind a man's suffering, and Eliphaz's question in 4:7 asks whether the innocent ever perish; Jesus' answer is that this man's blindness didn't come from his sin or his parents', much as the LORD said Job was ruined "without cause" (2:3). Others read each in its own setting: Jesus answered a question about one man born blind and said nothing of Job, and Eliphaz's words stand in their own book, where the LORD's verdict on them is 42:7. Neither reading makes Job a picture of Jesus.

נָקִיnaqisay na-KEE

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "clean, free from, exempt". Strong's: "innocent". Eliphaz asks, "Remember, now, who ever perished, being innocent?" (4:7). It is his question, not the book's verdict. The word comes six times in Job. Job uses it when he says of God, "he will mock at the trial of the innocent" (9:23), and Eliphaz uses it again in his last speech: "The innocent ridicule them" (22:19). Elsewhere it is the Law's word in innocent blood: "so that innocent blood will not be shed in the middle of your land" (Deuteronomy 19:10).