¹ Then Eliphaz the Temanite replied:

² “If someone ventures a word with you, will you be impatient?
But who can keep from speaking?
³ Think how you have instructed many,
how you have strengthened feeble hands.
⁴ Your words have supported those who stumbled;
you have strengthened faltering knees.
⁵ But now trouble comes to you, and you are discouraged;
it strikes you, and you are dismayed.
⁶ Should not your piety be your confidence
and your blameless ways your hope?

⁷ “Consider now: Who, being innocent, has ever perished?
Where were the upright ever destroyed?
⁸ As I have observed, those who plow evil
and those who sow trouble reap it.
⁹ At the breath of God they perish;
at the blast of his anger they are no more.
¹⁰ The lions may roar and growl,
yet the teeth of the great lions are broken.
¹¹ The lion perishes for lack of prey,
and the cubs of the lioness are scattered.

¹² “A word was secretly brought to me,
my ears caught a whisper of it.
¹³ Amid disquieting dreams in the night,
when deep sleep falls on people,
¹⁴ fear and trembling seized me
and made all my bones shake.
¹⁵ A spirit glided past my face,
and the hair on my body stood on end.
¹⁶ It stopped,
but I could not tell what it was.
A form stood before my eyes,
and I heard a hushed voice:
¹⁷ ‘Can a mortal be more righteous than God?
Can even a strong man be more pure than his Maker?
¹⁸ If God places no trust in his servants,
if he charges his angels with error,
¹⁹ how much more those who live in houses of clay,
whose foundations are in the dust,
who are crushed more readily than a moth!
²⁰ Between dawn and dusk they are broken to pieces;
unnoticed, they perish forever.
²¹ Are not the cords of their tent pulled up,
so that they die without wisdom?’