The Book of Job is a very tortuous book. The arguments of Job and his friends are shot through with truth and error hopelessly mixed together. Every line of contentious poetry stands locked in deadly battle with every other line. As maddening as this can be for a reader who is looking for practical application, should we really be surprised that a nation that earned its name in a wrestling match with God would canonize a philosophical book that is all straining sinew and agonistic grappling? In the book’s coda, God steps into the ring and raises Job’s hand in victory, but the argumentative stance that won him victory is nonetheless withered into embarrassed silence before the whirlwind. But surely Job and his friend’s arguments (chapters 3 to 37) can’t all be babbling nonsense, can they? Picking through the wreckage of the philosophical contest to discern the truth from the error is the challenge left to us as the readers.
Though Job and Proverbs are both books of Wisdom, they go about propagating wisdom in very different ways. Proverbs propounds time-worn sayings of the wise to be taken by heart. Job is much more prickly. In a way, Job’s friends show us how not to apply the Proverbs: “Like a lame man’s legs, which hang useless, is a proverb in the mouth of fools” (Prov. 26:7). But Job’s arguments cannot be relied upon fully either. What we are left with is the daunting task of disentangling what can be salvaged from what is irredeemable. In other words, the Wisdom of the book of Job is imparted through a process. It is not a laundry list of edicts or eternally fixed goads (Ecc. 12:11). Even Yahweh’s “deus ex natura” monologue at the end of the book does not fully disentangle the arguments made by all. This too should not surprise us, because Yahweh himself appears tortuous to us humans who are still being cured of our crookedness (Ps. 18:26). And just as Yahweh can appear tortuous, so sometimes Satan can pass himself off as a sage (2 Cor. 11:14). And that’s exactly what Satan does in his nocturnal visitation to Eliphaz.
Eliphaz is the first of Job’s friends to speak, likely indicating that he is the oldest and most eminent of Job’s friends. His first speech to Job runs through chapters 4 and 5. We will only be looking at the curious anecdote that he relates in 4:12-21. The passage consists of two parts: first a recounting of the circumstances of the visitation (v.12-16) and second a quotation of the message received from the night-visitor (v.17-21). First the story of the visit:
Now a word was brought to me stealthily; my ear received the whisper of it. Amid thoughts from visions of the night, when deep sleep falls on men, dread came upon me, and trembling which made all of my bones shake. A spirit glided past my face; the hair of my flesh stood up. It stood still, but I could not discern its appearance. A form was before my eyes; there was silence, then I heard a voice: (Job 4:12-16)
I will allow the reader to judge for himself whether or not the description of the visitation is more indicative of a holy or unholy visitor. In the handful of commentaries available to me, most of them talk as if this was a messenger from the Lord, and none of them entertain the idea that this could be an unclean spirit. A few argue that Eliphaz is emphasizing the solemnity and secretive nature of the visit in order to self-aggrandize. In this understanding he alone has had this visitation and therefore is in possession of a “special word from the Lord.” It is plausible that Eliphaz is seeking self-aggrandizement, but it is also apparent that he has been hoodwinked by the great deceiver.
Now, it is not very surprising that Eliphaz (and some commentators) would deduce from the details of the visit that it was a messenger from the Lord. Visitations of that sort frequently come at night and inspire great terror in the person being visited. However, the cumulative effect of the details of this particular vision make it stand out from other such visits. These details are: stealth, whispering, undispelled dread and uncomforted trembling, the spirit gliding past his face, gooseflesh, inability to discern an appearance, dramatic silence, and finally the anonymous voice. In contradistinction, visitors from the Lord are usually clearly seen and loudly announced. Their appearance may cause terror, but that terror is generally dispelled with reassurance and their purpose forthrightly announced. Everything about this visit screams, “false spirit!” But, because we have the advice of Galatians 1:8, we don’t have to judge the spirit solely on the “vibes” that its visit gives off, but can judge its message according to the Scriptures. And so to the content of the message we now turn:
Can mortal man be in the right before God? Can a man be pure before his Maker? Even in his servants he puts no trust, and his angels he charges with error; how much more those who dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, who are crushed like the moth. Between morning and evening they are beaten to pieces; they perish forever without anyone regarding it. Is not their tent-cord plucked up within them, do they not die, and that without wisdom? (Job 4:17-21)
The message here points quite decisively toward the infernal. The consistently propounded good news of the Old and the New Testament is the exact opposite of what is being said here. The Bible’s great message is that man can be in the right before God! In the Old Testament, the Lord made a way through sacrifice and repentance for man to be justified. The fact that the system of animal sacrifice was always pointing forward to Christ’s later, final sacrifice does not mean that the first system was invalid or optional.
Furthermore, we have already heard Yahweh in heaven declare that Job is right before God twice by this point in the book. In Job 1:8 and 2:3, Yahweh asks Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?” The statement is identical in both instances and I cannot conceive of a more direct contradiction of this Divine proclamation than the claims that are made by Eliphaz’s night-spirit. If more evidence of this is needed, look to the final chapter of the book. In Job 42:7-8, the Lord singles out Eliphaz and declares “My anger burns against you and against your two friends,” and twice tells him “for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.”
Additional evidence of malevolence in the speech of Eliphaz’s night visitor is the salty tone with which he complains of the Lord’s treatment of the angels. “Even in his servants he puts no trust, and his angels he charges with error” (Job 4:18). We have no indication in the rest of Scripture that there is any such strained relationship between the Lord and his heavenly servants… aside from Satan and his fallen angels of course. The claim that the Lord finds fault with his servants is a very jaundiced, accusatory statement coming from this faceless spirit. It is actually quite reminiscent of the servant in the parable of the talents who fails to yield an increase and lays blame at the feet of the Master for being a “hard man” (Matt. 25:24). The two servants from that parable who turn a profit on the talents entrusted to them serve as counter-examples of this Spirit’s claim that the Lord does not trust any of his servants [see also: Rom. 3:2; Gen. 18:17-19; Amos 3:7; and even Prov. 31:11 in an eschatological sense]. Lastly, the belittling claim that men are “crushed like the moth” and “perish forever without anyone regarding it,” is contradicted everywhere from God’s promise of victory over the serpent in Genesis 3 to his eternal promises to Abraham to David’s confidence that the Lord will not leave him in the grave (Ps. 16:10) to Jesus’ promise that God sees every hair and sparrow (Matt. 10:29-31). Even the sharp distinction between angels and men as privileged and subservient classes does not square with Scripture’s teaching.
David recognizes a difference of degree between the two types of creature: “Yet you have made [man] a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor” (Ps. 8:5). However, we cannot take that statement in isolation from Ps. 110:1 where David describes the human Messiah taking a throne of co-equal power to the father–something no angel is described as doing in Scripture. Hebrews 2:7 summarizes how Psalm 8:5 is to be interpreted in light of 110:1 by changing “You have made him a little lower” to “You made him for a little while lower than the angels.” Man was always intended to gain ascendancy over the angels. Eliphaz’s night visitor is not completely wrong in describing man’s lowly estate, but he talks as if it is only the “natural order of things” and ignores man’s future role as co-ruler of Heaven and Earth.
So, if this night spirit visitor of Eliphaz’s is in fact Satan, how does that affect our interpretation of the book?
Primarily, this perspective shift emphasizes the Lord’s instrumental use of Satan to achieve his ends. James 1:13 tells us, tantalizingly, “God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.” What seems to be insinuated is that he does in fact send others to tempt. Even in his corrupted state, Satan can do nothing but what the Lord allows him. We already have seen in chapters 1-2 that the Lord has allowed Satan to bring great affliction on Job. In chapter 4, the Lord allows Satan to visit Eliphaz in the night, infecting his mind with twisted arguments and starting the argumentation of the entire book off on bad footing. This state of affairs is very akin to the conversation that leads to Christ’s rebuff of Peter in Matthew 16. Peter had pulled Jesus aside to “rebuke him” and I think that he imagined himself to be bringing a needed corrective to the Lord’s “morbid” focus on the coming showdown with the religious leaders. But just like Eliphaz, Peter fails to realize that his thinking and advice have been polluted by Satan. Job would have been very justified in prefiguring Christ’s response to Peter in his dealings with Eliphaz: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man” (Matt. 16:23).
Satan’s craftiness is not boundless or insurmountable, but we must never underestimate it. May we all remain alert to the subtle ways in which Satan’s lies creep into even our most “moral” and “spiritual” instincts and practices. St. Paul warns us that in resisting the power of this world of sin, we can only renew our minds through testing every argument by Scripture’s light and by that testing, discern the will of God (Rom. 12:2) Again in Galatians, Paul’s warning could have helped Eliphaz: “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed” (Gal. 1:8). When Eliphaz was overshadowed by the mighty presence of his night-visitor he failed to evaluate the content of the message. Eliphaz did not have access to Paul’s charge in Galatians, but he surely had the warning of his father Adam that Satan comes as a blithe spirit, promising wisdom and power, but leaving only dust and ashes in his wake.
Jonathan David White is a 2021-22 Theopolis Fellow. He lives in Annapolis, MD with his wife and two sons.