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Bible Notes - Tabernacle Commentaries
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Job 22:17
Comments
Eliphaz echoes Job’s words in Job 21:14-16 but he draws a very different conclusion. When Job had used these words he intended to show how much the wicked get away with, for they openly defy the Lord, telling him to depart from them, and declaring that he can do nothing real to help them, and yet no hand comes forth from heaven to strike them. Now Eliphaz puts the same words in the mouth of the wicked, but he is speaking of the generation that perished in the flood. They too commanded God to depart from them and insulted him to his face in spite of his patience towards them. They too ignored his warnings, but they lived to experience his heavy hand upon them. They did not get away with their rebellious words, as Job had suggested. The wicked do indeed demand that God depart from them. What does this amount to? They cannot drive him out of his own world and they cannot ultimately depart from his presence, so they therefore make every effort to put out of their lives any reminder of him. They resent any sound of the voice of conscience. They ask God not to speak to them through providence. He may be there, but he can keep so much in the background that they can pretend to themselves that he is not there. How many different ways the unbeliever has of trying to live as if there is no God in heaven!The thought of verse 18 is disjunctive: in spite of their protests, the Lord does much for them; in fact it is he that gives them the riches that they enjoy for a time. Just as Job had stated that the counsel of the wicked was far from him, so Eliphaz repeats the same denial. He wants no part in the temporary profit that they gain from their corrupt ways. Perhaps this should be read with emphasis on the word ‘me’, to answer to Job’s identical sentiment in previous chapter.
Application
Questions
Several versions follow the LXX and read, ‘What can the Almighty do to us?’, making this part of what the wicked say to God. If the correct Hebrew reading of verse 17 is ‘to them’, then these are the words of Eliphaz, and, as Gill suggests, may be rendered ‘What has the Almighty done to them?’ – the word ‘can’ not being in the Hebrew. That is a slightly harder reading, given the disjunctive nature of verse 18 – ‘Yet he filled their houses with good things’ – which demands a contrast with what went before. The contrast would have to be with the earlier words, ‘Depart from us.’
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