5 For your iniquity teaches your mouth, And you choose the language of the crafty.
"It is all the same. Therefore I say, He destroys the blameless and the wicked. If the scourge kills suddenly, He will mock at the trial of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked. He covers the faces of the judges of it. If not he, then who is it?
"You give your mouth to evil. You harnesses your tongue for deceit. You sit and speak against your brother. You slander your own mother's son.
Deliver my soul, Yahweh, from lying lips, From a deceitful tongue. What will be given to you, and what will be done more to you, You deceitful tongue?
They bend their tongue, [as it were] their bow, for falsehood; and they are grown strong in the land, but not for truth: for they proceed from evil to evil, and they don't know me, says Yahweh. Take you heed everyone of his neighbor, and don't you trust in any brother; for every brother will utterly supplant, and every neighbor will go about with slanders. They will deceive everyone his neighbor, and will not speak the truth: they have taught their tongue to speak lies; they weary themselves to commit iniquity.
So the tongue is also a little member, and boasts great things. See how a small fire can spread to a large forest! And the tongue is a fire. The world of iniquity among our members is the tongue, which defiles the whole body, and sets on fire the course of nature, and is set on fire by Gehenna.{Gehenna is a name that describes a burning Hell with rotting bodies and unclean things in it} For every kind of animal, bird, creeping thing, and thing in the sea, is tamed, and has been tamed by mankind. But nobody can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.
Worthy.Bible » Commentaries » Matthew Henry Commentary » Commentary on Job 15
Commentary on Job 15 Matthew Henry Commentary
Chapter 15
Perhaps Job was so clear, and so well satisfied, in the goodness of his own cause, that he thought, if he had not convinced, yet he had at least silenced all his three friends; but, it seems he had not: in this chapter they begin a second attack upon him, each of them charging him afresh with as much vehemence as before. It is natural to us to be fond of our own sentiments, and therefore to be firm to them, and with difficulty to be brought to recede from them. Eliphaz here keeps close to the principles upon which he had condemned Job, and,
A good use may be made both of his reproofs (for they are plain) and of his doctrine (for it is sound), though both the one and the other are misapplied to Job.
Job 15:1-16
Eliphaz here falls very foul upon Job, because he contradicted what he and his colleagues had said, and did not acquiesce in it and applaud it, as they expected. Proud people are apt thus to take it very much amiss if they may not have leave to dictate and give law to all about them, and to censure those as ignorant and obstinate, and all that is naught, who cannot in every thing say as they say. Several great crimes Eliphaz here charges Job with, only because he would not own himself a hypocrite.
Job 15:17-35
Eliphaz, having reproved Job for his answers, here comes to maintain his own thesis, upon which he built his censure of Job. His opinion is that those who are wicked are certainly miserable, whence he would infer that those who are miserable are certainly wicked, and that therefore Job was so. Observe,