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Man does not live by bread alone. He needs cliches. Cliches abound in our culture. All you need to do is listen to a sports commentator, watch a moment of TV or pay attention to other people's conversations. In order to win a championship, athletes need to take their game "to a different level." They have to "ramp up" their performance. They have to "play within themselves," and "wait for the game to come to them." Cliches are verbal shortcuts, allowing us to try to explain life without having to coming up with our own analyses of things. They help us frame life, even if life doesn't always want to fit within the frames. Cliches give us a way of diminishing life's complexity.

But it is not as if they are worthless. Cliches stick because they seem to capture truths about life. They are the verbal equivalent of ritual, giving us some space to experience and interpret life while it swirls around us. Life comes at us without explanation and often without ostensible meaning, and so cliches help reduce the inevitable tension we feel when we don't understand the basic truths of our daily existence. A cliche that has stood the test of time is known as a proverb or apophthegm, a sententious utterance that becomes the building block of understanding and insight. So, we seek cliches because we long for a simpler explanation of things; we also become bound by them because they provide not simply the grooves in which we think but the ruts that keep us from exploring other interesting avenues in life.

And, let's face it. By the time that most people reach 50 they have stopped studying and are anxious to take in anything that will make life simpler. Pains in the body, worries about children and finances, uncertainties regarding the future, fear of dying and hosts of other issues crowd into the mind of the "over 50" person, making him or her an easy target for cliche-mongers of all sorts.

I think this is one of the reasons why the Book of Job is not much read or studied today. Job is a person who once lived by cliche and then had his life upended by pain. His pain, he felt, had no explanation. There was no way of encompassing it, no way to mitigate it, no means of putting an explanation on it that would make it tolerable either physically or emotionally. He not only despised and rejected the cliches of the wisdom tradition proffered him by the friends but he resisted attempts to reduce his pain to any explanatory summary. Job's pre-distress life had an executive summary; his post-distress life was simply one unfinished and unresolved complaint after another.

As such, people don't really want to study Job. It is just too difficult to work through the text with Job and the friends. We don't see "where Job is going," and we don't see him "summarizing" or "getting to the bottom line" of his troubles. They just keep flowing, like blood oozing from an unstanched wound. But not so for Eliphaz. In the space of his 45 or so verses in chs. 4-5 he utters at least four proverbs or cliches that help him try to explain life and, by extension, Job's suffering.

Turning to Eliphaz's Cliches

When you look at Eliphaz from the perspective of the wisdom tradition, you see that he fits right in. He is full of little statements that you or I have probably uttered on some occasion. There is a lot of "truth" to what he says. He brings at least four proverbs to bear on Job's situation in his first speech. Let's just review them briefly. First, he says, in 4:8: "As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same." Notice what he is doing. He not only faithfully recounts one of the cornerstones of the wisdom tradition, but says that it also comports with his experience. He has seen it. The tradition believes it. Therefore, it must be true. And, it is a simple and easily-grasped rule. It presents a clear picture. If you put corn in the ground, don't expect milo to spring from the soil.

Second, in 4:17, he asks the rhetorical question, "Can mortals be more righteous than God? Can human beings be more pure than their Maker?" Not only do we reap but we sow, but we are humans, first, middle and last. Eliphaz has laid out some pretty clear rules. He would claim that they are like curbs on the highway of life; they keep us on the highway, and lord knows that in order to make the best time and cover the most distance in life you need to keep on life's superhigway. I am sure that if they had macadamized roadways in Job's time, Eliphaz would have used that cliche.

Third, in 5:2, Eliphaz says, "Surely vexation kills the fool, and jealousy slays the simple." His words are not directly lifted from the wisdom tradition, but Proverbs knows similar thoughts. "Fools show their anger at once, but the prudent ignore an insult" (12:16) or "A stone is heavy, and sand is weighty, but a fool's provocation is heavier than both" (27:3). Anger and foolishness are wed in the tradition. And just as they lead to death for Eliphaz, they lead to destruction for the wisdom tradition generally: "A tranquil mind gives life to the flesh, but passion makes the bones rot" (14:30). Hm. Maybe Eliphaz would use that proverb during his second speech..

Finally, in 5:18, he says, "For he wounds, but he binds up; he strikes, but his hands heal." Thus, this is only a temporary problem, an ephemeral affliction. God's last word with the faithful is one of healing, not of judgment; of life, and not of death.

Conclusion

Eliphaz relates each of these cliches/proverbs as a means of explaining and, ultimately, limiting Job's pain. But instead of limiting the pain, Job probably feels that it would have been good had Eliphaz limned his anguish. From Job's perspective cliches don't necessarily explain life convincingly; they seal off a person in his own prison of incomprehension. That, indeed, is why Job explodes so vociferously at his friends in 6:14ff. But, for now, the struggle will be whether the cliches, which have always worked in the past, will work this time.

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