Job 4:12 and Eliphaz's vision and eliphaz's theophany and limning the text of Job

As I mulled over the Hebrew text of 4:12ff., I became more and more convinced that Elihphaz's words were meant to describe an experience of profound importance to him, equalling in intensity and suggestiveness Job's painful experience narrated in ch.3. In other words, it is as if Eliphaz is saying, 'Job, you have had your loss and your reaction to loss; but I, no less than you, can point to an experience of great profundity. Hear my experience and learn the message of my experience.' And, when Eliphaz narrates that experience in 4:12-16 he uses rare vocabulary and provocative pictures that indicate the depth of his own engagement in the vision. I think that Job actually will riducule Eliphaz's vision in 26:14, where he uses the same word as Eliphaz does in 4:12 (shemets, translated "whisper" or "fragment," and appearing only these two times in the Bible), but that is a point to be saved for much, much later.

4:12, The Word that Comes

I may have been too quick to denominate Eliphaz's experience in 4:12-16 as a "vision," when the first word he uses to describe it was "word" (the standard Hebrew term dabar). We may translate the verse as follows:

"To me came a stolen word; and my ears took a little piece of it."

Let's pause on each word. The text begins, rather unexpectedly, with "to me." Normally this little word (elay) is embedded in the middle of a verse, but not here. I think it is meant to contrast with the thought of 4:10-11, where the lion is frustrated and its young are scattered. That is, the lion and its young (a perhaps sub- or unconscious reference to Job and his children) are discomfited, but 'I, Eliphaz, yep you got it right, I had something (divine) come to me.'

What was it that came to Eliphaz? A word. In contrast to the lion, which roared (4:10) in its futility, to Eliphaz in his fidelity came a word. But it was a "stolen" word. The Hebrew verb is the usual word for "steal," [ganab. It is used, for example, seven times in 21 verses from Gen 31:19-39, and is translated either "steal" or "deceive" in those verses] but could be interpreted two ways. Ah, the ambiguity of Eliphaz continues! On the one hand, the interpretation which most scholars favor (and I adopt) is that the word was like a thief--it came unbidden, secretly, unexpectedly. A second reading of the "stolen" word, however, would be to see it as "deceptive," For example, the verb ganab is best translated "deceive" three or four times in Gen.31. Maybe Eliphaz, under the guise of apparent clarity of speech, is basically a double-speaker, a person whose words from the "git-go" are laced with double-entendres. But he probably wants to stress the "thief-like" or furtive nature of the communication he received.

Now we are ready for the second half of the verse. The only word worth thinking about is the curious word shemets, which occurs only one other time in the Bible (Job 26:14). Because it occurs so infrequently, and it doesn't have a root that is readily recognizable, we are free to experiment with translation. Most renderings of it are "whisper" or "fragment." Either seems like it makes sense here: it would emphasize the partial, mysterious, furtive and therefore special nature of the word that came to Eliphaz. Of course, this is also laced with ambiguity. On the one hand, Eliphaz may be wanting to argue for the specialness of the revelation or the sense of his privilege to have this "vision." On the other hand, something that is fragmentary or partial is open to misinterpretation. You can arrange fragments in lots of ways, based on your overall philosophy of what you are trying to do.

Conclusion

Yikes, I guess I have not gotten too far in this mini-essay, have I? Here is where we are. Eliphaz's opening words narrating his vision both stress the specialnesss of it ("to ME came the word") and the secretness and partialness of it. The careful reader, who reads between the lines, can see in this verse a continuation of Eliphaz's ambiguous speech, while the "surface" meaning is rather clear--Eliphaz received a partial and secret message. It is almost as if he is expecting the hearers now to lean forward in their chairs or, for Job, to get a more comfortable position on the ash heap, to hear the great things that Eliphaz is about to narrate. Can't you see the picture? All are kind of leaning forward now. Eliphaz's voice lowers to a whisper as he will recount the whispered or fragmentary message he received. You can hear a pin drop or, as the case may be, a potsherd scrape. But Eliphaz is only getting warmed up. He will continue to use arresting and rare words in the subsequent verses, to which I now turn.

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