✧Then Eliphaz the Temanite replied: ✧2“If one ventures a word with you, will you be wearied? Yet who can keep from speaking? ✧3Surely you have instructed many, and have strengthened their feeble hands. ✧4Your words have steadied those who stumbled; you have braced the knees that were buckling. ✧5But now trouble has come upon you, and you are weary. It strikes you, and you are dismayed. ✧6Is your reverence not your confidence, and the uprightness of your ways your hope? ✧7Consider now, I plead: Who, being innocent, has ever perished? Or where have the upright been destroyed? ✧8As I have observed, those who plow iniquity and those who sow trouble reap the same. ✧9By the breath of God they perish, and by the blast of His anger they are consumed. ✧10The lion may roar, and the fierce lion may growl, yet the teeth of the young lions are broken. ✧11The old lion perishes for lack of prey, and the cubs of the lioness are scattered. ✧12Now a word came to me secretly; my ears caught a whisper of it. ✧13In disquieting visions in the night, when deep sleep falls on men, ✧14fear and trembling came over me and made all my bones shudder. ✧15Then a spirit glided past my face, and the hair on my body bristled. ✧16It stood still, but I could not discern its appearance; a form loomed before my eyes, and I heard a whispering voice: ✧17‘Can a mortal be more righteous than God, or a man more pure than his Maker? ✧18If God puts no trust in His servants, and He charges His angels with error, ✧19how much more those who dwell in houses of clay, whose foundations are in the dust, who can be crushed like a moth! ✧20They are smashed to pieces from dawn to dusk; unnoticed, they perish forever. ✧21Are not their tent cords pulled up, so that they die without wisdom?’