15:8 Do you listen in on God’s secret council? 1
Do you limit 2 wisdom to yourself?
15:9 What do you know that we don’t know?
What do you understand that we don’t understand? 3
15:10 The gray-haired 4 and the aged are on our side, 5
men far older than your father. 6
15:15 If God places no trust in his holy ones, 7
if even the heavens 8 are not pure in his eyes,
1 tn The meaning of סוֹד (sod) is “confidence.” In the context the implication is “secret counsel” of the
2 tn In v. 4 the word meant “limit”; here it has a slightly different sense, namely, “to reserve for oneself.”
3 tn The last clause simply has “and it is not with us.” It means that one possesses something through knowledge. Note the parallelism of “know” and “with me” in Ps 50:11.
4 tn The participle שָׂב (sav), from שִׂיב (siv, “to have white hair”; 1 Sam 12:2), only occurs elsewhere in the Bible in the Aramaic sections of Ezra. The word יָשִׁישׁ (yashish, “aged”) occurred in 12:12.
5 tn Heb “with us.”
6 tn The line reads: “[men] greater than your father [in] days.” The expression “in days” underscores their age – they were older than Job’s father, and therefore wiser.
7 tn Eliphaz here reiterates the point made in Job 4:18.
8 sn The question here is whether the reference is to material “heavens” (as in Exod 24:10 and Job 25:5), or to heavenly beings. The latter seems preferable in this context.