Job's answer is a magnificent and terrible outcry. First, he speaks of his pain as a protest against the method of Eliphaz. His reply is not to the deduction which Eliphaz' argument suggested, but rather to the charge it made, of unreasonableness and folly manifest in his lamentation. Eliphaz had used terms of strong condemnation. Job declared, in effect, that he did not understand the cry because he did not know the pain. His vexation and calamity should be set over against each other, poised in fair balances. If this were done, the calamity would be found to be so heavy as to excuse even the rashness of speech. The wail is always evidence of a want. The wild ass does not bray when he has grass, nor the ox low over his fodder. Having declared this, his sorrow seemed to surge on his soul anew, and he cried out for death because his strength was not equal to the strain thus placed upon him. His strength was not "the strength of stones," nor was his "flesh of brass."
Job then turned on his friends with reproaches of fine satire. He had expected kindness, but was disappointed. Here there would seem to be reference not merely to the attitude of Eliphaz, but to that attitude as a culminating cruelty. His eyes were wandering back to olden days, and he spoke of "my brethren," likening them to a brook in the desert to which the traveling caravans turned, only to find them consumed and passed. He declared that his friends were nothing. Reproach merged into a fierce demand that instead of generalization and allusion,
there should be definiteness in the charges they made against him. "What," says he, "doth your arguing reprove?" There is a majesty in this impatience with men who philosophize in the presence of agony, and it is impossible to read it without a consciousness of profound sympathy with the suffering man.