Job 5:1-7 contains the application of the principles just laid down.
Job 5:1-2. If the angels are imperfect, it is no use for Job to appeal to them as intercessors with God. Duhm, following Siegfried, rejects this verse connecting Job 4:21 closely with Job 5:2. The foolish man, he says, means in this context, the man without the fear of God. A man must be an impious fool, Eliphaz would say, in agreement with the Job of the Volksbuch (Job 2:10), if in misfortune, instead of, like a wise man, feeling his worthlessness and submitting to God, he allows himself to be carried away into rebellion against God and therewith invokes upon himself instant destruction, as Job's wife advised him (Job 2:9). It must be admitted that this is attractive. But Peake defends the text, arguing that the connexion is only superficially good: Job 4:21 speaks of the common lot of frail man, Job 5:2 of the destruction of the fool through his own irritation. He gives the following meaning to the passage: Do not appeal to the angels who cannot help you, and thus draw down the penalty of your exasperation, but commit your cause to the all-powerful omniscient God, who can save you out of your distress. Translate Job 5:2: Impatience killeth the foolish one, and the simple one his indignation slayeth. A rebellious impatience is with Eliphaz the sin of sins:
It shows a will most incorrect to Heaven.
Eliphaz wishes to point out to Job whither his impatience must necessarily lead. He enforces his teaching by examples from his own experience (Job 5:3). He has seen the miserable end of the foolish, and of his children (Job 5:4). The habitation of the foolish decays and his children have no one to stand up for them, but are crushed in the gate, i.e. overpowered at law (contrast Job 31:21; Psalms 127:5 *). The gate is the place of justice, where the elders of the city sit to hear causes. For the precepts implied in 4, that the children suffer for the sin of the father, cf. Exodus 20:5.
Job 5:5-7 are all difficult. The usual explanation of Job 5:5 is that the hungry break through the thorn hedge (Job 1:10) to get at the harvest. This is not very probable; why should they trouble to do this in order to get into the field? (Peake). Perhaps the text is corrupt: the last clause of the verse is also questioned by many scholars. The text, however, seems better than mg. Duhm gets a good sense by the emendation and the thirsty draws out of their well. Davidson explains Job 5:6 f. as follows: Eliphaz now sums up into an aphorism the great general principle which he seeks to illustrate in this section of his speech (Job 4:12 to Job 5:7). It is that affliction is not accidental, nor a spontaneous growth of the earth, but men acting upon the impulses of their evil nature bring it upon themselves. According to this explanation Job 5:6 repeats in another form the maxim they that sow trouble reap the same (Job 4:8); while the words man is born unto trouble mean, it is his nature through his sin to bring trouble upon himself; evil rises up out of his heart as the sparks fly up out of the flame. It is not, however, really certain that the sons of flame or of lightning (mg.) are to be understood as the sparks; and it has to be admitted that Davidson's explanation in general reads a good deal into the text which is not clearly expressed in it. A possible view is that the sons of flame are the demons, who are here regarded as the ultimate cause of human trouble. The meaning of the two verses must, however, be regarded as in the end uncertain.