If there be a messenger with him, an interpreter, one among a thousand, to shew unto man his uprightness:
Elihu refers to himself as the divinely sent (Job 32:8; Job 33:6) "messenger" or angel х mal'aak (H4397)], the "interpreter," to explain to Job and vindicate God's righteousness; х meeliyts (H3887)], an interpreter of foreign tongues, and so an interpreter to Job of God's obscure dealings: such a one Eliphaz had denied that Job could look for (Job 5:1); and Job (Job 9:33) had wished for such a "daysman" or umpire between him and God. The "messenger" of good is antithetical to "the destroyers" (Job 33:22).
With him, х `aalaayw (H5921)] - 'for him' - i:e., for his good, for his salvation (Maurer). If these be vouchsafed to the sufferer. The office of the interpreter is stated, 'to show unto man God's uprightness' in His dealings. Umbreit translates, 'man's upright course toward God' (Proverbs 14:2), 'to show man what is his upright course toward God.' The former is better: Job maintained his own "uprightness" (Job 16:17; Job 27:5-6); Elihu, on the contrary, maintains God's, and that man's true uprightness lies in submission to God. - "One among a thousand" is a man rarely to be found. So Jesus Christ (Song of Solomon 5:10, "The chiefest among ten thousand"). Elihu, the God-sent mediator of a temporal deliverance (Job 33:24-26), is a type of the God-man Jesus Christ, the Mediator of eternal deliverance, "the messenger of the covenant" (Malachi 3:1). This is the wonderful work of the Holy Spirit, that persons and events move in their own sphere in such a way as unconsciously to shadow forth Him whose "testimony is the spirit of prophecy," as the same point may be center of a small and of a vastly larger concentric circle.