The debate sinks to the level of being preposterous. Eliphaz commits intellectual dishonesty to defend his untenable position.
From the very start of this whole story, Eliphaz and his pals have perverted truth by pulling things out of context. Human language cannot describe how God operates; it can only characterize and indicate. That is the very nature of the symbolic languages of the ancient Semites. What the trio have been doing is a very low grade of literalism that abuses the fundamental nature of the tongue these men spoke. This is what you expect from illiterate bumpkins, not community leaders.
Eliphaz asserts, in so many words, that men cannot bless God. God has no friends, he alleges, and no favorites among men. If things go bad for a man, there can only be one cause, and that is sin. He then pointedly and rudely asserts Job is evil.
He goes on to allege that Job’s former greatness came at the expense of moral failure and it finally caught up with him. Eliphaz rattles off a list of sins he knows for a fact Job did not commit. Having painted himself into this ridiculous logical corner, he flatly asserts what all humanity in that region knows to be a lie. Were Job anything like this, his reputation would have been awful and they would never have been his friends.
Eliphaz even goes on to insist that Job was like those drowned by the Flood, openly rejecting God’s Laws. Obviously Job was so morally blinded that he deserved the same fate. Then he insults Job once more with formulaic calls for repentance that reduce God to an mere mechanism. This is precisely the same reasoning of the Pharisees, who insisted one could only be wealthy because of God’s favor, and poor only because they were accursed. This why the Twelve were rather stunned by a rabbi who didn’t teach that the rich were going to Heaven. It’s the same logic here: If the rich weren’t going to Heaven, who was?
Eliphaz is forced to deny the reality before his own eyes to defend his goofy theology.
