Job 15:7

Then he goes on to accuse Job of claiming the most extreme superiority in wisdom, without the least ground for it. To allow himself such contempt for others, Job would have to be the first man, born before the hills. He would also have to sit in God's own council, holding secrets no one else knew. Eliphaz doubts it, and challenges Job to prove his claim is real. He also pleads for himself and his friends: Job wrongly treats them as worth nothing, instead of giving them the honour due to age and experience.

So it was dishonest of Eliphaz to ask him, "Are you the first man who was born? Or were you brought forth before the hills? Have you heard the counsel of God? Do you limit wisdom to yourself?" (vv.7-8). Job had asked his friends much the same question that Eliphaz asks in verse 9: "What do you know that we do not know?" He had said, "What you know, I also know; I am not inferior to you" (ch.13:2), but Eliphaz accused him of claiming to be superior to them.

Eliphaz ought to have rebuked Zophar for assuming that he knew the secrets of wisdom and Job did not. Instead, his own arguments only exposed his bias.

He next challenges Job: Where has he gained wisdom superior to theirs? Has he been in the secret counsel of God from the beginning, before the earth and hills were made? Only divine Wisdom, the eternal Son, could claim such a relation to God as that (Prov. 8). As for Job, he is like themselves, only with less experience than many to whom Eliphaz could appeal.

Here we have twice the thought of "generation" — "I was brought forth," "I was brought forth" (Heb. chul; see Job 15:7, "Or were you brought forth before the hills?" and Ps. 51:5, "brought forth in iniquity"). How can we avoid the conclusion that it is the Eternal Son who was then brought forth?

Eliphaz was a man who stood strongly for the great value of experience. You know there are people who are very strong for experience. So what about the great and good men who have gone before — are they the standard? No one denies the honour due to elders, at least no person with any sense of what is right. But Eliphaz used it in a wrong way. He told Job, "Why, you are going against everything the best men who ever lived have held. Are you the first man? Are you as old as the hills, that you talk like this? You act as if you knew better than all these excellent men, older than your father. And you set yourself up like this."

Others have noted that Eliphaz, trying to comfort Job, offered his own observation as certain proof that he was right in what he said (Ch. 4:8). Bildad came next, and appealed to the tradition handed down from older men as a reliable witness. Then Zophar told Job, in effect, that he was right because his own intuition told him so! All this was useless. Only Elihu insisted that people know nothing of God unless God reveals Himself.

Here was where they went astray: they assumed that the world as it now stands fully shows God's judgment on the ways of men. This assumption runs through the speeches of all three friends. At first they said it calmly. In the end it hardened into harshness.