Job 22:30

There is a very old mistake in this verse. That word "island" is all wrong. The same Hebrew word means "island" and also "not." Take the name "Ichabod." There the "I" is used as an adverb meaning "not," for "Ichabod" means "not glory," or "the glory is departed." That is the word here. Translate it as a negative and you get the true sense — "him that is not innocent." "Island" only makes nonsense. No one has ever explained the old Authorised Version reading, and it is astonishing that it remains. Man lost his innocence and has never recovered it. Man gains holiness by the faith of Christ, but no recovery of innocence; that could not be.

There is no "island" expressed in either the Septuagint or the Vulgate, which removes one difficulty. But Schultens seems to have been the first to see that the word translated "island" is a negative, as in the name Ichabod.

He will even deliver — not the humble only, but the faulty.

This seemed wise advice to Eliphaz, and in many a case it would fit well. But it was completely out of place for Job. To him gold and silver weighed no more than dust, and the favour of God was everything. Hidden sin was not the question, nor repentance for it. The question was a deep submission to God's will. God could use the enemy to bring out the patience of the sufferer, and use his friends to lay bare his impatience. Eliphaz did not so much as touch the true question. He misjudged Job, and would have made the illness worse instead of curing it.

Eliphaz allows that a believer may be brought low, but he does not apply this to Job unless Job takes his advice to repent. If Job does repent, he tells him, he will be able to help others... In fact, Eliphaz was trying to do this very thing for Job. He thought the purity of his own hands would deliver Job, if only Job would repent.

They were the people who were "not guiltless"; they were guilty, they were "not innocent."… That came true in Job's three friends, little as Eliphaz expected it. God treated them as guilty towards their dear brother, whom they had so misjudged. They had accused him of all kinds of hidden evil, and made him out to be a hypocrite as well as a bad man. And Eliphaz here unconsciously utters words that came true.

"He shall deliver him that is not innocent," or "not guiltless" — that is the proper word — "and he shall be delivered by the pureness of your hands." God forced these three men to feel it: Job was more righteous than they were, and his hands were cleaner than theirs. They had dirtied their own hands by attacking Job so shamefully and so violently. They owed it to Job that God spared their lives.

They had to come to Him with a sacrifice, through the very man they had so badly misjudged… And His servant Job, whose prayers they had despised, would pray for them, so that God would not blot them out of the book of the living… Meanwhile favour and blessing crowned Job more than ever, and the Lord restored his fortunes when he prayed for his friends.