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<p>Both Job and his friends took the same way that disputants commonly take, which is to undervalue one another’s sense, and wisdom, and management. The longer the saw of contention is drawn the hotter it grows; and the <i>beginning of</i> this sort of <i>strife is as the letting forth of water; therefore leave it off before it be meddled with</i>. Eliphaz had represented Job’s discourses as idle, and unprofitable, and nothing to the purpose; and Job here gives his the same character. Those who are free in passing such censures must expect to have them retorted; it is easy, it is endless: but <i>cui bono?--what good does it do</i>? It will stir up men’s passions, but will never convince their judgments, nor set truth in a clear light. Job here reproves Eliphaz, 1. For needless repetitions (<a class="bibleref" title="Job.16.2" href="/passage/?search=Job.16.2">Job 16:2</a>): “<i>I have heard many such things</i>. You tell me nothing but what I knew before, nothing but what you yourselves have before said; you offer nothing new; it is the same thing over and over again.” This Job thinks as great a trial of his patience as almost any of his troubles. The inculcating of the same things thus by an adversary is indeed provoking and nauseous, but by a teacher it is often necessary, and must not be grievous to the learner, to whom <i>precept must be upon precept, and line upon line</i>. Many things we have heard which it is good for us to hear again, that we may understand and remember them better, and be more affected with them and influenced by them. 2. For unskilful applications. They came with a design to comfort him, but they went about it very awkwardly, and, when they touched Job’s case, quite mistook it: “<i>Miserable comforters are you all</i>, who, instead of offering any thing to alleviate the affliction, add affliction to it, and make it yet more grievous.” The patient’s case is sad indeed when his medicines are poisons and his physicians his worst disease. What Job says here of his friends is true of all creatures, in comparison with God, and, one time or other, we shall be made to see it and own it, that miserable comforters are they all. When we are under convictions of sin, terrors of conscience, and the arrests of death, it is only the blessed Spirit that can comfort effectually; all others, without him, do it miserably, and sing songs to a heavy heart, to no purpose. 3. For endless impertinence. Job wishes that <i>vain words might have an end</i>, <a class="bibleref" title="Job.16.3" href="/passage/?search=Job.16.3">Job 16:3</a>. If vain, it were well that they were never begun, and the sooner they are ended the better. Those who are so wise as to speak to the purpose will be so wise as to know when they have said enough of a thing and when it is time to break off. 4. For causeless obstinacy. <i>What emboldeneth thee, that thou answerest</i>? It is a great piece of confidence, and unaccountable, to charge men with those crimes which we cannot prove upon them, to pass a judgment on men’s spiritual state upon the view of their outward condition, and to re-advance those objections which have been again and again answered, as Eliphaz did. 5. For the violation of the sacred laws of friendship, doing by his brother as he would not have been done by and as his brother would not have done by him. This is a cutting reproof, and very affecting, <a class="bibleref" title="Job.16.4,Job.16.5" href="/passage/?search=Job.16.4,Job.16.5"><span class="bibleref" title="Job.16.4">Job 16:4</span>, <span class="bibleref" title="Job.16.5">5</span></a>. (1.) He desires his friends, in imagination, for a little while, to change conditions with him, to put their souls in his soul’s stead, to suppose themselves in misery like him and him at ease like them. This was no absurd or foreign supposition, but what might quickly become true in fact. So strange, so sudden, frequently, are the vicissitudes of human affairs, and such the turns of the wheel, that the spokes soon change places. Whatever our brethren’s sorrows
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