Esau's Most Righteous Son Became Job's Harshest Critic

The story is a strange one, and the tradition knew it was strange. The son of the man who sold his birthright for lentil soup became a prophet. He was raised in the household of Isaac, educated in the pious way of life, and eventually endowed, according to Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, with the spirit of prophecy. The Lord found him worthy of it.

His name was Eliphaz, and he was the firstborn son of Esau.

In the Book of Job, Eliphaz the Temanite is the first of Job's three friends to speak, and his speeches are among the most elevated in the biblical wisdom literature. He speaks of what he has seen in visions, of the voice that passed before his face in the night (Job 4:15). He argues for the moral order of the universe with the precision of a man who has spent years close to the God who ordered it.

The Legends connect the dots that the biblical text leaves undrawn. Eliphaz the son of Esau, raised in Isaac's house, drawing on his grandfather's tradition, is the same person as Eliphaz the Temanite, the friend of Job. He was not simply a wise man from the east. He was a man who had stood at the edge of the patriarchal circle, close enough to absorb everything but not inside the covenant, shaped by what he had observed of Abraham and Isaac without inheriting their promises.

From this vantage point he confronted Job.

"Thou didst ween thyself the equal of Abraham," Eliphaz told Job, according to the Legends. You marveled that God dealt with you as harshly as the generation of the tower of Babel. But Abraham stood ten temptations and did not flinch. You falter at one. The blind man, the deaf man, the maimed -- you consoled them all, said all the right things. You told the blind man that God would one day open his eyes. You told the deaf man that God would one day unseal his ears. But now the suffering has come to you, and you trouble yourself. You say you are an upright man, why does He chastise you?

Eliphaz had a point. The Legends are honest about that. His theology was correct. His catalog of the patriarchs who had suffered without murmuring -- Noah saved from the flood, Abraham from the furnace, Isaac from the slaughtering knife, Jacob from the angels, Moses from Pharaoh's sword, Israel from the Egyptians -- was a genuine account of how the tradition worked. The righteous suffer, and the righteous endure, and the endurance is part of what makes them righteous.

The problem was not what he said. The problem was the way he said it to someone in agony.

Job answered Eliphaz with words that cut in a different direction: "Look at thy father Esau!" The son of the man who despised his birthright should not be lecturing me about endurance. And Eliphaz answered back, with a clarity that is almost admirable: "I have nothing to do with him. The son should not bear the iniquity of the father." Esau will be destroyed because of his own deeds. I am a prophet. My message is not about Esau. It is about you.

The exchange crackles with the specific tension of someone who has spent his life escaping his father's shadow. Eliphaz was the worthiest of Esau's sons, the one who sat at Isaac's feet and learned the pious way. He was determined not to be defined by what Esau sold for soup. His prophetic vocation was, in part, a lifelong argument with his own inheritance.

But God was not pleased with Eliphaz. After Job's story concluded, the divine verdict landed not on Job's head but on the head of his friend: "Thou didst speak harsh words unto My servant Job." And God announced the punishment with a precision that had the texture of irony: one of Eliphaz's own descendants, a man named Obadiah, would utter a prophecy of denunciation against Eliphaz's father's house, the Edomites. The son who rejected his father's sin would father a line that condemned it.

The Legends and the Ginzberg collection preserve this story because the tradition was fascinated by the question of what happens to righteousness that grows in the wrong soil. Eliphaz was genuinely righteous. He was genuinely prophetic. He had genuinely absorbed the lessons of the patriarchs. And he applied them, in the wrong tone, to a man whose suffering exceeded his own experience. God said: a man may not be held responsible for what he does in his anguish. And then God held Eliphaz responsible for not knowing that.

The apocryphal and wisdom traditions of the Second Temple period, nearly 600 texts in our collection, return again and again to the relationship between correct theology and human kindness. Eliphaz knew the theology. He had learned it from the best teacher available. What he had not yet learned, in all his years, was when to put it down.