Job 22:15–20

Job 22:15 — "Will you keep the old way?" Eliphaz opens with a rhetorical challenge. The Hebrew 'orah 'olam ("the old way" or "ancient path") refers to a well-worn road of wickedness traversed by generations before Job — a path Eliphaz implicitly accuses Job of following. The "old way" resonates with ancient Near Eastern wisdom traditions where the fate of predecessors served as moral instruction for the living. Eliphaz is not merely describing abstract wickedness; he is issuing a pointed accusation that Job's protests against God place him in dangerous company. The image of a "path" is morally loaded in wisdom literature: Proverbs consistently contrasts the way of the righteous with the way of the wicked (cf. Prov 2:12–15; Ps 1:6). To "keep" this way is to make it one's own, to persist on it deliberately — heightening the gravity of the charge.

Job 22:16 — "Who were snatched away before their time" The phrase yiqātēpû ("snatched away," or "seized") carries the force of sudden, premature destruction. These are not people who simply died; they were cut off violently before their natural end. The phrase "before their time" implies that divine patience had a limit — that God endured their wickedness up to a point, then acted with sudden decisiveness. This verse likely alludes to the antediluvian generation (cf. Gen 6–7) or possibly to Sodom and Gomorrah — archetypal examples of swift, catastrophic divine judgment upon a generation that had exhausted divine forbearance. The Catholic interpretive tradition, particularly in the Church Fathers, frequently reads these ancient judgments as typological prefigurations of final eschatological judgment.

Job 22:17 — "Who said to God, 'Depart from us!'" This is the spiritual center of Eliphaz's indictment. The cry sûr mimmennû ("Depart from us!") is the ultimate act of apostasy — an explicit, willful rejection of the divine presence. This precise phrase echoes Job 21:14, where Job himself quoted the words of the wicked — revealing that Eliphaz is cannily turning Job's own prior description of the wicked back against him. The theological gravity is immense: to bid God depart is not mere impiety but a chosen spiritual blindness, a darkening of the intellect and will against the source of all being. The Catechism identifies this disposition as the root of grave sin — the deliberate turning away from God who is the ultimate end of the human person (CCC 1033, 1849). Eliphaz adds the taunt, "And what can the Almighty do to us?" — a sentence implied in the verse's fuller context — which compounds the arrogance: these are people who dismissed not only God's presence but God's power.

Job 22:18 — "Yet he filled their houses with good things" Here Eliphaz introduces a crucial theological tension: the very wicked who rejected God were materially prosperous. The word ṭôb ("good things") recalls the language of creation and blessing in Genesis. God did not immediately strip them of blessing upon their apostasy — He continued to give them the goods of earthly life even as they spurned Him. This is an acknowledgment of what theology calls God's universal providence or common grace — the fact that God causes His "sun to rise on the evil and on the good" (Matt 5:45). Yet Eliphaz frames this generosity darkly: their continued prosperity becomes evidence of the depth of their ingratitude. They received everything from the hand they refused to acknowledge. This verse also quietly undermines Eliphaz's own retributive theology, for he must concede that the wicked did indeed prosper — if only for a season. Patristic commentators such as St. Gregory the Great (Moralia in Job, Book XVI) noted this tension and used it to argue that temporal prosperity is no indicator of divine favor, and temporal suffering no indicator of divine abandonment.

Job 22:19 — "The righteous see it, and are glad" The "seeing" here (yir'û) is not passive observation but the vindicated recognition of divine justice. The joy of the righteous is not cruelty toward the fallen wicked, but the exultation of those who trusted in God's justice when it was not yet visible — and now behold its fulfillment. St. Thomas Aquinas, commenting on related passages, distinguished this joy from schadenfreude: the righteous rejoice not in the suffering of the wicked per se, but in the manifestation of divine righteousness (ST II-II, q.36, a.3). This joy confirms that the long trial of faith — living justly in a world where the wicked seemed to prosper — was not in vain.

Job 22:20 — "Surely those who rose up against us are cut off" The declaration qāmêhem nikhḥad ("those who rose up against us are cut off") comes as a triumphant confirmation. The word nikhḥad ("cut off," "destroyed," "annihilated") has finality to it. The shift to first-person plural ("against us") suggests this is the voice of the righteous community — a collective witness to God's faithfulness across time.

Typological and Spiritual Senses: The "old way" of the wicked, typologically read, points to every generation's temptation to self-sufficiency — the choice of the creature to constitute itself as its own final end. The ancient sinners snatched away prefigure all who, through final impenitence, are cut off from God eternally. The joy of the righteous anticipates the eschatological rejoicing of the saints at the consummation (Rev 19:1–3), where the justice of God is made fully manifest.

Catholic tradition brings distinctive depth to this passage in at least three ways.

First, the theology of divine patience and judgment. The Church teaches that God's patience (makrothymia) — His willingness to fill "their houses with good things" even as they cry "Depart from us!" — is itself an act of mercy, not indifference. The Catechism teaches that God "desires all men to be saved" (1 Tim 2:4; CCC 74, 1058) and that even the most hardened sinner receives the continued gift of existence and earthly good as an implicit invitation to repentance. St. Gregory the Great, whose Moralia in Job remains the foundational patristic commentary on this book, reads the temporal prosperity of the wicked as a form of divine condescension: God sustains those who hate Him, hoping they will turn. The "snatching away before their time" is thus not arbitrary divine violence but the withdrawal of patience once the possibility of conversion has been exhausted.

Second, the sin of saying "Depart from us." The Catechism identifies mortal sin as a radical rupture with God (CCC 1855), and final impenitence — the definitive refusal of God's mercy — as the only truly unforgivable disposition, not because God's mercy is limited, but because the sinner has closed the very faculty by which mercy is received. The Second Vatican Council's Gaudium et Spes (§13) speaks of the human tendency to choose self over God as the root of all social disorder. Eliphaz's ancient sinners are a type of this disposition.

Third, the joy of the righteous. Catholic eschatology does not shy away from the vindication of the saints. The Catechism (CCC 1038–1041) teaches that the Last Judgment will fully manifest the justice of God, and that part of the beatitude of heaven is the perfect conformity of the redeemed will with divine justice — which includes the recognition that God's ways are altogether righteous. This is not vengeance but the peace of perfect truth.

Contemporary Catholic life is saturated with a version of Eliphaz's temptation in reverse: we are culturally pressured not to invoke judgment at all, to flatten divine justice into mere mercy divorced from truth. But these verses challenge the faithful to hold the full picture. When a Catholic sees institutions, cultures, or persons that functionally cry "Depart from us!" — through the systematic exclusion of God from public life, family life, or personal conscience — the temptation is either despair (God is absent) or presumption (God doesn't mind). Eliphaz, despite his misapplication to Job, is correct that neither is true. God's patience is real and active, but it has a moral shape.

Practically, this passage invites the Catholic to examine whether any area of personal life has quietly adopted the "old way" — not through dramatic apostasy, but through gradual habituation to choices that push God to the periphery. The daily Examen, recommended by St. Ignatius of Loyola, is precisely the spiritual tool for catching this drift before it becomes a path. Ask: where today did I act as though God's presence was inconvenient? Where did the goods He gave me become ends in themselves?