Verse 5. — But now the blow has come upon you, and you have failed; it has touched you, and you are confounded. 32. The perverse assail the life of the good in two ways. — Perverse men assail the life of the good in two ways, for they either assert that the good speak evil, or that they do not keep the right things they speak. Whence blessed Job also is reproved below by his friends for his speaking; but now he is torn at for having spoken rightly, yet not having kept these things. By the wicked, then, at one time the speech of the good is reproved, at another their action, so that either the reproved tongue may fall silent, or, condemned by the testimony of its own tongue, their life may sink under the charge. And it must be noted that first they bring in praises of the tongue, and afterward complain of the weakness of the life.
For the wicked, lest they appear openly perverse, sometimes speak good things about the righteous, things which they know to be already recognized by others as well. But, as we have said before, these very things they at once drag over to the heaping up of guilt, and they show that they should be believed in contrary matters, from the fact that they were also speaking prosperous things; and they insinuate evils as though the more truly, by so much as they were praising the good as though devoutly. To the service of a charge, then, they twist the voices of favor, while thereby they wound the life of the righteous the more grievously afterward, from that very point by which a little before they seemed outwardly to defend it. Often, moreover, the good things which before they despise as possessed, these they afterward marvel at as though lost. Whence Eliphaz too, because he asserts that the holy man's virtues have been lost, adds them by enumerating, saying: