I have heard many such things: miserable comforters are you all.
Read Chapter 16
George Leo Haydock
AD 1849
Comforters. "Job's friends or comforters "are become proverbial, to denote people who do the contrary to what they seem to promise. (Haydock)
Never did men sustain worse the character of comforters. They all magnify their knowledge and piety, and make the most absurd application of their principles to Job's condition. (Calmet)
He was not ignorant that tyrants and wicked men were often, nay generally till the age in which he lived, visited with visible judgments. (Haydock)
2. For the Elect often hear the wrong things of others, as if they belonged to themselves, and guilt is charged upon them by those, by whom the charges so fastened on them are done. Now by this reply, blessed Job denotes that season of the Church, when, under oppression from her adversaries, she is looked upon as cast to the ground by their temporal power. Whence it follows; burthensome comforters are ye all. Whether they be heretics, or whether any of the wicked, when they see the good travailing in adversity, herein that they aim to console them, they endeavour to prompt wrong things to their minds. Whence not without reason their consoling is rendered burthensome to the mind of good men, in that amongst words of sweetness, they are bent to proffer the poison of error, and whilst in seeming they lighten their griefs by soothing words, they are in haste to put upon them a load of sin. But Elect persons, even when they are bereft of temporal glory, do not lose the forcibleness of...
You are “comforters” but very wicked ones. No word of yours is for the good, but they are all for the bad. You teach, you give advice, and you propose not how ordeals must be avoided, but how [new] ordeals will be obtained from affliction! [You do not teach] how a storm must be abated but how harmful agitations can be raised from peace. - "Homilies on Job 19.16.2b"
Since Eliphaz speaks so, as if the matter were of extraordinary importance, and talks as if his speech derived from the wisdom of the ancestors, Job also resumes the argument he had used at the beginning. Is what you say not evident, he says? Therefore, since you speak superficially and utter what comes to your mind without checking your words, do not be annoyed with me if I express the thoughts of my mind. - "Commentary on Job 16.1–2"
