"_Plead then: will any one answer thee; And to which of the holy ones wilt thou turn? Nay, resentment killeth the fool, And hasty indignation slayeth the silly. I myself have seen a godless fool take root; Yet straightway I cursed his habitation:-- His children are far from succour, They are crushed in the gate without deliverer: While the hungry eats up his harvest And snatches it even out of the thorns, And the snare gapes for their substance._" The desolation he saw come suddenly, even when the impious man had just taken root as founder of a family, Eliphaz declares to be a curse from the Most High; and he describes it with much force. Upon the children of the household disaster falls at the gate or place of judgment; there is no one to plead for them, because the father is marked for the vengeance of God. Predatory tribes from the desert devour first the crops in the remoter fields, and then those protected by the thorn hedge near the homestead. The man had been an oppressor; now those he had oppressed are under no restraint, and all he has is swallowed up without redress. So much for the third attempt to convict Job and bring him to confession. It is a bolt shot apparently at a venture, yet it strikes where it must wound to the quick. Here, however, made aware, perhaps by a look of anguish or a sudden gesture, that he has gone too far, Eliphaz draws back. To the general dogma that affliction is the lot of every human being he returns, that the sting may be taken out of his words:-- "_For disaster cometh not forth from the dust, And out of the ground trouble springeth not; But man is born unto trouble As the sparks fly upward._"