Interpretations of Eliphaz’s first speech (Job 4-5) going back at least 75 years have been torn between radically different and opposed options. Whether Eliphaz is characterized as a well-intending friend whose counsel drifts more or less unintentionally towards accusation or a sly, perhaps even sarcastic fiend whose inauthentic words of comfort hardly soften the harshness of his dogma, interpreters agree that the speech’s meaning and the subjective position from which it is spoken are inherently related. This a hen-and-egg kind of problem: does one’s position on Eliphaz’s mood determine the meaning of his speech or does its meaning determine one’s conclusion about his mood? Any determination about meaning can only be made on the basis of one’s (presup)position about mood which, therefore, cannot be grounded in the speech’s meaning. This paper abandons the vague notions of “mood” and “meaning” for the more critical categories of the subject and signification. Unlike mood, the subject is not external to the field of meaning, it is this field’s internal limit (at least in the theoretical tradition oriented around J. Lacan). Interrogating the subject of Job 4-5 rather than the speaker’s mood enables us to avoid this interpretive either/or and grasp Eliphaz’s message anew. Eliphaz takes the positions of ignorance implied by Job’s questions in ch.3 and produced by the ambivalence of his speech in ch.4 and offers God in ch.5, not as an answer, but as the ultimate force of ignorance – the doer of the unfathomable (5:9), the frustrater of the wise (5:12-14). With God as the subject (the immanent limit of signification), Eliphaz turns all ignorances into their opposite, the instruction of God (5:17), i.e. wisdom (cf. Prov 8:3). Eliphaz thus teaches what von Rad and few others have (re)learned, that wisdom’s essence is quintessentially bespoken at its limits.