In the Book of Job, Eliphaz is the first friend to speak, and he opens with a ghost story. A spirit passed before his face in the night, he says, and the hair of his flesh stood up. Then a voice asked whether a mortal can be more just than God. It is the kind of detail a visionary like William Blake could not resist.
This is plate 9 of his Illustrations of the Book of Job, the engraved series he finished in 1826. A tall robed figure stands wrapped in light, arms folded, on a bank of cloud, and the cloud streaks outward like a wind. Below, the friends crouch and recoil, with their hair visibly rising from their heads. At the right, an old bearded figure sits in the clouds above them, watching.
What you notice depends on how well you know Blake. In his reading, the friends who comfort Job are the problem, since they preach a moral accounting where suffering is always deserved. The vision Eliphaz describes is the source of that doctrine, and the spirit is not the loving god of the opening plates. Many scholars see Blake hinting that the dazzling voice is closer to a false god, a figure who speaks pure law and no mercy.
Look at the text around the image. The border carries the verses from Job and Blake's own marginal notes, and the bottom line quotes the passage about the hair rising. The text is part of the engraving, cut in Blake's hand lettering.
It is a quiet plate compared with the Satan scenes, but it is the one where the trouble starts.
Blake's The Vision of Eliphaz appears on our: