"If, up to this point, Job has been praying, or at least soliloquizing, now he makes a more direct attack on the friends (the you' in verse 21 is plural)."42
Job's friends had not been loyal to him when they judged him as they did. "Kindness"in verse 14 is literally "loyalty."Consequently Job was close to forsaking his fear of God. Job's friends should have encouraged and supported him. Instead they proved as disappointing as a wadi. A wadi is a stream bed that is full of water in the rainy season, but when the heat of summer comes it dries up completely. Job replied that his friends were no help in his distress.
Evidently Job's friends were afraid of him (v. 21) in the sense that they feared that if they comforted him God would view them as approving of his sin and would punish them as well.43
"Verse 21 is the climax of Job's reaction to his friends' counsel [thus far]. They offered no help."44
"There is no act of pastoral care more unnerving than trying to say the right thing to someone hysterical with grief. It is early in the day for Job to lose patience with them. But the point is not whether Job is unfair: this is how he feels. The truth is already in sight that only God can speak the right word. And Job's wits are sharp enough to forecast where Eliphaz's trend of thought will end--in open accusation of sin. Hence he gets in first with a pre-emptive strike, anticipating in the following denials his great speech of exculpation in chapter 31."45
