Albert Barnes Commentary Job 15:14

"What is man, that he should be clean? And he that is born of a woman, that he should be righteous?" — Job 15:14 (ASV)

What is man that he should be clean? - The object of Eliphaz in this is to overturn Job's positions that he was righteous and had been punished beyond his deserts. He had before maintained (Job 4:7) that no one ever perished being innocent, and that the righteous were not cut off. This was a favorite position with him; and indeed, the whole drift of the argument maintained by him and his friends was to prove that uncommon calamities were proof of uncommon guilt.

Job had insisted that he was a righteous man and had not deserved the calamities which had come upon him—a position which Eliphaz seems to have regarded as an assertion of innocence. To meet this, he now maintains that no one is righteous, that all who are born of women are guilty. In proof of this, he goes back to the oracle which had made so deep an impression on his mind, and to the declaration then made to him that no one was pure before God (Job 4:0); he does not repeat it exactly as the oracle was then delivered to him but refers to its substance and regards it as final and indisputable. The meaning is, “What are all man’s pretensions to purity, when even the angels are regarded as impure and the heavens unclean?”

He who is born of a woman - This is another mode of denoting man. No particular argument to maintain the doctrine of man’s depravity is couched in the fact that he is born of a woman. The sense is, simply, how can anyone of the human family be pure?