Job, pious as he is, does not curse God. He tears his clothes, bows down, and blesses Him.
Once more, God says to the Adversary that there is none more pious than Job, and once more the Adversary jeers, “Skin for skin! A man will give all he has for his own life. Yet, reach out, pray, Your hand and strike his bone and his flesh. Will he not curse You to Your face?” (Job 2:5, Alter)
Yet again, God gives Job up to the Adversary — “Only preserve his life” — who strikes Job with a rash from head to toe, leaving him to sit among the ashes and scrape at his flesh.
-His friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar commiserate with him, sitting silent with him for seven days and nights. Even Job’s wife seems to sigh: “Do you still cling to your innocence? Curse God and die.” (Job 2:9, Alter)
+His friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar commiserate with him, sitting silent with him for seven days and nights. Even Job’s wife seems to sigh: “Do you still cling to your innocence? Curse God and die.”5 (Job 2:9, Alter)
And now we skip all the way to the last chapter of the book for the conclusion of the framing device. God commands that Job’s friends offer up sacrifices on his behalf, and when they do, all of Job’s wealth is restored twice over. 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels and so on, down to seven more sons and three more daughters (which he gives the delightful names Dove, Cinnamon, and Horn of Eyeshade). Job lives another hundred and forty years, long enough to see four generations of offspring, until he dies “aged and sated in years.” (Job 42:17, Alter)
Of all of the book of Job, it is this framing device which seems to cause the most controversy. Even the Apocrypals podcast, whose tagline is “Where two non-believers read the bible and try not to be jerks about it”, drops the ‘and try not to be jerks about it’ for this episode, host Chris Sims explaining, “Unfortunately, this week we are reading the book of Job.” \parencite{apocrypals}
A simplification, of course, but perhaps a good starting point. ↩
This is the translation of the phrase in Hebrew, hasatan. Alter notes that it wasn’t until much more recently that this was refigured as specifically Satan: “The word satan is a person, thing, or set of circumstances that constitutes an obstacle or frustrates one’s purposes.”4 \parencite[466]{alter} The Jewish Publication Society concurs. (Job 1:6, JPS via Sefaria) It is job title more than it is identity. ↩
+This is the translation of the phrase in Hebrew, hasatan. Alter notes that it wasn’t until much more recently that this was refigured as specifically Satan: “The word satan is a person, thing, or set of circumstances that constitutes an obstacle or frustrates one’s purposes.”4 \parencite[466]{alter} The Jewish Publication Society concurs. (Job 1:6, JPS via Sefaria) It is job title more than it is identity. In fact, the transition from the Adversary to Satan himself is fraught ((etc etc, also footnote to ally)) ↩
Shortly after I started to realize just how ill-suited I was to music education, I went through a change of identity online. While before I had gone by the name ‘Ranna’, cribbed from Garth Nix’s excellent Old Kingdom series, I now began to go by the name Makyo, a zen Buddhist term which bears a similar meaning. Something about just how focused many of the general teacher education classes were on things other than education filled me with a sense that I might not actually be in any way helping students, but simply standing in their way. I was makyō. I was satan. ↩
((Alter suggests sarcastic interpretation: what is the point of maintaining your innocence? Might as well, wretch that you are. NOAB has his wife as more sympathetic in that she has also lost everything; Job’s reply not sinning with his lips disproves the Adversary ↩
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