Job's Wife

 

Gaspare Traversi, Job mocked by his wife

Job has always been interesting to me. Reading that book as a child, I did not get the same message from his friends that I do after years of reading, praying, and living through some inexplicable life events that would fit "Why do bad things happen to good people," even when I didn't personally know the person affected.

But recently a friend added to her blog thoughts - or conversations - about Job's wife - as she asked: "Where Was Job's Wife."  His wife does show up in a number  of paintings, and there are innumerable citations about her on the web. The above painting could be the "thousand words" of :

Then said his wife unto him, Dost thou still retain thine integrity? curse God, and die. (Job 2:9 KJV)

There is no doubt about the meaning of her words. A look at Job 2:9 in any translation confirms her words were not filled with kindness. For the longest time I looked no further. While the majority of women in the Bible are names, she along with some others only get a description as being a wife, mother, or sometimes their sin.

Take a moment to look at the descriptions before this scene. She was the mother of ten children. It appears they all got along. How often do our children get together on their own:

And his sons went and feasted in their houses, every one his day; and sent and called for their three sisters to eat and to drink with them. (Job 1:4 KJV)

Job/s first chapter tells us about what he lost. There, as a reflection of the times, is no mention that his wife lost all of those things listed in Job 1:13-19, too. However, there is no mention of Job's home being destroyed. Was it, as his son's is described, four cornered? Could it have been a tent? Job had herds, did their homes move with their oxen, sheep, camels, and asses?

If so, it would have been the wife's responsibility to see to their home - their meals, their foodstuff, their pots and pans, their cooking utensils, their bedding, their pillows, the very fabric of their home were it tents instead of buildings. For a large family, there would have been servants, for whom she was responsible. When they packed for moving, everything would have been managed by Job's wife.

Now, her husband is on the ground:

Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, And said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD. (Job 1:20-21 KJV)

Next we learn Job is covered in boils and the words recorded from her lips are:

And he took him a potsherd to scrape himself withal; and he sat down among the ashes. Then said his wife unto him, Dost thou still retain thine integrity? curse God, and die. (Job 2:8-9 KJV)

Neither she nor any other woman is mentioned again until the last chapter, but I like to feel this painting reflects how she tended to her husband as he suffered:

There is no other mention of Job's unnamed wife. Even at the end of the book, where we find that he received a double portion of all that was lost:

So the LORD blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning: for he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses. He had also seven sons and three daughters. (Job 42:12-13 KJV)

There is no indication, in this book at least, that those ten children were borne by another wife. That wasn't the point, the lesson, from Job's story.

Part of his story is the doubling of his loss in oxen, sheep, camels and asses. But not his children. 

For me, it is confirmation that those children were where God wanted them to be, where the family would be doubled when Job and his wife's time to join them arrived. In heaven, Job would have twenty children - fourteen boys and six girls. Eventually, living as Job taught and lived his own life, there would be others, many he got to see before he died:

After this lived Job an hundred and forty years, and saw his sons, and his sons' sons, even four generations. So Job died, being old and full of days. (Job 42:16-17 KJV)

I have no desire to make that 140 years, but I have been blessed to see son and daughters, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, along with the continuation of great-great-grandchildren raised to believe the Bible, with God's promise that there is more than what we see here in this world. Perhaps in the next I can know more about Job's wife:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1 Corinthians 13:12 KJV)