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Victor SASSON |
Biblica 79 (1998) 86-90 |
The Literary and Theological Function of Job's Wife in the Book of
Job
I.
In the Prologue to the Book of Job, Job is depicted as notorious for his great
wealth, and famous for his exceptional piety. God, presiding over an angelic
convention, draws Satan's attention to this perfect man. He asks an innocent,
rhetorical question regarding Job's commendable piety. Satan exploits this occasion
to brand Job a hypocrite, accusing him of having some ulterior motive for his
piety. Job – he says – must be giving only lip service in return for the great
material prosperity God has showered upon him. Once he is deprived of this
prosperity and struck with disease, Job will certainly blaspheme. Eventually,
God is induced to put Job to the test – as suggested by Satan – with all manner
of disease, having first destroyed all his wealth and eliminated all his ten
children. But Job still does not blaspheme. For one reason or another, Job's
wife is left untouched. At some point she intimates to her husband that he is
something of a fool for sticking to his blind faith in God. She tells him to
curse God and die. He rebukes her:
You talk as any wicked fool of a woman
might talk. If we accept good from God, shall we not
accept evil? (2,10;
It is not clear why Job's wife is spared the fate of the children. In the
Epilogue to the story – although she remains nameless – she serves as a
necessary vehicle for the continuation of Job's line.
II.
In a recent essay on the Book of Job, David Clines makes some statements about
Job and his wife from an unconventional stance. He discusses such issues as
patriarchy, the suffering of Job's wife, gender dominance, and makes biased and
unfair allegations against Job the man and his author 1.
He defines patriarchy as "a social system in which men have unproblematic
power over women" and views Job's verbal rebuke of his sacrilegious wife
as an example of such power over women. Job – it is alleged – lumps all women
as "foolish chatterers"! There is no evidence, however, that Job
lumps all women as such. It is also not clear how one can dismiss Job's
wife's terrible blasphemy so lightly, while at the same time magnifying and
condemning Job's well-deserved verbal reprimand.
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Then Job is accused of ignoring or suppressing his wife's suffering in the
story. This allegation shows a failure in understanding that Job's wife is not
a major character in the dramatis personae. The book is not a drama
about Job's wife. She plays a minor role – and, admittedly, a negative one.
There is no reason to see this as sex discrimination on the part of the book's
author.
What is central to the drama is the suffering and torments of Job himself.
Perhaps more importantly, Job's wife is not a conscientious, devoted, sensible,
compassionate wife like, say, Portia (the wife of Brutus). If she were such a
wife, she would embrace her husband's suffering as her own. She would tell her
husband it is God's will to submit oneself to adversity. She would be a tower
of strength to him. We do not expect her to be the perfect, ideal wife –
portrayed in chapter 31 of the Book of Proverbs –, one who speaks nothing but
wisdom and lovingkindness; but we do expect her to be
a sensible, God-fearing woman. The Prologue to the Book of Job, however, makes
it quite clear that she is fickle and sacrilegious. In fact, she only adds to
her husband's suffering, distancing herself from him. She has developed a
loathing for him. In the words of Job himself:
My breath is noisome to my wife (19,17a;
She is, indeed, a foolish woman, speaking like one of those foolish
female chatterers. She makes an outrageous, blasphemous suggestion: to curse
God and incur the penalty of death. In a sense, she joins hands with the
Adversary, Satan. By seeking death for her husband, she seeks the easiest way
out of a marriage and a commitment; the easiest way out of a test. Typically,
our politically-correct critic twists the evidence and accuses the victim, not
the perpetrator – simply because the perpetrator happens to be female. He
points a finger at good, steadfast, pious Job – now dispossessed, humiliated,
in pain, wallowing in dirt and ashes – of treating his wife as a non-entity 2.
III.
Another claim is that Job's wife – even though she herself says nothing about
this personal matter – has spent fifteen "whole years" of her life
being pregnant with Job's twenty children (seven sons and three daughters
before Job's trials began, in ch. 1; and again seven
sons and three daughters after his trials, in ch.
42). But, surely, they are her children as well as his. Children in the
Near East are considered a blessing and a source of happiness, and the Hebrew
Scriptures enjoin us to have as many of them as possible (cf. Ps. 127) 3.
Our critic simply cannot entertain the thought that
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Job's wife actually desired and enjoyed
bearing and raising her own children. He has uncritically adopted a fashionable
stance of aborting nature and substituting rhetoric for substance.
IV.
Regarding the so-called gender dominance, there is ignorance – if not deliberate
suppression – of the subtle (and not so subtle) dominance of women over men.
Men and women are different, because they have been made different. They
have different anatomy and different psychology. Women exert their dominance over men differently.
In the case of Job's wife, to get herself out of her commitment and thus betray
her husband in his terrible adversity, she did not ask for divorce. She found a
better convenient alternative at hand: she simply told her husband to commit
suicide! There will be commentators, no doubt, who will contend that Job's wife
only wanted to help her poor husband out of his misery. Such a warped
interpretation, however, would only violate the tenor and drift of the text.
In connection with Job's three beautiful daughters and the inheritance their
father gives them (ch. 42), the comment is made that
"the daughters inherit, because the man Job is charmed by them". But
this is, surely, begrudging a father looking at his daughters and marvelling at their beauty. Job does not give them
inheritance merely because they are beautiful. More likely, the story seeks to
show the continued fairness and generosity of the new, restored Job.
V.
As regards sexual temptation, Job is clear about his resistance to it. He is
married to a woman he loves very much. He is – and remains to be – a faithful
husband, even though the woman he loves is not steadfast:
If my heart has been enticed by a woman
or I have lain in wait at my neighbour's door, may my
wife be another man's slave, and may other men enjoy her (31,9-10; NEB).
As a married man, Job even resists gazing at a young virgin:
I have come to terms with my eyes, never
to take notice of a girl (31,1;
Based on the biblical account that Job's three daughters were exceedingly
beautiful (42,15), we may credit their mother with
captivating physical beauty (and their father with good looks). This is in
keeping with experience which shows physical beauty marred in some persons by
flawed character. Beauty, however, cannot be a substitute for piety and good
character. By itself, it is mere vanity, skin-deep (cf. Prov.
31,30). Job's nameless wife, therefore, must have been
beautiful – but her beauty was marred by fickleness of character, impiety, and
selfishness.
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VI.
It is a well known scientific fact – much to the chagrin of the male – that the
female of the species will preferably mate, if she can, with the male who is
most powerful – the one who is most able to provide the most security. In human
society, too, this is a fact of life which only a sheltered person living in an
ivory tower can deny. Margaret Mead, the noted anthropologist, observes:
"In women's eyes, public achievement makes a man more attractive as a
marriage partner 4.
In a real sense, then, it is the female of the species who has always had a
need for patriarchy – with all the positive and negative aspects it entails. It
is she who must have originally created, encouraged, and perpetuated this now
much maligned institution. But, evidently, it is part and parcel of the natural
process and it is doubtful that anyone can ever succeed in dislodging and
eliminating it. It appears to be desperately and tacitly needed by the majority
of ordinary, decent women themselves, irrespective of the financial
independence they might achieve. Needless to say, with protection comes
power-problematic or unproblematic, desirable or undesirable. Perhaps had men
naturally needed matriarchy to the extent women have always needed
patriarchy, similar results would obtain.
There are, therefore, firm grounds to believe that Job's wife must have married
a man much older than herself – a Job who had struggled hard enough to amass a
notorious wealth. She certainly did not marry him for his wisdom: we can rest
assured on that score. Nor did she marry him for his piety, which she
considered a simpleton's folly and at which she eventually scoffed. A man with
seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, and
five hundred she-donkeys was to be wooed and brought under the marriage canopy.
As a shrewd young lady, she must have found an older, Job rather attractive for
a marriage partner, and must have eagerly sought the protection of his name and
the security of his wealth. All of this is borne out by the fact that the woman
– who had extraordinary physical stamina (in contradistinction to her mental
impatience) – bore Job ten children before his trials began, and ten more after
his restoration, making it a total of twenty. Allowing an average of two years
span between each childbirth, Job's wife was pregnant
over a period of forty years (barring the possibility of any twins). This is a
positive and commendable role in the dramatic and near tragic history of the
man Job. But – as we shall soon see – this cannot have been undertaken without
self-interest in mind.
VII.
Much that we would like to, we cannot end on a positive note regarding Job's
wife. We cannot forget that she distanced herself from her husband in his most
difficult hour. No doubt some commentators will gloss over or whitewash this
part and other embarrassing parts in the story – to suit their political agenda.
But Job, undergoing extreme torments of body
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and mind, had also to suffer the estrangement of an
unfeeling, self-centered wife (19,17a) – the woman he loved and cherished. In
his downfall, she added to his humiliation before the eyes of the world. This
was the most unkind cut of all. For one can forgive
God for an undeserved test. One can even try to understand Satan's difficult
position – that of a professional Adversary. But how can one forgive the
treachery of the wife of one's bosom at a time when one needs her most? And yet
Job foregave her and accepted her return, even though
he knew she was only thinking of herself. This is what God called perfect faith
and what Job's wife considered to be the faith of a simpleton. Seeing that she
also offered him the choice of killing himself, and that she blasphemed God,
our overall assessment of this person cannot but be negative. We do acknowledge
her productive fecundity, but even in that specific area in which she excelled
so well, she did not persevere without obvious self-interest. After the death
of her first ten children, she must have hoped for the restoration of her
husband's fortunes and consequently, of her own. And, indeed, her estrangement
from her husband – we notice – lasted the length of the dialogues and of Job's
trials. This was not a matter of days or weeks, but more probably a matter of
months. The moment her husband's fortunes were restored, however, she soon
found a way of reclaiming her position as Mistress of the House in Job's
mansion. As a shrewd, patriarchal, Iron Age feminist, this nameless woman
played her cards exceedingly well. No wonder the Epilogue to Job's drama makes no mention of her at all. It ignores her completely.
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Victor SASSON |
© 1998 Biblica
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1 D. CLINES, "Why is Therea
Book of Job, and What Does it Do to You if You Read it?",
The Book of Job(ed. W.A.M. BEUKEN) (
2 A bizarreclaim is made that
commentators on the Book of Job are biased because they "are allmale"! The question is not asked why are there no female commentators on Job.
3 Job's wife isobviously a
woman of independent thinking and there is no evidence she was coerced intounwanted pregnancies.
4 M. MEAD, Somepersonal
Views (