Job's Wife

In Job 1, we see how Job’s piety precedes his prosperity. Satan is undeterred in his accusations against Job, since, in his opinion, the loss of wealth is nothing compared to the loss of health. What ensues in Job 2 is a concentration of suffering for Job along physical, psychological, and spiritual lines. A key consideration in the interpretation of Job 2 is the role that Job’s wife plays. How should we understand her words to her husband? Is she being sympathetic or antagonistic? This reflection will take some time considering Job’s wife.

First, we must assess the context that gives rise to the words of Job’s wife. In Job 2:7, we learn that Satan, with circumscribed power, afflicts Job’s health severely from head to toe. The exact diagnosis of Job’s condition is immaterial; the point, as one commentator has summarized, is that “Job was smitten by a repulsive disease that not only tormented him but also symbolized [at least for the original reading audience] that he was encountering the wrath of God.”[1] After all, boils were included among the curses for covenant disobedience in Deuteronomy 28. There is, then, at least a literary context for making connections between the state of Job’s health and divine displeasure. Job himself makes a clear connection between his physical suffering and divine displeasure, though he is vexed by it. In Job 9:17-18 (ESV), he says of God, “For he crushes me with a tempest and multiplies my wounds without cause; he will not let me get my breath, but fills me with bitterness.”

It is in that context, then, that Job’s wife says to him, “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die” (Job 2:9 ESV). Grammatically, Job’s wife begins with a question of fact, inviting an answer of yes or no.[2] That this question is followed immediately by two imperatives, i.e. “curse”[3] God and die, suggests that Job’s wife’s own assessment of the facts of the matter is that Job has no grounds for holding fast to his integrity. It is also noteworthy that her words are a combination of God’s positive assessment of Job’s character and Satan’s prediction of what would happen when Job’s health was taken from him.

All that is plain enough, and these words function in the chapter as a means by which Job may express once more his nuanced faith. Importantly, the narrator tells us that even in this second, grievous trial Job did not sin with his lips. Without further elaboration, Job affirms that there need not be a mechanical relationship between suffering and sin. In his response to his wife, he reflects the mysterious testimony of Scripture that God is the sovereign Lord over all, as the Lord says of himself in Isa 45:7 (ESV), “I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the LORD, who does all these things.” To this he adds, “Woe to him who strives with him who formed him, a pot among earthen pots! Does the clay say to him who forms it, 'What are you making?' or 'Your work has no handles'?” (Isa 45:9 ESV). That is the thrust of Job’s response.

But what do we make of the words of Job’s wife? Is she being the devil’s handmaid? Is she sympathetically assessing what her eyes see? Is she speaking out of self-protection? Certainly our assessment of Job’s wife and her words is influenced by many factors. If we assume that she truly loves her husband, then we come at her words quite differently than if we picture these two as a grumpy, griping old couple.[4] If we remember that women were highly dependent on their husbands or fathers, then we may approach her words more sympathetically as one who has lost all support and safety.[5] Finally, and as already noted, it may be that Job’s wife has assessed the calamitous events according to a mechanical view of sin and suffering, in which case she is suspicious of Job’s claim to integrity. If that is the case, it should be noted that Job’s wife does little more than Job’s friends will do. They all speak foolishly in their assessment of Job’s situation. While Job’s friends counsel him to confess sins that he has not committed—all in a clinical way—Job’s wife confronts him with the pathos of a loved one.

In the end, the point of this reflection is that we do well not to come to hasty judgments about Job’s wife. She does not offer wise counsel to her husband, but we should be careful about impugning her motivation. Her misguided words ultimately allow Job to point all of us to the Lord as our hope for persevering integrity.

[1] John E. Hartley, The Book of Job, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 82–83.

[2] Bruce K. Waltke and Michael Patrick O’Connor, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 316.

[3] “Curse” is actually the word “bless,” but “bless” is being used euphemistically in this context to mean the opposite.

[4] David J. A. Clines, Job 1-20, WBC 17 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2015), 52.

[5] Clines, Job 1-20, 51.