Job — Chapter 2

Authorship & Background

Deep Dive

Setting: Chapter 1 ended with Job on his face before God, stripped of his flocks, his servants and all ten of his children, and still saying, "blessed be the name of the LORD" (1:21). Satan's theory, that Job only worshiped God because God paid him well, has failed. But the Accuser doesn't give up. Chapter 2 follows the same pattern as chapter 1: a scene in heaven, a permission with a limit, a disaster on earth, and Job's response. This time the attack reaches Job's own body, and it comes through the people closest to him as well. The chapter ends quietly, with three friends sitting in the dust beside him for a week, and that silence is the doorway into the long poetic debate that fills most of the book.

Satan Attacks Job's Health (vv1–10)

• "Again there was a day" (v1). The opening is almost word for word the same as 1:6–8. The repetition is deliberate. The reader is meant to feel that we are back in the same courtroom, before the same King, with the same Accuser, but now with the result of round one on the record. The "sons of God" are again the angels who serve in God's court, and "Satan" is again ha-satan, "the adversary."
• "From going to and fro on the earth" (v2). Satan's answer is the same as before. He has learned nothing and repented of nothing. He is still roaming, still looking for fault.
• "He still holds fast his integrity" (v3). God adds one line to his earlier praise. "Integrity" is tummah, from the same root as "blameless" (tam) in 1:1: wholeness, a life that is all of a piece. The word appears only five times in the Old Testament, and four of them are in Job. Job's wife throws it back at him in v9, and Job himself will refuse to let it go: "till I die I will not put away my integrity from me" (27:5). The book is in large part about whether Job's integrity will survive.
• "You incited me against him to destroy him without reason" (v3). This is one of the boldest sentences in the book. God speaks as if Satan had pushed him into acting. "Incited" is the word used when David says that if the LORD has "stirred you up against me," let him accept an offering (1 Sam 26:19), and when Satan "incited David" to number Israel (1 Chr 21:1). The sentence doesn't mean God was manipulated against his will. It means the attack was real, it came from God's hand, and Job did nothing to deserve it. "Without reason" is chinnam, the same word Satan used in 1:9: "Does Job fear God for no reason?" Satan claimed Job served God for nothing in return. God answers that Job suffered for nothing in return. The Tyndale notes point out the wordplay.
• "Skin for skin!" (v4). This sounds like a proverb from trade, a fair swap of one hide for another. Satan's point is plain enough even if the exact image isn't: a man will give up anything outside himself, even his children, to save his own skin. So far God has only touched what Job has. Touch what Job is, and his faith will crack.
• "Touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face" (v5). "Bone and flesh" means the whole person, the body at its core. The Tyndale notes add that ancient people often thought of the bones as the seat of health and strength (compare Ps 6:2; Prov 3:8). Once more Satan asks God to do it, and once more the word "curse" is the polite substitute barak, "bless," as in 1:5 and 1:11.
• "Behold, he is in your hand; only spare his life" (v6). God moves the limit, but he still sets it. "Spare" is literally "guard" or "keep watch over." The Tyndale notes observe the irony: God makes the Accuser responsible for keeping Job alive. Satan can do terrible things, but he cannot take one step past the line God draws.
• "Loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head" (v7). The word is shechin, "boil" or "eruption," the same word used for the boils on the Egyptians (Exod 9:9–11), for skin disease in the purity laws (Lev 13:18–20), for Hezekiah's near-fatal illness (2 Kgs 20:7), and for one of the covenant curses, "the boils of Egypt… of which you cannot be healed" (Deut 28:27, 35). That last link is painful. Job's body now looks like the body of a man under God's curse, which is exactly how his friends will read it. Nobody knows the exact disease. Later chapters describe itching, open sores that crust and break again, worms, blackened and peeling skin, fever, wasting, nightmares and constant pain (7:4–5, 14; 19:20; 30:17, 30).
• "A piece of broken pottery with which to scrape himself" (v8). A potsherd, the most common rubbish in any ancient town. Job scrapes his skin for some relief from the itching. The Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint) says he scraped away the pus.
• "While he sat in the ashes" (v8). The rich man of chapter 1 is now sitting in the ash heap, probably the town dump outside the walls where refuse was burned. Sitting in ashes was also a sign of deep grief and humiliation (Jonah 3:6; Isa 58:5), so this may be a choice as much as a place. Either way, Job has gone from "the greatest of all the people of the east" (1:3) to the bottom of the town's rubbish pile.
• "Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die" (v9). Job's wife repeats God's own words from v3, "holds fast his integrity," but as a taunt or a plea. Without knowing it, she voices Satan's exact prediction. She has lost everything Job lost, all ten of her children included, and readers have long disagreed about her. Some hear contempt: give up on God, and let him strike you dead for it. Others hear anguish: she can't bear to watch him suffer and would rather he died. The text doesn't say which, and it may have been both. The Septuagint gives her a much longer speech about her own wandering and grief. Scholars agree it is a later expansion, not part of the original Hebrew, but it shows how early readers felt for her.
• "You speak as one of the foolish women would speak" (v10). Job doesn't call her a fool. He says she is talking like one. "Foolish" (nabal) in the Old Testament is a moral word, not an intellectual one. It describes the person who lives as though God doesn't matter: "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God'" (Ps 14:1). Job is saying, in effect, "That's not who you are."
• "Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?" (v10). "Evil" here means trouble or disaster, not moral wickedness (compare Isa 45:7; Lam 3:38). Job's answer goes a step beyond 1:21. There he blessed God for both giving and taking. Here he says that a person who gladly takes God's gifts has no right to refuse God's hard providences. Note the "we": he includes his wife in it.
• "In all this Job did not sin with his lips" (v10). The Tyndale notes connect this with the Bible's teaching on the tongue (Prov 13:3; Jas 3:2). Some older Jewish teachers noticed the phrase "with his lips" and suggested Job was already sinning in his heart. That reads too much into it. The narrator is simply answering Satan's prediction, "he will curse you to your face." He didn't. Round two goes to Job. Satan never appears in the book again.
• Commentators: Henry calls Satan "that sworn enemy to God and all good men," and sees God's restraint in v6 as pointing forward: "Job, in being thus maligned by Satan, was a type of Christ, the first prophecy of whom was that Satan should bruise his heel" (Gen 3:15). He grants that "skin for skin" has some truth in it, since self-preservation is a powerful instinct, but Satan uses it to slander. Guzik notes that God and Satan both assume nothing touches Job without God's permission, and that "without reason" means Job gave no sinful cause, not that God had no purpose. The three differ on Job's wife. Guzik is the most sympathetic, reminding readers that she had lost her children too. Henry calls her Satan's tool and hears in "die" a push toward self-destruction. JFB reads her "curse" as "renounce" God and adds, "Nothing makes the ungodly so angry as to see the godly under trial not angry." JFB says Job "was covered with one universal inflammation" and suggests a form of leprosy (elephantiasis). That is a guess, and most modern scholars leave the disease unnamed.

Job's Three Friends (vv11–13)

• "Job's three friends heard of all this evil" (v11). News traveled slowly. The Tyndale notes suggest months may have passed (7:3 speaks of "months of emptiness"), long enough for word to reach three men in different lands and for them to arrange to travel together.
• "Eliphaz the Temanite" (v11). Teman was a region of Edom, south and east of the Dead Sea, famous for its wise men: "Is wisdom no more in Teman?" (Jer 49:7; Obad 8). Eliphaz is the name of Esau's firstborn son, and Teman was Esau's grandson (Gen 36:10–11). Eliphaz speaks first in each round of the debate, probably because he is the oldest.
• "Bildad the Shuhite" (v11). Shuah was one of Abraham's sons by Keturah, sent away "to the east country" (Gen 25:2, 6). No place called Shuah is known for certain.
• "Zophar the Naamathite" (v11). "Naamah" isn't known as a place outside Judah, so his homeland is uncertain. The Greek Old Testament lists a Zophar among Esau's descendants, which would make all three men from the Edom region, the land of wisdom. These are not foolish men. They are the best thinkers of their world, and that is part of the point. The book will test their wisdom against Job's suffering.
• "They made an appointment together to come to show him sympathy and comfort him" (v11). Their purpose was good. "Show sympathy" is literally "to shake the head" or "to rock to and fro," a gesture of grief that came to mean consoling someone. They traveled a long way to do it.
• "They did not recognize him" (v12). The disease had so changed Job's face that his old friends couldn't tell who he was from a distance. Isaiah uses the same kind of language about the suffering Servant: "his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance" (Isa 52:14).
• Weeping, torn robes, dust toward heaven (v12). These are the actions of mourning for the dead (Josh 7:6; 1 Sam 4:12; Lam 2:10). They grieve over Job as if he were already gone. Throwing dust "toward heaven" so it falls back on the head may also be a way of crying out to God.
• "They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him" (v13). Seven days was the normal mourning period for a death (Gen 50:10; 1 Sam 31:13). Ezekiel sat "overwhelmed" among the exiles for seven days before speaking (Ezek 3:15). In Jewish custom, mourners still wait for the grieving person to speak first. This week of silence is the best thing the friends do in the whole book. When they finally open their mouths, they will do great harm.
• "For they saw that his suffering was very great" (v13). "Suffering" is the word for pain, both bodily and inner. They saw it rightly. Their mistake will come later, when they try to explain it.
• Commentators: Henry praises their purpose, "Good people should make appointments among themselves for doing good," but warns ahead of time, "Many that aim well do, by mistake, come short of their aim." Guzik gives the friends real credit: they came, they wept, they stayed silent, and they meant well. That is more than most of Job's acquaintances did (19:13–19). JFB explains the dust thrown toward heaven as a sign of the deepest mourning and reads the silence simply: "extraordinary griefs are too great for utterance." JFB also traces Eliphaz to Esau's son and Bildad to Abraham's son Shuah, as the Tyndale notes do.

Pointing to Christ

Job's second test brings him lower than the first. His own body is struck, his wife urges him to give up, and his friends hardly recognize him. Isaiah describes the Servant of the LORD the same way: "his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance," "as one from whom men hide their faces" (Isa 52:14; 53:3). In Gethsemane Jesus faced a temptation to turn from the Father's will. He answered it as Job did, but perfectly: "Shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given me?" (John 18:11). Job sat in the ashes outside the town and was afflicted "without reason." Jesus suffered "outside the gate" (Heb 13:12), and he is the one who could truly say, "They hated me without a cause" (John 15:25). Job's friends sat silent for seven days and then failed him. Jesus is the friend who does not fail, a High Priest who can "sympathize with our weaknesses" because he was tested in every way we are (Heb 4:15).

Commentary

• Enduring Word (David Guzik): enduringword.com Guzik emphasizes that God's statement "without cause" (v.3) is the interpretive key to the entire book. Every argument the friends make assumes Job suffers because of sin — but God has already declared there is no cause. Guzik also notes that Job's wife has lost everything Job has lost — she is a fellow sufferer who has reached her breaking point. Her counsel is wrong, but her pain is real. The seven days of silence represent the friends at their best — "when they saw that his grief was very great" they had the wisdom to simply be present.
• Jamieson-Fausset-Brown (1871): blueletterbible.org A critical and explanatory commentary on the whole Bible, more concise than Matthew Henry and closer to the Hebrew and Greek, with attention to historical and geographical detail. Public domain.
• Matthew Henry's Exposition (1710): blueletterbible.org A devotional verse-by-verse commentary in the Puritan tradition, still among the most widely read three centuries on. Public domain.

Videos

Articles

• BibleProject: bibleproject.com On the whole book: the speech from the whirlwind, and why it answers Job the way it does.
• GotQuestions.org: gotquestions.org On the whole book: an overview of the book of Job -- who wrote it, when, why, and how it fits the rest of Scripture.

Links open on the publisher's own site. Nothing here is reproduced on this page.

Reflection

• Not All Suffering Is Punishment (v.3) — God Himself states that Job's suffering has no cause in Job's own sin. If you're suffering and can't identify a reason, can you accept that some suffering isn't correction at all?
• God Still Sets the Limits (v.6) — Even as the testing intensifies to Job's body, God preserves his life. In your hardest seasons, do you trust that God is still holding a boundary even when it doesn't feel like it?
• Be Careful Whose Counsel You Trust in Crisis (v.9) — Job's own wife, devastated by the same losses, urges him toward the very response Satan predicted. Who are you listening to when you're at your lowest, and are their words leading you toward faith or away from it?
• Receive Both the Good and the Hard From the Same Hand (v.10) — Job reasons that if he accepted blessing from God, he must also be willing to accept adversity from Him. Do you only trust God when life is going well, or does your trust hold through hardship too?
• Sometimes Presence Matters More Than Words (v.13) — Job's friends do their best ministry simply by sitting with him in silence for seven days. When someone you love is suffering, are you quick to offer explanations, or slow enough to just stay present?