Saturday, March 26, 2011

Job 2:9

וַתֹּאמֶר לוֹ אִשְׁתּוֹ עֹדְךָ מַחֲזִיק בְּתֻמָּתֶךָ בָּרֵךְ אֱלֹהִים וָמֻת

9 His wife said to him, “Are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die!”

תֻּמָּא "integrity" is sometimes thought to be a "late" Hebrew word (i.e., from the time of Ezra), but this is probably because it happens to occur in Ezra more than in other places (Ezra 5:17; 6:1,6,12). But it also occurs in the Davidic Psalm 7:9 and here.

This is the only time Job's wife speaks: the devil has created strife in their marriage. She wanted his suffering to come to an end, and so she wished for his death. In such agony, she could imagine no other end to her husband's misery. Certainly she had lost almost everything he had lost: his property was her stability; his children were her children. Her grief for them went as deep as his. Now he had lost his health, too, and she saw her husband suffering to the point of death, and she knew that without him, she would have nothing; nothing at all. She was evidently still young (as we will later see) and perhaps could have been taken in by another husband, but she wasn't thinking of that now. She wanted him to have peace and relief; death was the only answer she knew.

The strife was religious. She urged her husband to give up on his trust in God for help. In their culture, there is virtually no record of suicide as an option even to suffering. Although there are some exceptions in Egypt, that was another culture and a completely different religion. So Job's wife tells her husband to call God's wrath down on himself by cursing God.

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