Job 1

Carefully Examining the Text

1:1 And that man was blameless and upright- Job will be described as blameless and upright in 1:1, 8; 2:3. The emphasis in this verse is not on the time Job lived nor where he lived but on his character. “Job’s blameless is given precedent over the more external description of Job’s family and wealth" (Clines, 9) His character both begins (vs. 1) and ends (vs. 4-5) this section. The word translated blameless is a pivotal word in the book (8:20; 9:20, 21, 22). The same root word appears in 12:4; 36:4; 37:16 and its feminine form appears in 27:5; 31:6. In 9:20 the word blameless (or guiltless in the NASB) is used in parallelism with the word righteous and an antonym for blameless is to declare guilty. In 9:22 blameless or guiltless is the opposite of the wicked. Blameless is not sinless. Job acknowledges “iniquities of my youth” in 13:26; 14:16-17. This root word for blameless is used of Noah (Gen. 6:9), Abraham (Gen. 17:1), and to describe the sacrificial animals in Ex. 12:5; 29:1; Lev. 1:3. In Ps. 19:13 blameless is defined as being kept back from great transgression.

1:5 “With such an expression of Job’s concern, his own still-future temptation would be foreshadowed" (Clines, 16). The very thing that Job feared his children would do, curse God in their hearts, is what the Satan says that Job will do if his blessings are taken away in 1:11; 2:5. It will also be what his wife encourages him to do in 2:9. The word translated curse is actually the Hebrew term for bless. We know that it means curse because of its connection with the word sinned in 1:5. Why was the term for bless used when curse is its meaning? While we can only speculate on the why it is possible that the thought of cursing God was so abhorrent that the scribes could not bring themselves to write these words and used bless as a euphemism for curse. (Alter, 12). The same phenomena appears where Naboth is accused of blessing (cursing) God and the king in I Kings 21:10, 13; Psalm 10:3. The weakness with this argument however is that there are places in the Old Testament that speak of cursing God and use the word generally rendered curse- Exodus 22:28; Lev. 24:14, 15, 23; Isa. 8:21. Each time the word bless is used we must examine whether it means bless or its opposite. (Seow, 254-255).