Mrs Job and Mr Job

I recently wrote some liturgies for a local Australian group. The liturgies are designed so that a lay leader can pick it up and lead a service without being overwhelmed by preparation or study. There are a range of writers and it follows the Revised Common Lectionary. However, each individual writer can choose which reading within the lectionary to follow. Being a Hebrew Bible scholar, I often follow the readings from the Old Testament and sometimes from the psalms as that is a particular area of interest for me.

Recently, I was writing on two sections from the book of Job. The first week took the first sentence from this book, which introduces Mr Job as an upright fellow from the land of Uz. Then it jumps to the first ten verses of Chapter 2, where the divine beings are having a meeting and God brags to them about how good Mr Job is, so The Adversary* dares God to see how good Mr Job really is by testing him. They have already killed Mr Job’s kids and taken away all his possessions, but the ‘real’ test is covering him in sores.

(As long as Mr Job is healthy, right, then he will be able to withstand anything. Which is a fairly ableist position to take, but one not unlike that which is still often heard today). Mr Job sits down to have a cry and pick at his sores, and enter Mrs Job. Verse 9 tells us that Mrs Job says to Mr Job “Are you still holding onto your integrity. Curse God and die!”

Now, scholars have suggested that she might also have said “Bless God and die” but most of our translations favour the cursing edition. Mr Job calls her a fool and then she ceases to exist for the rest of the book, while Mr Job and his friends try to philosophise their way to the root of the problem.

Within feminist literature there has been much written about the elusive Mrs Job. Mrs Job also lost her children, house and possessions. Mrs Job probably keeps life going while Mr Job is sitting in the dust complaining. And there are questions about whether Mrs Job (or some other woman) bore the replacement children for Mr Job that are mentioned at the end of the book.

In the liturgy, both in the week which featured Mrs Job, and in the following week where she is absent, I deliberately referred to him as Mr Job. I wanted to remind the reader that Mr Job was not just a single man who happened to be stuck by misfortune. Mr Job had a Mrs Job who presumably played some role in the getting of children, and building a fortune, and facilitating Mr Job’s lifestyle. Mrs Job lost everything too, but Mrs Job did not have the luxury of sitting in the dirt with her friends talking about how they were feeling sad. Mrs Job has been cast as the foolish appendage who is not even allowed to be frustrated by her husband in what must have been an incredibly difficult time for her too.

Now, I understand that in calling her Mrs Job, she is still defined by her relationship with her husband and she is still known by his name. The book of Job has not bothered to tell us who she was or where she came from so that we are able to understand her identity on her own terms. This is par for the course for many biblical books and reflects the patriarchal nature of ancient Israel and the texts that this society produced.

However, perhaps knowing her name might divorce her from the context of the book, and mean that her story still becomes subsumed by her husbands telling of it. I wonder if by insisting on calling him Mr Job, we perhaps might remember that there was a Mrs Job who surely had big, valid feelings, too. By calling him Mr Job, it also distinguishes the character from the book of Job, which may allow us to step back and think of him as a thought experiment in theodicy, or justice or whatever category you think might fit to parse this text through.

Whatever we do, I think it is worth noting the effort that goes into re-imagining Mrs Job back into a story about her life. Creative endeavours such as this might be fun and enlightening and thought-provoking, but they also take work. The scholarship that goes into re-inserting women into the text means that there is less energy for other important feminist work. Work that men are not required to do because the text is so often focussed on their experience and their feelings and their voices.

This is perhaps the emotional labour that feminist biblical scholars carry, and continue to perform because it matters that women can be seen and heard, in the text, in religious settings, and in society in general.

Calling him Mr Job when I write the liturgies might not change much, but language matters and this small step reminds us that he was not the only person directly impacted by the deal made between the Adversary and God.

*Not really a name. Hebrew is ha-satan, but Satan isn’t a great rendering either.

Image by Kunj Pusekh on unspalsh.com