Michael David JOB's CHILDREN Coogan

Michael David JOB'S CHILDREN Coogan IN THE BOOK OF JOB, Job's anonymous wife is virtually silent. She is a stock figure, whose only part is a nag brusquely reproaching her husband for his piety; of the fate of their ten children she has nothing to say. But in J. B., Archibald MacLeish's dramatic modernization of the book of Job, J. B.' s wife Sarah repeatedly laments her dead offspring. When told of their daughter Rebecca's rape and murder, she cries "Oh, my baby! Oh, my baby!"; later, after all five of her children have been killed, she exclaims, "My poor babies! Oh, my babies!", and elaborates: They are Dead and they were innocent I will not Let you sacrifice their deaths To make injustice justice and God good! 1 In an earlier retelling of the book, The Testament of Job, Job's unnamed wife becomes Sitis (Sitidos).2 None of the first set of children are named; they are merely plot devices, props to dramatize first Job's piety, and then the disasters which strike him. Neither Job nor Sitis laments their dead children, since they are firm believers in a blissful afterlife; the children are explicitly not mourned because they have gone to their eternal reward. 3 In the earliest amplification of the biblical book, the Septuagint, Job's as yet nameless spouse expands her brief biblical line in a long addition to 2:9, in which she complains of her own unhappy life and of the loss of her sons and daughters, "the labor pains of my womb, for whom I toiled in distress for nothing." This sample illustrates different treatments of what from almost the time of the book's composition to the present has been a concern: what of Job's dead children? The concern is underscored by the lack of attention it gets in the book itself, for 1A. MacLeish, J.B. A Play in Verse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958) 83, 107, 110. 2The name is derived from the LXX rendering of Uz (Hebr cu~). *ausitis (R. P. Spittler, "Testament of Job," The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha [ed. J. A. Charlesworth; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983] I, 850). In T. Job Silis dies during Job's troubles, and the mother of the second set of children is Dinah, Jacob's daughter, an identification derived from the equation of Job and the Edomite king Jobab (Gen 36:33; see Spittler, "Testament of Job," 839). 3so also some commentators on the Qu~iin; see D. B. Macdonald, "Some External Evidence on the Original Form of the Legend of Job," AJSL 14 (1898) 160. 136 MICHAEL DAVID COOGAN superficially at least the biblical Job does not exhibit the grief expected of a bereaved father.4 It is my intention in this essay to explore the topic of Job's children from several perspectives, including especially the issue of the unity and structure of the book, following its literary divisions: first, in the prose prologue (chaps 1-2), then in the poetic dialogues (3-37), and finally in the prose epilogue (42).5 Pari passu I will digress to gloss texts discussed. I. 1lIB PROLOGUE Job the perfect, Job the patient. He is "fs tam, a man of integrity, like Noah (Gen 6:9; cf. Ezek 14:14, 20), Abraham (Gen 17:1; 20:6) and above all Jacob (Gen 25:27), and his integrity has been rewarded, especially in his numerous progeny. His abundant offspring are a clear sign of divine favor, as the satan observes (1:10) and confirming biblical cliche: see, for example, Pss 127:3-5; 128:3-4. Job's children are unnamed, but they are numbered: there are seven sons and three daughters. The number seven is almost certainly traditional; note, for example, the seven sons of Jesse (1 Chr 2:13-15),6 the praise of Naomi in Ruth 4:15, and the reversal in the Song of Hannah (1 Sam 2:5; cf. Jer 15:9). In Canaanite tradition, the patriarch Kirta has seven/eight sons, twice, and seven/eight (?) daughters; the god Baal has three daughters, who are named (see below), and perhaps seven sons as well.7 The ratio seven to three is retained in the epilogue with the second set of chil- 4Contrast also al-Tha<Jabi (ca. A.D. 1035), cited in Macdonald, "Some External Evidence," 149, where Iblis (Satan), addressing God, says: "O my God! lo! Ayyiib [Job] knoweth that so long as Thou permittest him to enjoy his soul and his children Thou wilt give him wealth. Wilt thou, then, give me power over his children? For they are the temptation that leads astray and goes to the mark; against it the hearts of men cannot stand up and against it their patience is not strong." 5Toe speeches of Yahweh from the storm (chaps. 38--41) are not included in the discussion here. As many commentators have observed, they are a magnificent poetic catalogue of divine creative power, but they are at least superficially irrelevant to the issues of the suffering of the innocent Job and the fate of his children. There may, however, be a subtle connection; it is of interest that there are re peated references to the young of various animals in the divine speeches (ravens [38:41], goats and deer [39:1-4], ostrich [39:14], and eagle [ne.l'er; 39:30]). 61n 1 Sam 16:10-11, David is the eighth son; see also 17:12. But as C.H. Gordon (review of U. Cassuto, The Goddess Anath, in JAOS 72 [1952] 181) suggested, the variation between seven and eight may be a residue of standard epic diction, in which any number xis parallel to x + I; see also P. K. McCarter, Jr.,/ Samuel (AB 8; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980) 276--77. Other variants for seven are seventy (note the seventy sons of Gideon [Judg 8:30] and Ahab [2 Kgs 10:6]), and seventy-seven (whose parallel is eighty-eight); see further F. C. Fensham, ''The Numeral Seventy in the Old Testament and the Family of Jerubbaal, Ahab, Panammuwa and Athirat," PEQ 109 (1977) 113-15. 7In CTA 5.5.5-11, Baal is instructed about his journey to the realm of Mot. He is to take with him .

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