It was in this moment of intense agony—the worst of her life—that she, being mystified at her husband’s composure, told him to curse God and die. This was clearly the darkest day of her life. Therefore, her words came out of intense grief. Such struggles with God amidst intense grief are natural and to be expected, but becomes sinful when it turns into accusations against God. In exhorting Job to curse God, she was telling him to complain of God not to God, so her expression of grief crossed the line into sin.
Then his wife said to him, “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die.” But he said to her, “You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips.
-Job 2:9-10, ESV
Why do bad things happen to good people? That question has been asked since time immemorial and is so central to our understanding of the world that an entire book of the Bible explores it: Job. In wrestling with this question, Job stands alone as his friends accuse rather than comfort him. Even his wife turns against him…or does she? All we see from her is this short statement: “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die” (Job 2:9), which has caused many Christians to view her in a negative light. This post will examine what that statement, Job’s response, and the context really say about her, which will give us all great reason to hope.
Satan’s 4D Chess?
Why did Job’s wife tell him to curse God? Some claim it was because she was crucial to Satan’s strategy against Job: “Previously he had pursued his aim by battering Job, but now he insinuates a question into his mind and follows it up by a proposed action—all put into the mouth of Job’s wife!”.[1] While it is quite possible that Satan tempted her to make this statement, some have taken this to mean that Satan had kept her alive for the purpose of tormenting Job—as if she was a wicked nag who would cause Job more pain alive than dead. In this view, she is nothing more than a pawn in Satan’s game of 4D chess, but from context it is clear that nothing could be further from the truth. The first two chapters of Job do not depict Satan as a master strategist playing 4D chess. Instead, he is revealed to be short-sighted, arrogant, and self-centered. Since we have previously seen that arrogant self-centeredness is the enemy of God’s people, it should not surprise us to find these traits exemplified by the Enemy himself—and that is exactly what we see in Job. The only one in Job with a grand strategy is God. It was God who drew Satan’s attention to Job and then by praising him essentially used Satan’s arrogance to goad him into making a bold claim that Job would curse God if he saw calamity. When God gave Satan permission to take away all Job had, He was essentially saying “I’ll take that bet”. At this point, a wise person would see this as a trap—or at the very least a foolish bet—and backtrack. But since the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10), it should be unsurprising that Satan who does not fear God in a way that would lead to wisdom would arrogantly and foolishly stick to a plan doomed to failure. When that inevitable failure came, Satan repeated the error by again making another bold statement against Job that elicited the same response from God—and the same failure when Job was afflicted with sores. God proved Himself true and omnipotent while Satan only proved to be a fool blinded by arrogance who had no choice but to fulfill God’s Will. His game could barely qualify as checkers, much less 4D chess. Satan may be incredibly intelligent and cunning, but he had no grand strategy for Job. Therefore it is preposterous to think that Satan had the wherewithal to keep Job’s wife alive for the purpose of tormenting him. The most we can say is that in his shortsightedness, Satan tempted Job’s wife as a target of opportunity, but that is a far cry from her being part of some grand plan of his. We can therefore rule out any thought that Job’s wife remained alive to add to his suffering, as that would be unsupported by the text.
Describing Job’s Wife Biblically
What then can we say about Job’s wife? All we have is that single statement from her, but there is much we can deduce from the rest of the text. First, Job is described as blameless, upright, and having an appropriate fear of God (Job 1:1). He also had seven righteous sons who were old enough to live on their own and three daughters who were mature enough to feast with them (Job 1:2,4-5). It is illogical to think that those ten righteous children were not born and raised by a righteous mother—and equally illogical to think that righteous Job would have married an unrighteous woman. Furthermore, at the end of the book we see Job blessed with seven more sons and three more daughters (Job 42:13). There is no indication that his wife died or left him, so we must assume that she bore and raised them as well. Therefore, from the text we can easily deduce that Job’s wife was righteous just as he was.
What then do we make of her comment? How could a righteous woman exhort her husband to curse God and die? The answer is that we are seeing a righteous woman in her darkest moment. Everything that was Job’s was also hers, so she had just become destitute as he had. More importantly, she had lost all ten of her children just as he had. The pain of losing even one child is unparalleled, so the pain of losing ten at once would be unimaginable. Additionally, we have previously seen that a godly wife’s primary focus is on the home and that the greatest impact most people will have on the Kingdom is their children. This means that her life’s work for at least two decades was all gone in an instant. Additionally, she had to watch the man she loved, whom she had been with through thick and thin, suffering while she was powerless to intervene. Therefore, it is no stretch of the imagination to say that Job’s wife was suffering just as much as he was.