Wednesday, March 17, 2010

My friend the jackal

Job's wife gets one line in the book, and we all roast her for that.

"Are you still holding onto your integrity?" she asks him, as he sits in the ruins of his life, scraping the sores that ooze all over his body, with a shard of broken pottery. The poor man is numb with grief over the deaths of his ten children as she confronts him, mad with her own grief and loss. "Curse God and die!"

Meanwhile Job's friends browbeat him for 36 chapters, telling him that he's only getting what he deserves. Job's wife merely wanted his suffering to end. These vultures won't be happy until he's really suffered, and yet we calmly discuss them as merely errant in their thinking.


Copyright © 2010 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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