Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Job · About this commentary
Four Messengers
Job 1:13-22
13 It fell on a day when his sons and his daughters were eating and drinking wine in their oldest brother’s house, · WEB
The disasters arrive without a pause between them, and the man who has lost everything grieves fully and worships in the same breath.
The construction of the paragraph is the first thing to notice. Three times the sentence while he was still speaking begins the next report Job 1:16–18. There is no interval, no chance to absorb one loss before the next arrives, and no moment in which the total is anything but rising.
The four causes alternate deliberately. Sabean raiders take the oxen and donkeys. The fire of God has fallen from the sky and burns the sheep. Chaldeans take the camels. A great wind out of the wilderness collapses a house on ten young people Job 1:15–19.
Human, natural, human, natural. Two of the disasters are the sort a court would call the fault of men and two the sort it would call an accident of weather, and the reader has just been told that a single permission stands behind all four. The distinction people draw between misfortune and malice does not survive the chapter.
Each report ends in the same seven words: I alone have escaped to tell you. In each case exactly one man survives, which is what guarantees the news arrives. Nothing is lost that would have spared Job knowing.
His response is given in four verbs and they are not restrained. He tore his robe, and shaved his head, and fell down on the ground — the full public vocabulary of mourning, performed without moderation. And then the fourth verb: and worshiped Job 1:20.
The grief is not suppressed to make room for the worship. They occupy the same sentence, and the book will spend forty chapters refusing to treat them as alternatives.
What he says is exact about ownership. Naked I came out of my mother's womb, and naked will I return there — nothing that has gone was ever his to keep. Then Yahweh gave, and Yahweh has taken away Job 1:21.
He names God as the one who took, and not the Sabeans, the fire, the Chaldeans or the wind. He is not told about the council and he is not wrong: the permission was God's, and the narrative has just shown it. What he does not say is anything about desert, and what he adds is a blessing rather than a question.
The assessment closes the chapter with a formula the narrator will shortly qualify: Job didn't sin, nor charge God with wrongdoing Job 1:22.
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