When
God finally did the right thing by Job,
so
the story goes,
he
blessed him with a new family.
Not
quite the doubling of numbers,
as
with his wealth and possessions,
but
we assume that he was not complaining.
Most
certainly the unnamed woman
who
happened to be his wife
would
have been more than satisfied
with
a total of ten,
having
given birth to a precise replacement
of
the seven sons and the three daughters
that
were lost at the start of the story.
If
we take the figures seriously
that’s
a total of twenty confinements,
which,
I daresay, she thought was enough;
besides
which, if you do the arithmetic,
you’d
think that she must have been past sixty
by
the time she had finished giving birth.
(Hmm,
we might need to go beyond the literal
to
find the meaning of this story.)
The
ratio is probably about right;
more
than twice the number of sons
than
that of daughters. Proof,
in
the context of the times,
that
Job was truly blessed by God.
But,
funnily enough,
the
writer seems only interested in the girls,
not
even bothering to name the boys.
Jemimah,
Keziah, and Keren-happuch
were
very beautiful, he tells us;
without
compare in all the land
of Uz.
Perhaps
even more notable
is the
story-master’s assurance
that
the daughters each received their share
of Job’s
estate, alongside their brothers;
a
remarkable thing in the context
of
the times and the culture.
We
celebrate Job for his virtue of patience,
and
for his faith in the face of suffering;
perhaps
we should also celebrate
his
pioneering insights into gender equality.
That
and his counter-cultural determination
to
be fair and just.
No comments:
Post a Comment