Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 52 · February 21
Job's Wife
“But he said unto her, Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips.”
The objection is fair and it should go first: this verse is used to shut people up. Somebody's world comes apart, they say something raw about God, and a Christian in the room produces shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil, and the conversation is closed.
Look at who is being answered. Job's wife had buried the same ten children in the same week, watched the property go, and then watched her husband sit down in ashes covered in boils with a piece of broken pot to scrape himself. What she says is Dost thou still retain thine integrity? curse God, and die, and it is the only line the book gives her. She is a bereaved woman telling her husband to stop suffering.
And his own record is not clean of the thing he is telling her not to do. One chapter later he opens his mouth and says Let the day perish wherein I was born, and it runs on like that for thirty chapters. The man who speaks this verse in chapter two says far wilder things in chapter nineteen, and the book prints every word.
The verse cannot be a rule about keeping quiet, and the plainest evidence is the ending. God is angry when it finishes, and not with Job. He says it to the friends who had been theologically careful the whole way through: ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.
The one who argued is the one who is said to have spoken rightly about God. That verdict is in writing, and it names him servant while it says it. Nobody has ever withdrawn it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 52 is Known and Trusted (Psalm 9:10).