Job 2:3 · Story · Integrity
Job's Integrity
Job held to his integrity through the loss of his children, his wealth and his health, and he defended it against his friends with oaths before God.
The book of Job spends thirty-five chapters, from Job 3 to Job 37, arguing whether one man's integrity was real.
Then the LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered My servant Job? For there is no one on earth like him, a man who is blameless and upright, who fears God and shuns evil. He still retains his integrity, even though you incited Me against him to ruin him without cause.”
- Who
- Job, Satan
Summary
In the book of Job integrity is a whole loyalty to God that suffering put to the test. The noun tummah stands four times in Job and the adjective tam, blameless, seven times. Job's friends reasoned that great suffering proves hidden sin, so his claim of integrity looked to them like a lie. Job answered by asking God Himself to examine his life. The same book that calls him blameless records him taking back his words.
- The LORD used two Hebrew words of Job in one verse, tam, blameless, and tummah, integrity.
- In Job 27 Job vowed to keep his integrity as long as breath remained in him.
- In chapter 31 Job called curses on himself if he had lied, lusted, cheated his servants or neglected the poor, and he signed his defence.
Still Keeping Hold
The LORD spoke His verdict on Job between the first disaster and the second.
Job's Integrity follows one word through the book of Job. Integrity means being one person throughout, the same before God in private as in public, and Job is the man on whom Scripture tests it. The LORD praised it, Job's wife questioned it and his friends denied it.
The question this study answers is what the LORD meant by Job's integrity and how Job kept it through the argument that fills the book. It gives the Hebrew words and where they stand in the book, Job's oath in chapter 27, the oath of chapter 31 and the two ways readers have judged Job's speeches.
The Patience of Job tells the same man's trial and restoration as an example of perseverance, and leaves the words of integrity and the oaths of chapters 27 and 31 to this study.
Both of the LORD's words come from the root t-m-m, which carries the sense of being complete. The verb rendered retains means to keep hold of, so the LORD says Job is still keeping hold of his integrity.
Job's wife used the same verb and the same noun when she asked, "Do you still retain your integrity? Curse God and die!" (Job 2:9).
Outside the book of Job the noun tummah stands only once, in Proverbs 11:3.
The Word Through the Book
The LORD, Job, his friends and Elihu all use the words of integrity as the argument moves from chapter 2 to chapter 37.
The friends turned the LORD's word about Job into a charge, and Job turned it into an oath.
- The LORD, after Job's first lossesThe LORD's verdict on Jobtam and tummahJob 2:3
- Eliphaz, the first friend to answer"the uprightness of your ways your hope"tomJob 4:6
- Bildad, the second friend"God does not reject the blameless"tamJob 8:20
- Job, answering Bildad"Though I am blameless, I have no concern for myself"tamJob 9:21
- Job, mocked by his friends"The righteous and upright man is a laughingstock"tamimJob 12:4
- Eliphaz, in his last speech"Does He profit if your ways are blameless?"tamamJob 22:3
- Job, under oathJob's oath to keep his integritytummahJob 27:5
- Elihu, speaking of God"Him who is perfect in knowledge"tamimJob 37:16
A timeline of eight moments in the book of Job, each with its speaker, the Berean words and the Hebrew word behind them.
Job, under oath, Elihu, speaking of God
The Friends' Charge and Job's Oath
Eliphaz charged Job with cruelty to the poor, and Job answered under oath.
The charge was specific: "You gave no water to the weary and withheld food from the famished" (Job 22:7).
“As surely as God lives, who has deprived me of justice—the Almighty, who has embittered my soul— as long as my breath is still within me and the breath of God remains in my nostrils, my lips will not speak wickedness, and my tongue will not utter deceit. I will never say that you are right; I will maintain my integrity until I die. I will cling to my righteousness and never let go. As long as I live, my conscience will not accuse me.Job's reply rests his case on his own conscience, the one witness his friends could not question.
Job would not confess crimes he had not committed, because his conscience did not accuse him of them.
The Oath of Chapter 31
Job ends his defence by swearing to the way he had lived.
The chapter runs through a man's whole life. Job swears that he has kept his eyes from desire, dealt honestly, kept from his neighbour's wife, heard his servants' complaints, fed the poor and trusted God above his gold.
If I have walked in falsehood or my foot has rushed to deceit, let God weigh me with honest scales, that He may know my integrity. If my steps have turned from the path, if my heart has followed my eyes, or if impurity has stuck to my hands, then may another eat what I have sown, and may my crops be uprooted.The noun tummah stands here, and these verses show the form of the whole oath, a condition followed by a curse.
He also swears that he never hid his guilt out of fear of the crowd (Job 31:33 to 34). His servants, the widow and the stranger at his door are named as people he treated rightly (Job 31:13, Job 31:16 and Job 31:32).
(Oh, that I had one to hear me! Here is my signature. Let the Almighty answer me; let my accuser compose an indictment. Surely I would carry it on my shoulder and wear it like a crown.The signature closes the case Job has made through the whole chapter.
Blameless in Loyalty, Answerable for Words
Job himself admitted that a blameless man could still be condemned by his own mouth.
Even if I were righteous, my mouth would condemn me; if I were blameless, it would declare me guilty.Job uses tam of himself and grants in the same breath that his own words could convict him.
The adjective tam names an undivided heart. Job also complains that God holds against him "the iniquities of my youth" (Job 13:26), so the word names a whole heart and leaves room for past sin.
then even if these three men—Noah, Daniel, and Job—were in it, their righteousness could deliver only themselves, declares the Lord GOD.The prophet counts Job among three men a reader of Israel's Scriptures would name first for righteousness.
A Voice on Job's Oath
An eighteenth-century commentator reads Job 27.
1662 to 1714 · Matthew Henry
Henry stands here for the conscience behind Job's oath.
Read the page on Matthew Henry
“On the other hand, since he was conscious to himself of his integrity, and that he was not such a man as his friends represented him, he would never betray his integrity, nor charge himself with that which he was innocent of.”
Matthew Henry · Commentary on the Whole Bible · on Job 27:3 to 4Puritan
Did Job Keep His Integrity in His Speeches?
Readers agree that Job kept faith with God and differ on whether his words went too far.
The first reading holds that Job kept his integrity in what he said as well as in what he did. At the end the LORD tells Eliphaz that the friends have not spoken accurately about Him, "as My servant Job has" (Job 42:7).
Gregory the Great, in his Morals on the Book of Job, Book XVIII, read Job 27:5 as a refusal to call the friends' wrong right. He wrote, "For he would 'depart from his innocency,' if he reckoned good things of bad persons".
Albert Barnes held the same reading in his Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832 to 1869). He wrote that Job "was conscious of integrity and sincerity, and nothing could induce him to abandon that conviction".
On the second reading Job's innocence stood, but his words against God's justice went too far. Matthew Henry, on Job 27:2, wrote that "Elihu reproved him for this word".
Would you really annul My justice? Would you condemn Me to justify yourself?The LORD's question names the fault the second reading finds in Job's speeches, defending himself at the cost of God's justice.
Job's last words to the LORD are "Therefore I retract my words, and I repent in dust and ashes" (Job 42:6).
Weighed on Honest Scales
The psalmist and Job made the same request of God.
Job's integrity was a loyalty held when it brought him nothing, and he would not curse God to end his pain.
Psalm 26 asks it in words close to Job 31:6: "Test me, O LORD, and try me; examine my heart and mind" (Psalm 26:2).
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- STEP Bible, Translators Amalgamated Hebrew Old Testament, the tagged Hebrew text (Tyndale House, Cambridge), CC BY 4.0.
- STEP Bible TBESH glosses (Tyndale House, Cambridge, CC BY 4.0), with the Strong's definitions (1890) the rows carry.
- Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on Job 27:2 and 27:3 to 4.
- Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job, Book XVIII, on Job 27:5.
- Albert Barnes, Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832 to 1869), on Job 27:5.
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