Job1chapter 1

Job 1:1-3

There was a man in the land of Uz: Uz sits in the Edomite orbit, the same territory Lamentations names the land of the daughter of Edom, and Job is patriarchal rather than Israelite from the first line. Perfect and upright, one that feared God and eschewed evil describes moral completeness and integrity, not sinlessness, as Gill and Henry both note against the popular flattening of the word. The wealth counted in sheep, camels, oxen and servants marks Job as the greatest of all the men of the east, a patriarchal measure the book keeps to its final chapter.

Job 1:4-5

The sons' feasting rotates house to house, and Job rises early to offer burnt offerings for all of them on the mere chance that they cursed God in their hearts, a fear he acts on without any accusation before him. Thus did Job continually makes the sacrifice a standing habit rather than a single scare, and Henry reads it as the family priesthood of the patriarchal age exercised in earnest, a father guarding sons he cannot watch every hour. Clarke notes the same care will return inverted in chapter 42, when the friends need a sacrifice offered on their behalf and Job is the one who prays for them.

Job 1:6-7

the sons of God came to present themselves: The phrase sons of God falls in the Old Testament at exactly five places, Genesis 6:2 and 6:4, and here at Job 1:6, 2:1 and 38:7, the same divine council standing behind both books. Satan comes also among them, and his answer to the Lord's question, from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it, is the roving of an accuser rather than an equal, as Gill and Barnes both read the exchange. The scene is staged entirely for the reader; nothing in the chapters that follow ever tells Job that it happened.

Job 1:8-9

God himself opens the case, repeating the perfect and upright formula of verse 1 and adding none like him in the earth, so the test that follows is not prompted by any fault the Lord has found. Satan's reply is the book's engine question, Doth Job fear God for nought, the charge that every act of piety is a transaction paid for in blessing. Henry notes that the question is aimed past Job at the nature of true religion itself, whether love for God can stand without profit attached to it.

Job 1:10-12

Hast not thou made an hedge about him is Satan's own word for the protection he wants removed, and Job will use the same image of his prison at 3:23, whom God hath hedged in, one word carrying two opposite readings of a single providence he never hears named. The Lord grants power over all that Job has while drawing one line, only upon himself put not forth thine hand, a bounded permission rather than an open field. Barnes reads the boundary as the chapter's real theology: the accuser has no authority except what is given him, and the giving is itself an act of the Lord's rule.

Job 1:13-19

Four messengers arrive in succession, each announcing a new loss before the last has finished speaking, and Gill notes the strict alternation of the blows: raiders take the oxen and camels, fire from heaven takes the sheep, raiders again take the servants, and a great wind takes the children, human violence and divine-seeming disaster trading places twice over. Each messenger closes with the same refrain, I only am escaped alone to tell thee, so that Job hears every loss compounded by the survivor's report of it. Delitzsch reads the pattern as deliberately built to remove any single cause Job could blame or appeal against.

Job 1:20-22

Job's mourning is full and physical, the rent mantle and the shaved head, and then he worships, the grief and the act of faith standing in the same verse rather than one following the other at a distance. Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither traces his life to its bare beginning and end, and the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away names God as the direct actor in the loss without naming Satan at all. Henry marks the closing line, blessed be the name of the Lord, as the wager's first answer: in all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly, the very charge Satan predicted at verse 11 has not come to pass.