Job2chapter 2

'Skin for skin' is a trader's phrase — the language of barter, where one hide is swapped for another of equal value. The accuser's argument is that Job has only traded away things he could afford to lose, and that a man will give anything he owns to keep his own body intact. So the second test goes after the body.

The disease is described as boils from the sole of the foot to the crown of the head, and the book later adds worms in the sores, blackened peeling skin, foul breath, sleeplessness, and burning fever. Attempts to name a modern diagnosis have never settled, and the text is not trying to give one. What matters is that it was disfiguring, agonising, and visible — the kind of thing that made a man untouchable.

The ash heap is a real place. Villages in that part of the world kept a mound outside the settlement where household ash, dung, and refuse were dumped and left to dry for fuel. It was where the diseased and destitute sat, because it was warm, outside the town, and nobody else wanted it. The scraping tool is just as ordinary — a shard of broken pottery, the most common object in any ancient household.

The friends do everything mourning custom asked. They tear their robes, throw dust into the air over their heads, weep aloud, and then sit on the ground with him for seven days without a word — the standard length of formal mourning, the same seven days later kept for the dead. They travelled from Teman in Edom, from the Shuhite country on the middle Euphrates, and from Naamah, which means they coordinated and came a long way.