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Emotional Responses to Suffering in the Testament of Job

1. Introduction

Job’s reputation as a patient sufferer figures prominently in literary references to this biblical

character in late antiquity.1 This tradition first appears as a central theme of the ancient Jewish work

known as the Testament of Job, a composition that purports to represent Job’s death-bed reflections for

the edification of his children.2 The first 44 chapters of this work recount Job’s piety, Satan’s attack

against him, the endurance he exhibits throughout his travails, and finally the interactions with his royal

colleagues. This narrative, likely composed sometime between ca. 100 BCE and 150 CE, fundamentally

transforms Job’s state of mind as described in the biblical book of Job: Job is no longer a tortured soul

but a patient sufferer whose faith enables him to endure trying times.3 In the Testament of Job, Job’s

patient endurance is a source of power, helping restore his agency and escape a state of absolute

powerlessness.4 Emotions, I argue below, play an essential role in this book since patient endurance is

1 See, e.g., Tertullian, On Patience ch. 14; Augustine, On Patience ch. 11.

2 See Cees Haas, “Job’s Perseverance in the Testament of Job,” in Studies on the Testament of Job, ed. Michael A.

Knibb and Pieter W. Van der Horst (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 117–54; Maria Haralambakis,

“‘I am not afraid of anybody, I am the ruler of this land’: Job as Man in Charge in the Testament of Job,” in Men and

Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond, ed. Ovidiu Creangă (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010), 127–44

(134–36). On the likely Egyptian provenance of the book, see John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish

Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 241. On the genre of testamentary

literature during the Second Temple period, see J. J. Collins, “Testaments,” in Jewish Writings of the Second Temple

Period, ed. Michael E. Stone (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1984), 325–55.

3 The Testament of Job, which was written in Greek, relies chiefly on the Old Greek version of the book of Job; see

Berndt Schaller, “Das Testament Hiobs und die Septuaginta-Übersetzung des Buches Hiob,” Biblica 61 (1980): 377–

406. The three central terms indicating patient endurance in the Testament of Job, ὑπομονή/ὑπομένω,

μακροθυμία/μακρόθυμος/μακροθυμέω, and, less frequently, καρτερία/καρτερέω, appear only occasionally in LXX Job

and typically with an entirely different meaning; see Haas, “Job’s Perseverance,” 125–34. On a date of composition

sometime between 100 BCE and 150 CE, see Collins, Between Athens, 241; Berndt Schaller, Das Testament Hiobs

(Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1979), 311.

4 On the difference between the portraits of Job in the canonical book and in the Testament of Job, see, e.g.,

Christopher Begg, “Comparing Characters: The Book of Job and the Testament of Job,” in The Book of Job, ed. W. A.

M. Beuken (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1994), 433–45 (437–39); Jan Dochhorn, “Das Testament Hiobs als

exegetischer Text: Ein Beitrag zur Rezeptionsgeschichte der Hiob-Septuaginta,” in Die Septuaginta: Texte,

Theologien, Einflüsse, ed. Wolfgang Kraus and Martin Karrer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 671–88. The change

in Job’s character is part of a larger network of deviations, omissions, and expansions in the Testament of Job

which can be explained “in terms of an attempt to fill in gaps and remove ambiguities and perceived difficulties in

better understood as emotional endurance, encompassing the suppression of expected emotions such

as anger, grief, shame, disgust, and self-pity. Job manages to endure suffering because he successfully

overcomes a host of emotions, while those who mock his patience as a form of powerlessness are

themselves powerless to suppress their own emotions.

Job’s suffering is translated into emotions, such as shame, grief, disgust, and pity, which

traditionally signify powerlessness. His suffering also induces in him anger, an emotion reserved for the

powerful, because his condition of powerlessness defies the power he once enjoyed. Those emotions

embody the experience of what theorists refer to as the “power-over” that others wield or the loss of

agency that deprives one of “power-to.”5 However, the self-control that Job exhibits in stifling those

emotions deprives his adversary, Satan, of exercising power over him and empowers himself to endure

and, ultimately, to achieve redemption—generational renown, two-fold restoration of all his material

possessions, and participation in the resurrection.6 As I explain below, the Greco-Roman world looked

askance at patient endurance, seeing it as a form of powerlessness. The author of the Testament of Job

infuses his narrative with a variety of emotions in order to challenge that view and highlight the

empowering effect of patient endurance.

the biblical story to bring it more in line with conventional piety” (Jessie Rogers, “The Testament of Job as an

Adaptation of LXX Job,” in Text-Critical and Hermeneutical Studies in the Septuagint, ed. Johann Cook and

Hermann-Josef Stipp [Leiden: Brill, 2012], 395–408 [396]).

5 See Gerhard Göhler, “‘Power to’ and ‘Power over’,” in The SAGE Handbook of Power, ed.

Stewart R. Clegg and Mark Haugaard (London: SAGE Publications, 2009), 27–39 (28).

6 On the role of Satan in the Testament of Job, see Kenneth Grayston, “Satan and Job,” Scripture Bulletin (1993): 2–

7; H. C. Kee, “Satan, Magic, and Salvation in the Testament of Job,” in SBL 1974 Seminar Papers (Cambridge, MA:

Society of Biblical Literature, 1974): 1:53–76. On the elements of divine reward for Job’s patience, see T. Job 4:6–

10. Jonathan R. Trotter (“The Role of Charity in the Testament of Job,” in Sibyls, Scriptures, and Scrolls: John Collins

at Seventy, Volume 2, ed. Joel Baden, Hindy Najman, and Eibert Tigchelaar [Leiden: Brill, 2017], 1298–1313 [1306

n. 29]), refers to those who regard the Testament of Job’s view of the afterlife as idiosyncratic within the range of

views from Jewish antiquity, but he compares the book’s eschatological perspective with that of Wisdom of

Solomon, and he cites George W. E. Nickelsburg’s characterization of the eschatology in the latter book: “It is now

evident why it is so difficult to pin down our author as to his eschatological timetable. He has no interest in such a

timetable because he has radicalized eschatological categories. And since immortality is already the possession of

the righteous man, his death is viewed as his assumption. Like Enoch, he is translated to heaven” (Resurrection,

Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism and Early Christianity [Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2006], 114).

The debates conducted between Job and his wife and royal colleagues focus on conceptions of

power. Job’s wife and colleagues adopt conventional understandings of power. Satan has exerted power

over Job, and, in the process, deprived Job of the power to serve as king, support the poor, and even

leave his self-imposed exile outside of the city. Suffering, they contend, renders one utterly powerless,

and the fact that Job does not experience negative emotions is thus irrational, even a sign of mental

instability.

According to Job, however, they fail to appreciate the empowering effect of emotional self-

control.7 He insists that their conception of power focuses on circumstances in the material world to

which they have access and overlooks the real object of power. Suffering is not necessarily an instance

of powerlessness but rather an opportunity for empowerment. One must look beyond this material

world and consider how to achieve the power to attain heavenly rewards. Genuine agency does not

involve acting in this world but rather acquiring the power to achieve redemption.

Emotions play a central role in the debates between Job and his wife and royal visitors about the

power of suffering because of the close connection between emotion and power, “conceptual twins”

which together comprise “the fundamental and constitutive features of the lived lives of individuals and

the social context in which they are embedded.”8 Emotions help arrange power relations because our

emotions are provoked by and produced within social interactions—and the form and content of social

interactions are governed by power. A conventional understanding of power should lead to emotions

7 See Haas, “Job’s Perseverance,” 119. On ὑπομένω elsewhere in ancient Jewish and Christian literature as a form of

active endurance, see, e.g., Brent D. Shaw, “Body/Power/Identity: Passions of the Martyrs,” Journal of Early

Christian Studies 4 (1996): 269–312; Themistocles Anthony Adamopoulo, “Endurance, Greek and Early Christian:

The Moral Transformation of the Greek Idea of Endurance, from the Homeric Battlefield to the Apostle Paul” (PhD

diss., Brown University, 1996); Alan Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of

Christianity in the Roman Empire (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016).

8 Jonathan G. Heaney, “Emotions and Power: Reconciling Conceptual Twins,” Journal of Political Power 4 (2011):

259–77. See also Ari Mermelstein, Power and Emotion: Community and Identity in Formation (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2021); Françoise Mirguet, An Early History of Compassion: Emotion and Imagination in

Hellenistic Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

that, in Job’s case, reflect his position of powerlessness. By exerting emotional self-control, Job

demonstrates that his perspective transcends concrete reality and its associated definition of power and

instead represents an outlook on power defined in terms of the heavenly realm. The author of the

Testament of Job devotes significant attention to emotion in order to address the fundamental question

raised by Job’s predicament: Can suffering be considered an opportunity for empowerment?

The relationship between power and emotion intersects with a closely related dimension of

emotion, namely the association between gender and emotion. Stretching back to antiquity, certain

emotions, especially anger, have been designated as masculine.9 Men may display anger as an extension

of their masculine power over others while women are expected to stifle their anger, thereby

reinforcing their subordinate position. The author of the Testament of Job communicates his claim that

suffering can empower by celebrating his male protagonist’s ambition to overcome emotions such as

anger. This view of masculinity is consistent with the Stoic emphasis on emotional self-control, in which

case the author seeks to portray suffering as consistent with hegemonic definitions of masculinity.

This paper uncovers the primary way that the author explores the proposition that patient

endurance of suffering empowers. Rather than simply have his characters engage in dialogue about the

correctness of this theological assumption, the author focuses instead on the correctness of their

emotions. Emotions do not simply add depth to the characters but rather signal cultural assumptions

about power. Job defies assumptions about power by defying expected sets of emotions. His

interlocutors, in turn, challenge Job’s understanding of power by challenging the correctness of his

9 On the gendered dimension of anger, see Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Anger and Insubordination,” in Women,

Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, ed. A. Garry and M. Pearsall (Boston: Routledge,

1989), 263–73. On the relationship between anger and masculinity in antiquity, see William V. Harris, “The Rage of

Women,” in Ancient Anger: Perspectives from Homer to Galen, ed. Susanna Braund and Glenn W. Most

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 121–44. The emotion of anger in antiquity has garnered significant

attention; see, e.g., William V. Harris, Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Leonard Muellner, The Anger of Achilles: Mênis in Greek Epic

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Kostas Kalimtzis, Taming Anger: The Hellenic Approach to the Limitations of

Reason (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2012).

emotions. Because emotions in the book are really surrogates for power, the book focuses not only on

Job’s emotions but also on those of his interlocutors. Those who endorse mistaken views about power

will likewise exhibit improper emotions.

The author’s attention to the emotional states of his characters implicates the relationship

between identity and emotion.10 Job’s emotional style is explicitly linked with his religious convictions.

The book thus characterizes Job’s feelings as monotheistic.11 Job’s emotional disposition is only possible

because of his belief in divine support. Groups generally adopt a specific emotional palette that

celebrates, concedes, subverts, resists, or sublimates the power dynamics inherent in social life.12 I

suggest that the apparent powerlessness of King Job is meant to represent a sense of powerlessness

among many ancient Jews and that, by modeling themselves after Job in “feeling” devotion to God, Jews

recapture agency and power.13 This relationship between identity and emotion should be studied in

particular historical contexts, and the “history of emotions” perspective holds great promise and largely

untapped potential for the study of pre-modern Judaism in its various forms.14

Although the date of composition of the Testament of Job is uncertain, the emphasis on

emotional self-control suggests a context in which the Stoic ideal of reason over emotion had gained

widespread currency.15 This position finds expression in the writings of Cicero from the mid-1st century

BCE and continues for centuries thereafter.16 Placed within this likely historical context, the author of the

Testament of Job claims that monotheists, presumably Jewish monotheists, represent the “best of all

10 See Benno Gamerl, “Emotional Styles—Concepts and Challenges,” Rethinking History 16 (2012): 161–75.

11 I follow the broad consensus that the Testament of Job was composed by a Jew. A minority of scholars consider

the possibility that the book is Christian in origin; James R. Davila, for example, places the book’s composition

within the context of its oldest surviving manuscript, Christian Egypt of the 5th century CE; see his The Provenance

of the Pseudepigrapha: Jewish, Christian, or Other? (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 197–99.

12 See Heaney, “Emotions and Power.”

13 See Mermelstein, Power and Emotion, 15–20.

14 See Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction, trans. Keith Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2015).

15 See Brent D. Shaw, “The Divine Economy: Stoicism as Ideology,” Latomus 44 (1985): 16–54.

16 See Margaret R. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

Greeks,” a minority whose strange practices might subject them to ridicule but who, through patient

endurance, exhibit the virtues admired by the Greco-Roman world.17 Though it must remain within the

realm of speculation, such a message would resonate with a Jewish audience at a time when Jewish

practices were condemned among foreigners as incompatible with Greco-Roman values.18 Because they

are capable of adhering to the Stoic creed, Jews who, like Job, “feel” their devotion to the one God can

resist an occasionally antagonistic world while still embodying what is best about Greco-Roman culture.

This paper also contributes to the longstanding interest in the diachronic study of a character

with importance resonances in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from antiquity through the present.19 Job

17 See Sylvie Honigman, “‘Jews as the Best of All Greeks’: Cultural Competition in the Literary Works of Alexandrian

Judaeans of the Hellenistic Period,” in Shifting Social Imaginaries in the Hellenistic Period: Narrations, Practices,

and Images, ed. Eftychia Stavrianopoulou (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 207–32. The premium that the author of the

Testament of Job places on patience likely originates with the Stoics, notwithstanding the fact that, in contrast to

Job, they regard virtue as its own reward. I am claiming that the author of the Testament of Job signals to his

audience that they can incorporate the mores of Stoicism into their pursuit of religious salvation, leading the

lifestyle of a Stoic sage even if their practice of virtue achieves divine reward. I assume, following Victor

Tcherikover (“Jewish Apologetic Literature Reconsidered,” Eos 48 [1956]: 169–93), that much of Greek-Jewish

literature was written for internal consumption rather than for a gentile audience; I do not believe that the author

was trying to convince a non-Jewish Greek audience to admire this Jewish adaptation of Stoicism. Although Job is

not characterized in the book as Jewish (“I am from the sons of Esau,” T. Job 1:6), he does hold himself out as a

model to his Jewish children, whom he identifies as members of “a chosen and honored race from the seed of

Jacob, the father of your mother” Dinah (1:6). Moreover, he transmits to them a ban against marrying foreign

women (45:2), one of the practices for which Jews were ridiculed, thereby assuming the persona of a Jew. The

book’s author likewise expected his Jewish audience to adopt the emotional palette of the monotheistic

protagonist.

18 Scholars have suggested specific historical events that would have encouraged the composition of a book about

Jewish endurance. Candidates include the diminished status of Egyptian Jews during the second half of the first

century CE (Robert A. Kugler and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, “On Women and Honor in the Testament of Job,” Journal

for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 14 [2004]: 43–62 [50–51]) and the Diaspora Revolt of 115–117 (William ‘Chip’

Gruen, III, “Seeking a Context for the Testament of Job,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 18 [2009]:

163–79).

19 The literature is immense. For representative scholarship, see Choon-Leong Seow, ed., The Many Faces of Job:

The Premodern Period (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023); Jason Kalman, The Book of Job in Jewish Life and Thought: Critical

Essays (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2021); Arik Sadan, “On the Advantages of Studying the Book of Job

as Outlined in Yefet ben ʿEli’s Commentary,” in Jewish Biblical Exegesis from Islamic Lands, ed. Meira Polliack and

Athalya Brenner-Idan (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2019), 271–78; Frank T. Harkins and Aaron Canty, ed., A Companion to

Job in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Samuel E. Balentine, Have You Considered My Servant Job:

Understanding the Biblical Archetype of Patience (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2015);

Katherine Low, The Bible, Gender, and Reception History: The Case of Job’s Wife (London: Bloomsbury, 2013);

Stephen J. Vicchio, The Image of the Biblical Job: A History, Volume One: Job in the Ancient World; Volume Two: Job

in the Medieval World; Volume Three: Job in the Modern World (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006); Robert Eisen,

The Book of Job in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Hananel Mack, Job and the

comes to be particularly celebrated in the Christian tradition for his emotional self-control, a

characterization first attested explicitly in the Testament of Job.20 Interestingly, one view among the late

antique rabbis describes Job as displaying a negative set of emotions, including fear and pride, a portrait

perhaps inspired by the emergence of Job as the model Christian.21 The historical study of Job’s

character should therefore begin with an analysis of his emotions in the earliest wide-ranging

exploration of his emotional world.

2. Competing outlooks on patient endurance

Job’s patient endurance is a leitmotif that pervades the book. Job defines himself with reference

to this ability at the very beginning of the book: “I am your father Job, fully engaged in endurance

(ὑπομονῇ)” (T. Job 1:5).22 God informs Job of Satan’s plans to “bring on you many plagues … take away

Book of Job in Rabbinic Literature (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2004) [in Hebrew]; Marc Bochet, Job après

Job: Destinée littéraire d’une figure biblique (Brussels: Éditions Lessius, 2000); A. H. Johns, “Narrative, Intertext and

Allusion in the Qurʾanic Presentation of Job,” Journal of Qur’anic Studies 1 (1999): 1–25; Judith R. Baskin,

Pharaoh’s Counsellors: Job, Jethro, and Balaam in Rabbinic and Patristic Tradition (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983);

Lawrence L. Besserman, The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

20 On the impact of the Testament of Job on the Christian portrait of the patient Job, see C. L. Seow, “The Greek

Book of Job and Other Second-Temple Greek Receptions,” in Many Faces of Job, 33–63 (63).The earliest tradition

attesting divine foreknowledge of Job’s patient endurance appears to be preserved in the book of Jubilees, a

second century BCE work that conflates Job’s suffering with the testing of Abraham in Genesis 22, and it describes

God as entirely certain that Abraham (and, by extension, his intertextual companion, Job) would succeed in the

divine challenge. The Vulgate version of Tobit 2:12 compares Tobias’ patience with that of Job. See C. L. Seow, “Job

in Second-Temple Hebrew and Aramaic Receptions,” in Many Faces of Job, 1–31 (17–19). Within the Greek

reception of Job, LXX Job portrays Job as far more righteous than does the Hebrew book; see Seow, “Greek Book,”

49. See also the reference to a pious Job in Ezekiel 14:14.

21 For the possibility that this negative view of Job is inspired by the Christian celebration of Job, see Baskin,

Pharaoh’s Counsellors, 24–26. Jason Kalman focuses particularly on the statement, attributed to the Babylonian

sage Rava, that Job denied the resurrection of the dead as targeting the Christian appropriation of Job as a

precursor to the suffering Jesus; see his Book of Job, 103–38. For the cowardly Job, see the suggestion in B. Sotah

11a that Job sinned by not objecting to Pharoah’s plan to dispose of the Israelites; for Job’s hubris, see the various

statements attributed to Rava in B. Bava Batra 16a.

22 Text of the Greek is based upon the P MS of Testament of Job as published by S. P. Brock, “Testamentum Iobi,” in

Testamentum Iobi, Apocalypsis Baruchi Graece (Leiden: Brill, 1967), 19–59. Where relevant, I will note textual

variants based on the critical apparatus in Ian W. Scott, ed., “Testament of Job,” in The Online Critical

Pseudepigrapha, ed. Ken M. Penner, David M. Miller, and Ian W. Scott (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature,

2006), https://pseudepigrapha.org/docs/text/TJob. For details on the Greek manuscript tradition of Testament of

for himself your goods … [and] carry off your children” (4:4–5), but he promises Job that his name will be

“renowned in all generations of the earth” and that his fortune will be restored “if you are patient

(ὑπομείνῃς)” (4:6) in enduring the suffering that Satan will inflict upon him. In that case, Job “shall be

raised up in the resurrection” and “will be like a sparring athlete, both enduring pains and winning the

crown” (4:9–10).23 In spite of all the hardships that Satan inflicts on Job, Satan eventually admits defeat

because Job “showed endurance (καρτερίαν) and did not grow weary” (27:4), proving, Job tells his

children, that “patience (μακροθυμία) is better than anything” (27:7).

Patient endurance of suffering was regarded in the ancient world as a form of powerlessness:

the one who causes another to suffer exercises “power-over” while presumably depriving the one

suffering of forms of “power-to.” Indeed, Brent D. Shaw describes this view as follows:

The elevation to prominence of the passive value of merely being able to endure would have

struck most persons, certainly all those spectators, as contradictory and, indeed, rather

immoral. A value like that cut right across the great divide that marked élite free-status male

values and that informed everything about bodily behaviour from individual sexuality to

collective warfare … Silence, passivity, submissiveness, openness, suffering—the shame of

allowing oneself to be wounded, to be penetrated, and of simply enduring all of that—were

castigated as weak, womanish, slavish, and therefore morally bad. The equation of these two

virtues—nobility (gennaia) and passive endurance (hypomonê)—would have struck the classic

male ideologue of the city state as contradictory, a moral oxymoron.24

That perspective seems to be shared by the characters with whom Job interacts, specifically his wife and

his royal colleagues. Job’s wife, Sitis, affirms that Job’s death would be preferable to the suffering that

Job, which includes three manuscripts customarily denoted P, S, and V, see R. P. Spittler, “Testament of Job,” in

The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983), 1:829–30;

Maria Haralambakis, The Testament of Job: Text, Narrative, and Reception History (London: Bloomsbury, 2012),

38–43. Translations are based upon Spittler, ibid., 839–68, with slight modifications.

23 The reference to resurrection is based on LXX Job 42:17, though, in the Testament of Job, the protagonist

receives this information before the onset of his suffering. Cf. the comment of Susan R. Garrett, “The ‘Weaker Sex’

in the Testament of Job,” Journal of Biblical Literature 112 (1993): 55–70 (56): “The canonical Job’s existential crisis

in the face of suffering has been completely eliminated in this retelling: Job understands precisely what is

happening to him, and trusts fully in God’s promise to reward his obedient endurance.”

24 Shaw, “Body/Power/Identity,” 279. For a critical response to Shaw’s analysis, see Robin Waugh, “The Testament

of Job as an Example of Profeminine Patience Literature,” Journal of Biblical Literature 133 (2014): 777–92.

the couple endures. Job’s patient endurance of his suffering, Sitis implies, represents an irrational denial

of his powerlessness. Rather than allowing Job to continue to suffer in silence, she insists that he

exercise the last capacity that he possesses, namely his power to “speak some word against the Lord

and die” (T. Job 25:10). In the aftermath of their total loss, salvation is impossible, so why does Job

believe that patience is a virtue? Job’s colleagues, too, assume that his patience is a sign of mental

imbalance or emotional disturbance (35:4).25 They imagine that his condition is a sign of deprivation, a

development that is inconsistent with the former “splendor” of Job’s throne (32:1–12).26

Job, however, believes otherwise. In his conversation with his wife, he concedes that both of

them are suffering, but he challenges her as follows:

Do you suggest that we should say something against the Lord, and thus be alienated from the

truly great wealth? If we have received good things from the hand of the Lord, should we not in

turn endure (ὑπομένομεν) evil things? Rather let us be patient (μακροθυμήσωμεν) till the Lord, in

pity, shows us mercy. (T. Job 26:3–5)

Patient endurance brings with it the power to achieve “truly great wealth” and a restoration of their

former standing. In order to amplify his wife’s misconception about endurance, Job claims that by

encouraging him to die, she is behaving “as one of the senseless women who misguide their husbands’

sincerity” (26:6). Endurance, according to Job, is a masculine, empowering virtue—the “co-optation of

25 As discussed below, p. XX, Job’s colleagues in 35:4 confirm that there are circumstances in which patience is

warranted, but they believe that suffering should provoke anger rather than patience.

26 John J. Collins, “Structure and Meaning in the Testament of Job,” in SBL 1974 Seminar Papers (Cambridge, MA:

Society of Biblical Literature, 1974): 1:35–52 (41), claims that “the motif of endurance does not recur” in the

Testament of Job after ch. 27. In fact, however, the subject of endurance seems to underlie the entire conversation

between Job and his royal colleagues, even if the word itself does not figure prominently. In addition, forms of

patience are not absent from the second half of the book. Job’s royal visitors refer to the need to exercise

“patience” (μακροθυμήσωμεν) in testing Job (T. Job 35:4), and their use of that word is not an accident: the text

seems to imply that those with genuine patience would be able to overcome their disgust. Finally, the rationale

behind Job’s patience, namely his awareness of a reality outside of his material world, remains an important

theme in the second half of the book as well. Collins, ibid., 46, does note that the theme of endurance “is by no

means incompatible with the main theme of insight into spiritual realities,” which runs through the rest of the

book.

passivity in resistance as a fully legitimized male quality”27—and he therefore labels as “feminine” those

who view patient endurance as disempowering. The passive nature of patient endurance suggested an

association with femininity and, hence, with powerlessness, in the ancient world, but the gendered

contrast articulated by Job suggests otherwise.28 According to Job, only those whose perspective on

power is confined to concrete reality would regard patient endurance as a feminine response to

suffering.29 Job similarly corrects his royal colleagues’ misunderstanding about the nature of his

patience. His condition does not represent a loss of agency but an opportunity to achieve true “splendor

and majesty” (33:3). This reference to Sitis’ feminine naivete, which is borrowed from LXX Job 2:10,

reinforces that Job remains in control of his reason and will not succumb to his emotion.30

The dispute over how to interpret patience expresses itself not simply in the book’s dialogue but

also in the emotions imputed to the various characters. According to the book’s author, the misguided

approach to power of Job’s wife and colleagues produces inappropriate emotions toward Job’s

condition, while they believe that Job’s emotions should mirror his state of powerlessness. Suffering can

be empowering because it affords the sufferer an opportunity to cultivate emotional self-control.

27 Shaw, “Body/Power/Identity,” 280.

28 See Aristotle, Rhetoric 2.6.13, who, in describing the emotion of shame, writes that “meek endurance and the

absence of resistance are the result of unmanliness or cowardice” (Freese, Loeb Classical Library). See also Seneca,

Moral Epistles 28.14, who, while identifying patientia as a virtue, does regard it as a feminine virtue. On the

association of endurance with femininity, see Shaw, “Body/Power/Identity,” 284–86. As Shaw, ibid., 287–95

demonstrates, the positive evaluation of endurance in texts such as the Testament of Job and 4 Maccabees was

part of a wider cultural shift; by the first century BCE, patient endurance had become the ambition of the Stoic sage

(see Thomas Scott Cason, “The Rhetoric of Disablement and Repair in the Testament of Job” [PhD diss., Florida

State University, 2007], 60–65). The point in Testament of Job, therefore, is that such a counter-cultural shift

depends on a perspective that looks beyond this material world.

29 See David Pettit, “‘I Was Exhausted as a Woman’: The Slippage of Virtue and Gender in the Testament of Job,”

Journal of the Bible and Its Reception 2 (2015): 51–67 (61); Waugh, “Testament of Job,” 792, argues, largely based

on the role that Job’s daughters play in the closing chapters of the book, that the Testament of Job “demonstrates

most clearly the idea that women inherit, inhabit, and can claim rights to the virtue of patience from Job, when

patience is often interpreted as a powerful, even miraculous attribute.” If so, I would suggest that rather than

seeing patient endurance as an inherently masculine virtue, we might instead regard the point of the book as

implying that when patience is a function of a different outlook on reality, a feminine attribute can become

masculinized and empowering.

30 See Pettit, “‘Exhausted as a Woman’,” 61. See also Haralambakis, “I Am Not Afraid,” 140: “The dung heap does

not represent a loss of his masculinity; it rather resembles an arena in which he wins his victories.”

Instead, Job stifles those emotions, reflecting his conviction that only through patience will he acquire

the power to achieve redemption and once again return to his position of prominence.31

3. Satan’s power-over and Job’s emotional resistance

Satan’s attempt to seize power over Job could only succeed if Job’s suffering induced in him certain

emotions. In chapter 20, Satan is described as arriving to Job “like a great whirlwind” when he

“overturned” Job’s throne (T. Job 20:5). Job recounts that “for three hours I was beneath my throne,

unable to escape. And he struck me with a severe plague from head to toe” (20:5–6). He subsequently

leaves the city “in great trouble and distress” and “sat on a dung heap, worm-ridden in my body” (20:7–

8). Satan’s display of raw power over Job is impressive and has long-lasting consequences. However, as

will become clear below, Satan’s power-over could only be effective if it provoked Job to experience

certain emotions. Rage, paralyzing grief, shame, self-pity, and self-disgust could have doomed Job and

confirmed that, in fact, Satan had beaten him into submission.

In a remarkable turn of events, however, Satan concedes defeat in their next interaction. At that

point, Satan does not arrive like a great whirlwind but emerges from hiding and out of the shadows. Job

compels him to emerge, insisting that Satan “stop hiding yourself … come out and fight!” (T. Job 27:1).

Describing their confrontation in competitive terms, Satan admits that, although “I became like one

athlete wrestling another, and one pinned the other,” Job “conquered my wrestling tactics” because “he

showed endurance and did not grow weary” (27:3–5). By controlling his emotions, Job manages to

overcome Satan.

Satan’s physical advantage over the seemingly weaker Job represents the former’s attempt to

exert his power-over. But in order to achieve its intended effect of “try[ing] to conduct, to determine

31 See Collins, “Structure,” 40, who observes that “throughout the book Job stands in opposition to some other

party.”

the behavior of others,” power must motivate by provoking emotional responses.32 Job’s focus on the

power to achieve reward outside of this material world makes possible his remarkable display of

“emotional resistance.”33 Suffering does not necessarily initiate a state of powerlessness; the effect of

suffering on power will be determined by the emotional response of the sufferer. I turn now to the

separate episodes of emotional resistance whose cumulative effect was to empower Job to endure and

seize power over Satan.

4. Job’s emotional turmoil and the power of patient endurance

Satan’s attacks against Job render Job powerless in many regards. But at the same time,

suffering provides Job with an opportunity to exhibit a different form of power: the power over his

emotions. In deploying this power, Job neutralizes Satan’s attempt to exert power over him. The

importance of this form of power is evident elsewhere in ancient Jewish and Christian literature.34 This

form of power-over is intimately connected with a different outlook on power-to, namely the power to

achieve heavenly reward rather than capacities in the immediate, material world: it is possible to exert

power over the emotions associated with suffering if one prioritizes achieving the power to acquire

heavenly reward. Belief in the redeeming power of God enables one to exercise reason and hence

power over one’s emotions, an important sign of masculinity.35 Patience is thus, according to the author,

a form of sophrosyne, the virtue of self-control that was prized by the Stoics.36

Job himself undergoes something of an emotional transformation in the book. He prepares

himself at an early point to endure whatever suffering Satan imposes upon him, telling his adversary

32 Michel Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in The Final Foucault, ed. James

Bernauer and David Rasmussen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 1–20 (18).

33 On emotional resistance, see Mermelstein, Power and Emotion, 14–17.

34 Mermelstein, Power and Emotion, 23–61; Stephen D. Moore and Janice Capel Anderson, “Taking It Like a Man:

Masculinity in 4 Maccabees,” Journal of Biblical Literature 117 (1998): 249–73; Shaw, “Body/Power/Identity.”

35 Throughout 4 Maccabees, it is through λογισμός that one successfully stifles one’s emotions; see Mermelstein,

Power and Emotion, 23–61.

36 Cason, “Rhetoric of Disablement,” 60–66. See below, n. 54.

that “I am prepared to undergo whatever you inflict” (T. Job 7:13). Yet it takes time before he manages

patiently to exert power over his emotions. In the interim, Job experiences a range of emotions that

emerge from the memory of lost power and his current disempowerment.

Following Job’s descent into poverty, his wife is forced to sell herself into slavery. Job is initially

angry at how his wife is treated by her master and says, “The gall of these fathers! How can they treat

my wife like a female slave?” (T. Job 21:3). The emotion of anger is central to both constructing and

reinforcing the hierarchical conception of gender relations in antiquity. As Aristotle explains, the major

impulse driving anger is the desire for revenge.37 At an institutional level, anger plays an important role

in punishment discourse in the classical Greek polis.38 Thus, only those who can legitimately exact

revenge from others have a right to be angry.39 Since women, children, and slaves are not positioned to

take offense at the actions of others, they also lack the right to be angry. Anger, therefore, is reserved

for men.40 The underlying cognitive element of anger helps account for the association between anger

and social and political hierarchies. Anger entails “judging that some wrong or injustice has been

done.”41 This definition is consistent with that offered by Aristotle, who contends that slights42 or

injustices43 are the causes of anger.

37 See David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 2006), 41–76.

38 See Danielle S. Allen, “Democratic Dis-ease: Of Anger and the Troubling Nature of Punishment,” in The Passions

of Law, ed. Susan A. Bandes (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 191–214.

39 Konstan, Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, 57.

40 See Harris, “Rage of Women.” Somewhat paradoxically, the ancient view that excludes women from legitimate

displays of anger is associated with a perspective that views women as particularly prone to anger; see ibid. This is

a view most evident among the Stoics, such as Seneca (On Anger 1.20.3), whose aversion to anger expresses itself

in their description of it as a “womanish” emotion. Women, by virtue of their inability to limit their anger to

specific circumstances, are deprived of the right to exhibit their anger at all. In general, characterizing minority

groups as especially irascible is one method through which both to justify and reinforce their subordination.

41 Spelman, “Anger,” 265.

42 See Rhetoric 2.2.1, 1378a: Anger is based on a “real or apparent slight … when such a slight is undeserved.”

43 Nicomachean Ethics 5.8.10: “It is apparent injustice that arouses anger” (Rackham, Loeb Classical Library).

This cognitive dimension of anger, however, does not preclude cultural interventions mandating

when and how anger may be expressed.44 As with emotions more generally, members of a society are

expected to manage their anger to match cultural expectations about emotional expression. If anger is a

judgmental emotion, then societies establish “feeling rules” that govern who has a right to judge and in

what circumstances they may do so.45 Not surprisingly, the hierarchical nature of anger naturally grafts

onto the hierarchical nature of gender relations. By being deprived of the right to become angry with

those who have wronged them, members of subordinate groups, including women, are excluded from

being “moral agents” in their relationships with others.46 Because of both the private and public faces of

anger in antiquity, the stereotype of anger as a masculine emotion reinforces a hierarchy in which men

dominate both domains.

Nevertheless, even men in antiquity are expected to rein in their anger, an emotion that

receives particular attention as possessing both productive and harmful effects. Aristotle cautions that

one must only grow angry “on the right grounds and against the right persons, and also in the right

manner at the right moment and for the right length of time.”47 One school of philosophical thought,

associated especially though not exclusively with Stoicism, goes significantly further in advocating for

the extirpation of anger.48 For Stoics and others who adopt that hardline approach, anger is

incompatible with the life of a wise man, and it undermines the ability of those in positions of authority

to win the favor of their subjects.49 This view regards the suppression of anger as a sign of masculinity;

anger management requires real men to exhibit power over themselves. Yet even among Stoic

44 For the relationship between the cognitive and socially-constructed aspects of emotion, see, e.g., Martha C.

Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

45 On feeling rules, see Arlie Hochschild, “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure,” American Journal of

Sociology 85 (1979): 551–75.

46 Spelman, “Anger,” 271.

47 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 4.5.3.

48 Barbara H. Rosenwein, Anger: The Conflicted History of an Emotion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020),

24–38.

49 See, e.g., Cicero’s letter to his brother Quintus about the governance of the province Asia, discussed in Harris,

Restraining Rage, 204–6.

opponents of anger, there is frequently an allowance for anger expressed in the right degree and under

the right circumstances—but only for men.50

Job’s anger is an expression of conventional forms of power that would have accorded him the

right to express anger with people of lower status. King Job is enraged that his wife, a woman of high

status, is being treated like a common slave. Anger is an emotion befitting one in a position of power

over the object of one’s anger, and, for that reason, kings in particular were regarded as endowed with

the capacity to exhibit anger.51 However, his anger quickly subsides when, according to Job, “I regained

patient reason (λογισμὸν μακρόθυμον)” (T. Job 21:4).52 Makrothumia enables Job to exert power over his

own emotions. While anger is borne of a belief in one’s power in relation to another, patience focuses

on the need to exert power over oneself, specifically over one’s emotions, by looking beyond the power

dynamics of this world and focusing instead on the power one possesses to achieve redemption.

While Job’s momentary anger is an expression of his power, he earlier experiences emotions

that point to his powerlessness. He is briefly overwhelmed when he witnesses his fellow countrymen

looting his palace. He is “unable to utter a thing” and “was exhausted, as a woman numbed in her pelvic

region by the magnitude of birth pangs” (T. Job 18:4). However, when he recalls God’s promise about

the reward that would accrue to him if he endured, he regains his composure and “became as one

wishing to enter a certain city to discover its wealth and gain a portion of its splendor” (18:6) for which

he is prepared to “lose everything” (18:7). The powerful dimension of patient endurance is especially

clear in the gendered contrast between his momentary emotional lapse, described as a woman in

50 See Harris, “Rage of Women,” 125.

51 Tessa Rajak, “The Angry Tyrant,” in Jewish Perspectives on Hellenistic Rulers, ed. Tessa Rajak et al. (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2007), 110–27.

52 See Cason, “Rhetoric of Disablement,” 107.

childbirth, and the recovery of Job’s reason, described in terms of acquisition of wealth.53 Patience

restores Job’s masculinity.54

By mastering his emotions, Job manages to exert power over himself and is thereby able to

recover agency. Job had lost the material goods that had given him various forms of power, including

the power to serve as a benefactor to others and support the poor, and his sudden powerlessness is

described in emotional terms. He is able to exert power over those emotions, however, when he realizes

that patient endurance will empower him to acquire superior goods. This conception of patience as

power is only possible once Job lifts his eyes beyond concrete reality.

Finally, when he receives the news about the death of his children, he is “deeply disturbed” and

“tore his garments” in a display of grief (T. Job 19:1–2). Grief, too, is an emotion borne of a feeling of

powerlessness; as Thomas Attig writes, “[t]he choicelessness of death and bereavement prompt feelings

that the world is out of control, and that survivors are powerless to influence major events in their

lives.”55 Grief entails a belief that some external power exerts power-over, thereby depriving a person of

his/her power-to. Job reports, however, that “when I understood what had happened I cried aloud,

saying ‘The Lord gave, the Lord took away. As it seemed good to the Lord, so it has happened. Blessed

be the name of the Lord!’” (19:3–4). By lifting his gaze outside of this world toward God, Job recognizes

that he possesses the power to align himself with the One who is in a position to reward him. The

53 See also T. Job 26:6, where Job accuses Sitis of responding emotionally because of her femininity; see above, p.

XX.

54 Pettit, “‘Exhausted as a Woman’,” 59–60; Cason, “Rhetoric of Disablement,” 98–99. Patient endurance of

suffering was increasingly recognized in the Greco-Roman world as a virtue, albeit not one of the cardinal virtues,

by the first century BCE; see ibid., 60–65. But the difference between attitudes to endurance in the Testament of

Job and in the text’s Greco-Roman context can be appreciated by noting that Seneca, too, refers to childbirth

within the context of his discussion of the virtue of patience—but unlike Testament of Job, which contrasts the

pain of childbirth with patience, Seneca analogizes patience to childbirth in an apparent attempt to characterize

patience as a feminine virtue (Moral Epistles 2). Moreover, for Seneca, patient endurance of torture or of hardship

in war is the prototypically virtuous form of endurance, though he admits that endurance of sickness, too, is a

virtuous form of endurance; see Moral Epistles 66–67.

55 Thomas Attig, “The Importance of Conceiving of Grief as an Active Process,” Death Studies 15 (1991): 385–93

(386).

emotion of grief vividly illustrates the extent of Job’s powerlessness, but his emotional turmoil is an

opportunity for Job to recapture agency if he exhibits patient endurance.

5. Power dynamics and the emotion of shame in the Testament of Job

Job is not the only figure in the book who is plagued by emotional turmoil. Job’s wife, Sitis, too,

experiences powerlessness, which the book describes by attributing to her shame, an emotion of

powerlessness. In an extended monologue, Sitis elaborates on the shame she feels when reflecting on

the experience of having cut her hair to pay for three loaves of bread “while the crowd stood by and

marveled” (T. Job 24:10). She had been an exceedingly devoted wife, initially venturing “unashamedly to

go into the market” to beg for bread, but her public shaming, tolerated because she had no alternative,

is too much for her to bear. The experience of trading her hair for three loaves of bread left such a

profound impact on Sitis that she “drew near” to Job “at once” (24:1). With this shameful experience

fresh in her mind, Sitis encourages Job to “speak some word against the Lord and die” (25:10), an

outcome that would finally free her from her suffering: “Then I too shall be freed from weariness that

issues from the pain of your body” (ibid.).

Sitis experiences shame with the cutting of her hair, an event that draws attention to her loss of

power-to, namely the fact that she is unable even to purchase a loaf of bread, and the power over her

wielded by those who “barely allow[] her to have her own food” (T. Job 22:1). She had earlier

courageously entered the market to beg for bread, but Satan subsequently deprives her of her power on

the road back to Job, “walking stealthily and leading her heart astray” (23:11).56 Her retrospective

reflections on her experience imply a feeling of shame with what had just occurred, and her

powerlessness is the focus of the extended lament that immediately follows. The refrain in the lament,

which contrasts Sitis’ current state with the recollection of her former glory, focuses on the fact that

56 See Seow, “Greek Book,” 57: “The notice in 23:11 about Satan leading her heart is a critical turning point, for the

narrative up to this point indicates not the slightest hesitation on her part.”

Sitis, whose massive wealth enabled her to support the poor and lead a life of luxury, now only

possesses the capacity to sell her hair for a loaf of bread.57

Coming immediately after Sitis reports that “the crowd stood by and marveled,” the lament

presumably originates with members of that crowd.58 Shame “always involve(s) in some way or other an

idea of the gaze of another,” and Sitis’ experience of having been exposed for all to see was deeply

shameful.59 Shame emerges from the actual or imagined gaze of others; the one experiencing shame

must “imagine how it will be seen as I commit the action, and the feeling of badness is transferred to

me.”60 This is because shame is “about appearance, about how the subject appears before and to

others.”61 One who is powerless to bridge the gap between “who one is and what one hopes to be” is

especially susceptible to the experience of shame, and Sitis’ experience in the marketplace magnifies

that gap.62 In four consecutive verses, this lament uses imperatives to “look” (ἴδε: T. Job 25:5, 7) at and

“see” (βλέπε: 25:6, 8) Sitis. While, in context, the audience for this lament is likely others in the crowd,

the target audience is never explicitly stated; the reader is supposed to imagine herself as being among

those instructed to “observe.” We participate in the process of shaming Sitis, which enables us to

appreciate that Sitis’ emotion seems reasonable under the circumstances.63

Job understands that his wife’s advice that he “speak some word against the Lord” is an action

that he would be performing on behalf of them both. In responding to her suggestion, he asks whether

57 See each verse in T. Job 24:3–8.

58 Though see Emily O. Gravett, “Biblical Responses: Past and Present Retellings of the Enigmatic Mrs. Job,” Biblical

Interpretation 20 (2012): 97–125 (113), who attributes the lament to Sitis herself.

59 Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 82.

60 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2012), 105–6.

61 Ibid., 104–5.

62 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 102.

63 Collins, “Structure,” 45, claims that the lament of ch. 25 “seems inappropriately placed—we might expect such a

lament by the onlookers after 23:10 but not in the middle of Sitis’ conversation with Job.” In fact, however, the

lament is very strategically placed within the framework of Sitis’ description of her own shaming. The function of

this lament is not simply to provide an account of the event but rather to enable us both to appreciate and

participate in the emotional experience of that event, something that we only discover during Sitis’ retrospective

in ch. 24.

she suggests “that we should say something against the Lord” (T. Job 26:3). In speaking a word against

God, Job would recapture his agency and that of his wife. Job, however, refuses to capitulate. He

concedes that he and wife “suffer these things” (26:3) but insists that their shame will be temporary:

“Let us be patient (μακροθυμήσωμεν) till the Lord, in pity, shows us mercy” (26:5). Just as Job earlier

suppressed his own anger in an empowering display of emotional self-control, so does he now argue

that he and his wife must similarly suppress the emotion of shame if they desire the power to achieve

heavenly rewards.

According to Job, Sitis is unable to suppress her shame because she “does not see the devil

standing behind (her) and unsettling (her) reasoning” (T. Job 26:6). In contrast to Job, Sitis’ emotions are

shaped by an inability to transcend concrete reality.64 Job’s patient reasoning (λογισμὸν μακρόθυμον,

21:4) had earlier enabled him to transcend destructive emotions; here, he accuses his wife of

succumbing to irrationality (διαλογισμούς), that is, allowing her emotions to interfere with her ability to

endure patiently. Her shame is a product of the fact that she perceives herself and her husband as

powerless to escape their suffering.

The opposition between “reasoning” (λογισμός) and emotion in chs. 21 and 26 appears

elsewhere in early Jewish literature. This distinction plays a central role in 4 Maccabees where, as in the

Testament of Job, the protagonists manage to stifle their emotions by employing what is referred to

there as “pious reasoning” (ὁ εὐσεβής λογισμός).65 This distinction was appropriated by the author of

both the Testament of Job and 4 Maccabees from Stoic thinkers, for whom the goal of right reason was

64 See Garrett, “‘Weaker Sex’,” 57, who observes that the portrait of Sitis in the book is consistent with “[a]

fundamentally negative view of females [in antiquity] as preoccupied with that which is earthly and corruptible,”

particularly with the “cycle of birth, life, death, and burial.” This feminine preoccupation with her material world

prevents her from appreciating the heavenly reality that is accessible to Job; see, ibid., 61–68.

65 See Moore and Anderson, “Taking It.”

to suppress entirely, or at least moderate, the emotions.66 The use of logismos in the context of both

anger and shame in the Testament of Job confirms that at issue in the book is the need to exhibit control

over various forms of emotion in the face of suffering.

The text communicates Job’s ability to overcome shame in the very next scene. Rather than

succumbing to shame like his wife, Job manages with patient endurance to provoke Satan to shame. In

calling Sitis’ attention to the presence of Satan in the background, Job uses the language of sight,

imagery that, as we observed, figured prominently in the earlier description of Sitis’ shaming: “Do you

not see (ὁρς) the devil standing behind you and unsettling your reasoning so that he might deceive me

too?” (T. Job 26:6). Job thus exposes Satan, who had been “hiding” behind Sitis and commands him to

“come up front! Stop hiding yourself! … Come out and fight!” (27:1). Satan emerges, and, like Sitis

earlier, he too can now be seen by others. Satan first weeps (27:2) and then departs, “ashamed” (27:6:

καταισχυνθείς). The shaming of Satan is a fitting coda to Job’s conversation with his wife: patient

endurance of suffering not only empowers one to overcome shame but can even provide power over

the one who causes the suffering by reducing him/her to shame.67

6. Disgust and competing conceptions of power in the Testament of Job

Shortly after his defeat of Satan, Job hosts royal colleagues—Eliphas, Baldad, Sophar, and Elihu—who

heard about his predicament. However, the disgusting stench of his body so overwhelms them that they

are unable to approach him. The Old Greek version of Job contains two references to Job’s worm-ridden

body and one to the dung-heap that became his home, but there are no obvious indications that Greek

66 On the opposition between logismos and emotion (θυμός) in Stoic thought, see David A. deSilva, 4 Maccabees:

Introduction and Commentary on the Greek Text in Codex Sinaiticus (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 69. For the debate among

Stoics over whether one should discipline or eliminate emotion, see David C. Aune, “Mastery of the Passions: Philo,

4 Maccabees and Earliest Christianity,” in Hellenization Revisited: Shaping a Christian Response Within the Greco-

Roman World, ed. Wendy E. Helleman (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), 125–58 (136–37).

67 See Cason, “Rhetoric of Disablement,”122: “From the standpoint of gender, the scene of Job conquering Satan

denotes a clash of competing masculinities in the narrative.”

Job means to elicit from its audience the emotion of disgust.68 Both Job’s worms and his dung heap

figure more prominently in the Testament of Job, which features not only a large number of references

to his worm-ridden body and to the dung heap but also descriptions of the disgusting effect that the

state of his body has on others.69

In the Testament of Job, Satan inflicts a plague on Job that is described as worms (σκώληκος) on

a number of occasions.70 I argue that the work’s author draws his audience’s attention to the

empowering effect of endurance by describing the reactions of disgust to Job’s condition. To ensure that

his audience appreciates Job’s remarkable endurance, the author describes the disgust that made it so

difficult for Job’s royal visitors to tolerate his presence. Disgust is a disempowering emotion, and the fact

that Job inspires disgust should highlight his powerlessness. In this way, his royal colleagues serve as

foils for Job, who patiently tolerates the suffering that had made him an object of intense disgust for

others. Job rejects the belief that his physical state is disgusting and a symptom of his powerlessness;

rather, his physical state can restore Job’s power by endowing him with the capacity to achieve

redemption. Job’s endurance is more powerful than the disgust that his body inspires in others, and that

endurance enables him to overcome the disempowering effect that disgust tends both to reflect and

produce.

Skolekosis—the infestation of worms or maggots in the body— is often associated in ancient

Jewish, Christian, and Greco-Roman sources with decomposition of the flesh and foul, disgusting

68 Job’s worm-ridden body: 2:8; 7:5. Job’s dung heap: 2:8. The Hebrew version of Job has Job sitting in ashes (רפא:

2:8) rather than in a dung heap, and he once refers to his flesh as maggot-ridden (המר ירשב שבל: 7:5). None of the

characters in the Hebrew version refer to his maggot-ridden body.

69 On the greater prominence accorded to Job’s worm-ridden body in the Testament of Job, see Dochhorn,

“Testament Hiobs,” 682.

70 See T. Job 20:8, 9; 24:3; 26:1; 34:4; 47:4, 6. Outside of Job 7:5, references to worms in the biblical book of Job

are far more poetic; see 17:14; 24:20; 25:6.

stenches.71 Ancient descriptions of worm-ridden bodies also evoke the image of corpse-consumption.72

Such an image provokes disgust, which theorists connect with the merging of life and death.73 Disgust

centers especially upon spoiled or decaying objects because ingesting them reminds us of our own

mortality.74

Job’s illness inspires disgust in those who encounter him. Because of the “stench of my body,”

the kings who visit Job are only able to approach him while holding perfume, even though their soldiers

had already spent three days scattering incense (T. Job 31:2–4). 75 The extent of their disgust is

remarkable, and Job’s disgusting smell seems to have made an impression on them; they ridicule him in

saying that “here he sits in the misery of worms and foul odors, and yet he is piqued at us” (34:4).

Baldad reminds Eliphas that “we were not strong enough to approach him because of the foul stench,

except by the use of much perfume” (35:2). Disgust is the emotional opposite of honor and status, and

these scenes serve to emphasize through the emotion of disgust that Job has been degraded.76 For that

reason, those who are sensitive to the loss of Job’s status, namely his royal visitors, remark on his

disgusting state. Similarly, his wife, Sitis, criticizes him for enduring the fact that he sits nightly “in the

refuse of worms (σαπρί σκωλήκων)” (24:3).

71 See, e.g., Papias of Hierapolis, Fragment 3, describing Judas Iscariot’s death: “Pus and worms flowed from each

part of his body … This land has been deserted due to its stench and is now uninhabited—why, even to this day no

one can go past that place unless they remember to plug their nose” (trans. Christopher B. Zeichmann, “Papias as

Rhetorician: Ekphrasis in the Bishop’s Account of Judas’ Death,” New Testament Studies 56 [2010]: 427–29 [427]).

On the importance of the sense of smell to the emotion of disgust, see Aurel Kolnai, On Disgust (Chicago: Open

Court, 2004), 50, who observes that “the true place of origin of disgust is the sense of smell.” See also William Ian

Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 66–79.

72 Christopher B. Zeichmann, “Worm Food: Towards a Typology of Worm and Lice Disease-Descriptions in Graeco-

Roman Narratives,” Ancient Narrative 17 (2020): 185–99 (194). The association between worms and corpses is also

found in the Hebrew Bible; see, e.g., Isaiah 14:11; 66:24.

73 See, e.g., Carolyn Korsmeyer, Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2011), 123: “Disgust recognizes the communion of death with the process of disintegration.” See also Miller,

Anatomy, 26–27 and Kolnai, Disgust, 53–54.

74 Martha C. Nussbaum, “‘Secret Sewers of Vice’: Disgust, Bodies, and the Law,” in The Passions of

Law, ed. Susan Bandes (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 19–62 (24).

75 The fact that Job sits on a dung heap contributes to the stench and only amplifies the disgust that Job’s body

provokes in others; see T. Job 20:7; 21:1; 24:1; 28:8; 32:4.

76 See Kugler and Rohrbaugh, “Women and Honor,” 56, who note that Job’s peers “observe repeatedly that he

stinks, a further sign of diminished honor.”

Pious Job’s bout with skolekosis is exceptional when viewed within the context of other ancient

descriptions of the disease. Worms are often described in ancient sources, including by Josephus and

the author of 2 Maccabees, as a divine punishment for the wicked that serves to demonstrate for their

audience how offensive they are by provoking in their audience the emotion of disgust.77 It was typically

reserved as a punishment for the wicked powerful, especially kings. Christopher Zeichmann describes a

“type-scene” for literary accounts of skolekosis in antiquity:78

Before suffering, the individual was generally a noble or royal male that committed a heinous

crime, either some sort of intolerable impiety or unrepentant brutality against his subjects …

One or multiple deities brought the offender to justice by inflicting him with worms (sometimes

lice) for his offenses, causing decomposition of the flesh … The disease continues to worsen as

rot, worms, or an ulcer affects the genitals or bowels … this is accompanied by a vivid

description of either the immense pain the victim is experiencing or their disfigured body … An

intolerable stench emanates from the victim, frequently leading to isolation from servants and

family members. Their suffering culminates in an unmourned, cowardly, and sometimes even

celebrated death.

It is not simply their deaths but the disgusting physical state produced by worms that serves to display

vividly divine power over these kings. According to Sara Ahmed,

[D]isgust reactions are not only about objects that seem to threaten the boundary lines of

subjects, they are also about objects that seem ‘lower’ than or below the subject, or even

beneath the subject . . . As a result, disgust at ‘that which is below’ functions to maintain the

power relations between above and below, through which ‘aboveness’ and ‘belowness’ become

properties of particular bodies, objects and spaces.79

77 See Josephus, Jewish War 1.656–658 and Jewish Antiquities 17.168–173 (Herod); Jewish War 7.451–453

(Catullus); Against Apion 2.143–144 (Apion); and 2 Maccabees 9:5–28 (Antiochus IV). See Louise J. Lawrence, “Evil

and the Body of Antiochus IV Epiphanes: Disability, Disgust and Tropes of Monstrosity in 2 Maccabees 9:1–12,” in

Evil in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. Chris Keith and Loren T. Stuckenbruck (Tübingen: Mohr

Siebeck, 2016), 49–68; Alexandria Frisch, “Worms, Rotting Flesh, and Falling Bowels: The Power of Disgust in a

Motif of Kingly Death in Early Jewish Literature,” Diné Israel 29 (2013): 33*–56*. According to Zeichmann, “Worm

Food,” 186, “Of the fifteen unique narratives of death by either phthiriasis or skolekosis, twelve explicitly attribute

the disease to divine punishment and it remains implicit in the remaining three.” See also Thomas Africa, “Worms

and the Death of Kings: A Cautionary Note on Disease and History,” Classical Antiquity 1 (1982): 1–17.

78 Zeichmann, “Worm Food,” 190.

79 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 88–89 (emphasis in original).

Disgust is a “cognitively sophisticated emotion” that depends on “well-developed ideas of

contamination and contagion.”80 Intimately related to the threat of contamination, the association

between disgust and contamination means that the one who inspires disgust is segregated, lacking the

power to participate in society by virtue of their exclusion. Those excluded in this way are necessarily

“lower” because “the high do not constitute a polluting threat to the low in the way the low do to the

high.”81 Disgust does not only serve to exclude but reifies existing power relations by ranking “people

and things in a kind of cosmic ordering.”82 By inflicting the wicked powerful with a disgusting disease,

God inverts the social hierarchy, elevating in status those who feel disgust while degrading the wicked

kings who now inspire disgust. By reducing human kings to a state of powerlessness, God demonstrates

his own power over them.

These power dynamics hold true in the case of Job’s condition as well, even though Job is pious.

Disgust is the ideal emotion with which to describe Job’s circumstances because of its association with

power. Satan afflicts Job with skolekosis immediately after he pins Job under the latter’s throne for

three hours (T. Job 20:5). Job immediately leaves the city and “sat on a dung heap, worm-ridden in my

body” (20:7–8). His body begins to ooze “discharges” which “wet the ground with moisture” (20:8).

Satan’s ability to overwhelm Job and leave him with a debilitating illness reflects his power over Job. The

disgusting character of that illness is an emotional expression of that power.

The disgust that Job’s skolekosis induces in his royal visitors illustrates the association of disgust

with powerlessness. The kings’ disgust is accompanied by their shock at Job’s sudden powerlessness.

They remember Job as the one “who rules over all of Egypt” (T. Job 28:7) and recall that he had the

power to serve as a benefactor of the poor (30:5). His wealth once dwarfed theirs, a marker of his

superior power over, and his power to, support others: “For when I used to bring out for them the

80 Miller, Anatomy, 6.

81 Ibid., 242.

82 Ibid., 2.

precious stones, they would marvel, clapping their hands, and say, ‘If the goods of our three kingdoms

were gathered into one at the same place, there would be no equal to the glorious stones of your

kingdom” (28:5).83 Job’s unrivaled power to give charity is an important theme in the book; almost all of

chapters 9–15, which describe in detail both his massive wealth and his commitment to benefaction, is

devoted to this theme.84 This would have been an important capacity considering that, in the ancient

world, “[h]onorable men of wealth are expected to display compassion and generosity and thereby

acquire a multitude of clients.”85 The power to give charity was thus an important element in one’s

power to rule as king. The lament of Eliphas in chapter 32 is an extended reflection on the contrast

between Job’s former power to give charity and his current state of abject poverty:

Are you the one who appointed 7,000 sheep for the clothing of the poor? Where then is the

splendor of your throne? Are you the one who appointed 3,000 camels for the transport of

goods to the needy? Where then is the splendor of your throne? Are you the one who

appointed the thousand cattle for the needy to use when plowing? Where then is the splendor

of your throne? (T. Job 32:2–3)

This lament is reminiscent of the one in chapter 25 that contrasts Sitis’ current state with the

recollection of her former glory. Here, Eliphas explicitly contrasts the kings’ disgust with Job’s present

condition with the memory of his massive wealth: Job used to sit on “golden couches” but now sits on a

dung heap; he used to have “the censers of the fragrant assembly, now you live amid foul stench.”86 The

text translates Job’s state of powerlessness into emotional terms by describing the intense disgust that

he inspires in his wealthy visitors.

83 See Haralambakis, “‘I Am Not Afraid,” 137.

84 Trotter, “Role of Charity”; idem, “The Developing Narrative of the Life of Job: The Implications of Some Shared

Elements of the Book of Tobit and the Testament of Job,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 77 (2015): 449–66. Cason,

“Rhetoric of Disablement,” 81, speaks of “Job’s superiority over the disenfranchised as they are defenseless

without his aid.” The fact that he had become powerless to give charity thus signified his loss of status and an

important component of his power to rule.

85 Kugler and Rohrbaugh, “Women and Honor,” 54. On the pursuit of honor acquired through wealth on the part of

both Job’s royal visitors and his wife, see ibid., 56–60.

86 T. Job 32:4, 8.

At the same time that the text’s emphasis on disgust serves to highlight Job’s apparent

powerlessness, it also draws attention to Job’s remarkable ability to restore his agency through his

patient endurance.87 The endurance he musters in the face of his disgusting state is apparent from the

very beginning of his illness. Job reports that although “many worms were in my body … if a worm ever

sprang off, I would take it up and return it to its original place, saying ‘Stay in the same place where you

were put until you are directed otherwise by your commander’” (T. Job 20:8–9). Job’s control over the

worms, the objects of disgust, is an example of his “ascetic discipline” through which he succeeds in

gaining access to the “heavenly plane” of reality that is inaccessible to his wife and royal colleagues.88

Job’s patience restores his agency by enabling him to embrace his disgusting illness. His patience is thus

a source of power that leads him to transform a state of powerlessness into one of power. Eventually,

Satan, analogizing the conflict to the wrestling matches of the pankration, acknowledges that, despite

his best efforts, Job managed to exercise power over Satan through his endurance—“Because he

showed endurance and did not grow weary, at the end the upper one cried out in defeat” (T. Job 27:4).89

Disgust typically serves to elevate the person experiencing the disgust over the one who is

disgusting.90 Yet Baldad implies that Job’s disgusting state overpowered them when admitting that “we

were not strong enough to approach him because of the foul stench, except by the use of much

perfume” (T. Job 35:2). They lack the power to endure what Job is capable of enduring. Ironically, then,

87 See Haralambakis, “I Am Not Afraid,” 141: “Whereas Job’s wealth is lost and regained, his masculinity is

maintained throughout the story.” On the theme of patient endurance in chs. 28ff., see above n. 26.

88 Lawrence M. Wills, “Ascetic Theology Before Asceticism? Jewish Narratives and the Decentering of the Self,”

Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74 (2006): 902–25 (913–14). Robert A. Kugler, “On Anthropology and

Honor in the Testament of Job,” in Dust of the Ground and Breath of Life (Gen 2:7): The Problem of a Dualistic

Anthropology in Early Judaism and Christianity, ed. Jacques T.A.G.M. van Ruiten and George H. van Kooten (Leiden:

Brill, 2016), 117–26, points in a similar direction when attributing to Job a “dualistic anthropology” that

distinguishes body from soul.

89 Haralambakis, “I Am Not Afraid of Anybody,” 136; Bradford A. Kirkegaard, “Satan in the Testament of Job: A

Literary Analysis,” in Of Scribes and Sages: Early Jewish Interpretation and Transmission of Scripture, Volume 2, ed.

Craig A. Evans (London: T & T Clark, 2004), 4–19 (13). On the use of the language of the pankration, see Haas,

“Job’s Perseverance,” 125.

90 See Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 88–89.

Job’s disgust is described as having the opposite effect from what we would expect91 The emotion of

disgust thus functions simultaneously to highlight Job’s own power and the powerlessness of his royal

colleagues.

Because he locates the source of his honor with God, Job is unperturbed by his disgusting state.

He attributes his ability to endure patiently to the reward that awaits him outside of this material world

(T. Job 18:5–8). The disgust that Job’s royal visitors experience, on the other hand, points to their focus

on this world.92 Because of its entanglement with the body, disgust is deeply sensory and evokes images

of death,93 both features that are this-worldly. Because Job’s disgusted visitors cannot access a reality

outside of the immediate and physical one, they fail to appreciate that the power to achieve redemption

constitutes genuine power-to. Job teaches his royal visitors, who “symbolize … the human state of

ignorance,” that his focus on heavenly matters empowers him to endure despite his disgusting physical

condition.94

The kings’ fixation on Job’s wealth suggests a focus on the mundane, earthly reality that is

amplified by their sensitivity to the material emotion of disgust. Already upon their arrival, their

experience of disgust is associated with their recollection of Job’s wealth:

But since they were about a half stadion distant from me because of the stench of my body,

they arose and approached me with perfumes in their hands, while their soldiers accompanied

them scattering incense around me so they would be able to approach me. And they spent

three days furnishing the incense. And when they had come near me, Eliphas spoke up and said

to me, ‘Are you Jobab, our fellow king? Are you the one who once had vast splendor?’ (T. Job

31:2–5)

91 See Cason, “Rhetoric of Disablement,” 125: “Masculinity and strength are often intertwined concepts, and they

are here as well. Their admission highlights Job’s ability to endure his circumstances and their inability to bear his

ordeal even for a short period of time.”

92 See Collins, “Structure,” 42: “The real issue between Job and his friends is awareness of heavenly reality.” On the

contrast between earthly and heavenly reality in the Testament of Job, see Trotter, “Role of Charity,” 1304–1309.

93 See above, p. XX.

94 Collins, Between Athens, 244.

Job’s focus on heavenly matters means that, despite the loss of wealth and the power-over and power-

to that accrue to the wealthy, his power is actually greater than theirs.95 The kings again contrast their

disgust with his alternative point of view in the next scene: “Here he sits in the misery of worms and foul

odors, and yet he is piqued at us. ‘Kingdoms shall pass away and so do their sovereigns. But as for my

kingdom,’ he says, ‘it shall last forever’” (34:4). Power, Job informs them, emanates not from authority

or wealth but rather from faith in the redeeming capacity of God.96 They might be wealthy, but he

possesses genuine power.

In contrast to other ancient texts that associate powerful kings with divinely-inflicted skolekosis,

King Job’s disease was not deserved. Despite this fact, Job endures more successfully than anyone else

by managing to survive his disgusting sickness. Because of its association with endurance, disgust in the

Testament of Job does not demonstrate the power of God over the king but rather the power of King

Job over Satan, the power to achieve redemption that Job eventually acquires, and the

misunderstanding of genuine power on the part of Job’s royal visitors.

7. Pity, anger, and power dynamics in the Testament of Job

Disgust is only one emotion that expresses the visiting kings’ misguided belief in their own power. Their

disgust is associated with two other emotions, pity and anger, which reinforce that belief. Eliphas

laments Job’s fate in a long passage that concludes with him “wailing while his fellow kings responded to

him all in a great commotion” (T. Job 33:1). That speech is seemingly an expression of pity for Job that

contrasts his former wealth with his fall from grace:

Are you the one who had golden couches but now sits on a dung heap? Now where is the

splendor of your throne? Are you the one who had a throne of precious stones, but now sits in

ashes? Now where is the splendor of your throne? … Are you the one who had golden lamps on

silver stands, but now you await the light of the moon? Where then is the splendor of your

95 See Haralambakis, “I Am Not Afraid of Anybody,” 138.

96 See Cason, “Rhetoric of Disablement,” 76–79.

throne? … Are you Job, the one who had vast splendor? Now where is the splendor of your

throne? (32:4–12)

Aristotle provided one prominent definition of pity among ancient thinkers: “Let pity, then, be a kind of

pain excited by the sight of evil, deadly or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it; an evil

which one might expect to come upon himself or one of his friends, and when it seems near.”97 Indeed,

the kings emphasize that Job’s suffering is not merited: “Have we not known about the many good

things sent out by him into the cities and the surrounding villages to be distributed to the poor, besides

those established at his house? How then has he now fallen into such a deathly state?” (30:5). It is also

not surprising that his royal colleagues express pity for King Job; Aristotle emphasizes that “men also

pity those who resemble them in age, character, habits, position, or family” precisely because “in such

cases we more easily perceive that a comparable misfortune might befall us as well.”98 For the most

part, however, the kings focus on Job’s lamentable state rather than the merits of his suffering,

reflecting a definition of pity which “regards the plight, not the cause of it,” that is, to “wretchedness as

opposed to desert.”99 The repeated refrain here, “where is the splendor of your throne,” draws

attention primarily to Job’s dramatic fall from grace because the wretchedness that evokes pity “is the

greater in proportion to the height from which one has fallen.”100

Pity, like disgust, is an emotional display that reflects a disparity in power. Françoise Mirguet

speaks of pity as a “privilege”: it involves “[c]onstructing the self’s relation to others while they are in a

situation of suffering,” yielding “a safe way to reposition the self towards them.”101 Pity issues from

someone who is not suffering and is therefore by definition in a superior position relative to the one

97 Aristotle, Rhetoric 2.8.2, 1385b.

98 The first quote is from Aristotle, Rhetoric 2.8.13, 1386a; the second is from David Konstan, Pity Transformed

(London: Duckworth, 2001), 50.

99 The first quote is drawn from Seneca, On Clemency 2.5.1 (Basore, Loeb Classical Library), the second from

Konstan, Pity Transformed, 93.

100 Konstan, Pity Transformed, 93.

101 Mirguet, Early History, 45.

being pitied; for that reason, pity can sometimes be associated with expressions of contempt.102 The

relationship between power and pity is visible in the fact that pity was especially associated with kings in

antiquity.103 The pity directed toward Job needs to be viewed within the broader power dynamics at

play in his encounter with his royal visitors.

Only once the “uproar died down” (T. Job 33:2) did Job intervene by demanding silence: “Quiet!

Now I will show you my throne with the splendor of its majesty” (ibid.). In silencing his royal visitors, Job

rejects their pity, and his speech clarifies why that is: he is actually the one in a position of power

because of the “splendor” he continues to enjoy. Job’s response reflects the Stoic viewpoint on pity,

according to which pity “insults the dignity of the person who suffers, implying that this is a person who

really needs the things of this world, whereas no virtuous person has such needs.”104 Job emphasizes

that eventually the kings and their riches will fade away (33:8); pity is therefore not an appropriate

emotion when directed at someone patiently suffering. However, he goes even further by arguing that

he does in fact desire honor and glory, but the glory and honor he seeks await him in a heavenly reality.

His “throne is in the upper world, and its splendor and majesty come from the right hand of the Father”

(33:3).

His royal visitors, however, refuse to be silenced. Eliphas “became enraged” (ὀργισθείς) (T. Job

34:2) in response to Job’s speech and addresses his royal companions as follows:

What good has it done that we have come here with our armies to comfort him? Look, now he

accuses us! Let us then go back to our own countries. Here he sits in the misery of worms and

foul odors, and yet he is piqued at us. (34:2–4)

102 See Robert H. Kimball, “A Plea for Pity,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 37 (2004): 301–16 (301), who queries whether

pity is “actually one of our morally baser emotions, like jealousy, envy, or hatred, because pity can include

contempt for its object and an attitude of morally reprehensible superiority on the part of the pitier?”

103 Mirguet, Early History, 46–49.

104 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 357.

Eliphas’ response is not pitying speech but angry speech. Like pity, anger, we observed earlier, is an

emotion that draws attention to a disparity in power. Eliphas’ angry speech spotlights this apparent

disparity: Job has been reduced to living in a state of chronic filth, yet he rejects the pity of his visitors.

Job not only offends Eliphas but challenges his high status: Job suggests that “kingdoms” and “their

sovereigns” would pass away (34:4) and “demeans” his royal visitors “in the presence of our troops”

(34:5). Eliphas refuses to be denied his assumption that he is in a position of power in relation to Job,

even if that assumption is now expressed through anger rather than pity.

As mentioned earlier, Job momentarily grows angry at those who had wronged him in chapter

18, but, in contrast to Eliphas, he manages to stifle his anger. The difference between Eliphas and Job

appears to center upon their respective understandings of power. The power dynamics that justify

anger reflect conventional understandings of power that are focused on concrete reality, but an

appreciation for genuine power—the power to achieve redemption by enduring and stifling emotion—

would lead to anger control. Job attempts to educate Eliphas in the correct understanding of power in

chapter 33, but Eliphas’ anger confirms that he fails to heed that lesson.

Eliphas’ royal colleagues do not endorse his display of anger, and Baldad urges him to “not

speak that way” (T. Job 35:1) to Job. Instead, Baldad urges the kings to “be patient (μακροθυμήσωμεν)

in order that we may discover his true condition” (35:4). Yet the patience of Job’s visitors does not

resemble his own. Eliphas urges patience because he deems it likely that Job is “emotionally disturbed,”

“mentally deranged,” and “driven senseless and imbalanced” (35:4–5). According to Baldad, Job’s

attempt to reject their pity by silencing them can only emerge from a state of mental illness; Baldad

urges patience not because he accepts Job’s point of view but because he is certain that Job’s point of

view is indefensible. Baldad’s insistence on patience constitutes a rejection of anger because he remains

relatively sure that pity is in order: Job suffers not only physically but also cognitively. Like Eliphas,

Baldad repudiates Job’s attempt to deny them their relative position of power, but by insisting that Job’s

speech points to his emotional disturbance, Baldad actually deepens the gap in power between Job and

his visitors. Just as Satan’s earlier attempt to assert power over Job by silencing him backfired, so too

does Job’s attempt to silence his visitors only serve to deepen the perceived gap in power between

them.

But Eliphas is not the last one to direct his anger at Job. The royal visitors continue to argue with

Job and are prepared to leave after 27 days (T. Job 41:1–2). However, Elihu encourages them to stay in

order to listen to his final speech. Like Eliphas earlier, Elihu focuses on the power dynamics in their

interaction with Job. Elihu had come to make “lamentation for him, remembering his former

prosperity,” but Job refused their pity by instead speaking “in boastful grandeur, saying he has his

throne in heaven” (41:4). Elihu had come to Job to express pity over the latter’s fall from grace, but Job

insisted that he remained the powerful party. Accordingly, Elihu “spoke out” against Job with “insulting

words” (41:5) and employed “arrogant speech” (42:1). The hymn that Eliphas subsequently recites

makes clear that Elihu expressed anger with Job: “Even his honored ones he provoked to anger

(παρώργισεν) … wrath (ὀργή) and anger (θυμός) shall be his tent. He has no hope in his heart, nor peace

in his body. He had the poison of asps in his tongue” (43:9–12). If Job deprived Elihu of his power by

rejecting his pity, Elihu sought to reassert his power by expressing anger toward Job.105

Elihu’s anger, however, triggers divine condemnation. Eliphas had apparently managed to

overcome his anger, but Elihu, even at this late point in the kings’ interactions with Job, continues to

speak with anger. For that reason, God no longer “considered Elihu worthy” of forgiveness for his

treatment of Job (T. Job 43:1). In a formulation not found in the canonical version, LXX Job 9:22 contends

that divine “anger destroys the great and powerful,” a vindication of divine justice and power over the

105 Elihu is described as “angry” (ὠργίσθη) in LXX Job as well (32:2 [2x], 3), but the Testament of Job has otherwise

transformed Elihu from a pious, humble character into a paradigm of impiety. On this transformation in character,

see H.-M. Wahl, “Elihu, Frevler oder Frommer? Die Auslegung des Hiobbuches (Hi 32–37) durch ein

Pseudepigraphon (TestHi 41–43),” Journal for the Study of Judaism 25 (1994): 1–17. The darker view of Elihu’s

character is also reflected in the statement by Rabbi Akiva that “Elihu is Balaam” (Y. Sotah 5:6 [20d]).

great.106 The Testament of Job considers the opposite scenario, in which one of the great become angry

because he refuses to recognize divine power-over. Human anger, and the assertion of power that

underlies it, offends God, the genuine source of power. In the hymn that Eliphas recites thanking God

for forgiving the kings’ their sins, he comments extensively on Elihu’s fate: “The Lord has forgotten him”

(43:10), and, as a result, Elihu “will have no memorial among the living” (43:5, 17). God asserts His own

power over King Elihu by depriving him of a legacy, reminding the kings that He is the one with genuine

power.

Job’s royal friends are not the first characters in the book who express anger with Job. At the

beginning of the book, God informs Job that Satan will “rise up against you with rage (ὀργῆς) for battle”

(T. Job 4:4), but Job is expected to be “patient” in return (4:6). As with Job's later encounter with his

royal colleagues, his contest with Satan is framed around the contrast between anger and emotional

control. The powerful people in the book display emotions associated with power, but the Testament of

Job provides a subversive definition of power by ascribing to Job an emotional style normally associated

with the powerless.

8. Conclusion

The Testament of Job describes various confrontations between Job on the one hand and Satan, Job’s

wife, and his royal visitors on the other that center upon competing conceptions of power. The latter

group focus on conventional forms of power: they believe that Job is powerless because Satan

dominates him physically (power-over) and because Job’s capacities are now limited (power-to). Job

objects to this evaluation of his power because, he contends, that perspective is limited to power

dynamics in our physical, material world. By shifting one’s focus from the immediately physical to the

heavenly plane, one also arrives at a different evaluation of Job’s power. From that perspective, Job’s

106 See Seow, “Greek Book,” 39.

physical state is actually empowering because it affords him an opportunity to acquire the power to

achieve redemption.

Those divergent outlooks on power translate into different emotional expectations for the

suffering Job. Job’s interlocutors fail to appreciate why Job stifles emotional responses to his suffering. If

Job is powerless, then that powerlessness should register as anger, grief, shame, self-disgust, and

acceptance of pity. Their conception of power yields a set of “feeling rules”—culturally determined

expectations about which emotions are appropriate under what circumstances— that demand specific

emotional responses to suffering. In this case, the fact that Job fails to obey those feeling rules leads his

wife to rebuke him and his royal visitors to suspect that he is mentally imbalanced. Job’s conception of

power, by contrast, yields different feeling rules: because Job’s suffering actually restores agency, it

should not provoke in him emotional excess. The emotions of the protagonists in the book emerge from

competing conceptions of power and their associated feeling rules.

On the other hand, Job’s interlocutors experience a wide range of emotion. They lack the power

to control their emotions, including grief, shame, disgust, and anger, mirroring the fact that they lack

conventional forms of power-over (Satan) and power-to (Job’s wife and royal visitors). They serve as

emotional foils to Job, whose perspective on power and the applicable feeling rules empower him to

stifle his emotions.

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