From Dust to Glory The plan
Illustration · An ash heap outside a town wall at dusk, with a broken clay jar and its pieces lying in the ash. Not drawn from a photograph.

Day 4 · Job 1–4

Among the Ashes

A blameless man loses everything without being told why, sits seven days in silence with three friends, and at last speaks.

Day 4 of 365Job

Today’s reading · about 10 minutes

Job 1–4

Job’s losses, his friends’ silence, his lament, Eliphaz begins

Read it

Psalm 2

Today’s psalm

Read it

A new book starts today. Watch BibleProject’s overview of Job before you read.

Themes and asks

  1. For nothing?

    In heaven’s court, the Accuser puts his challenge about Job in a few words: “Yes, but Job has good reason to fear God” (1:9, NLT). Translated word for word from the Hebrew, it is a question: “Is it for nothing that Job fears God?” Many commentators see the whole book turning on it: whether anyone loves God for God’s sake, and not for what it brings.

    • If the blessings went, what would be left of your faith?
    • When have you done the right thing knowing it would cost you?

  2. The LORD gave

    Job’s first answer to his losses is worship: “The LORD gave me what I had, and the LORD has taken it away. Praise the name of the LORD!” (1:21, NLT). Struck with sores and told by his wife to curse God and die, he asks whether we should accept only good things from God and never anything bad (2:10). Twice the narrator clears him: he did not sin by blaming God (1:22), and he said nothing wrong (2:10).

    • What have you been given that you hold most tightly?
    • How do you speak about God when something is taken from you?

  3. Seven days of silence

    Three friends come to comfort him. They weep when they see him, then sit on the ground with him for seven days and nights, and no one says a word, “for they saw that his suffering was too great for words” (2:13, NLT). Many readers have taken their silence as a model for sitting with the grieving.

    • When has someone’s presence helped you more than anything they said?
    • Who could you simply sit with this week?

  4. The day of my birth

    When Job at last speaks, he curses the day he was born (3:1–3) and asks why he did not die at birth. He does not curse God, but he holds nothing back. Then Eliphaz answers, gently at first, from what he has seen: “those who plant trouble and cultivate evil will harvest the same” (4:8, NLT). Readers have long differed over whether he is being kind or presumptuous.

    • What do you say to God when you are in the dark?
    • When have you reached too soon for an explanation of someone’s pain?

Behind the words

A man in the land of Uz

The book of Job names no king and gives no date, but its world is an old one. Job’s wealth is counted in herds (1:3), and he offers sacrifices for his children himself, with no priest or temple (1:5). Israel, the exodus and the law of Moses never come up. And the book calls God Shaddai, “the Almighty,” more often than the rest of the Bible together, the name Exodus 6:3 ties to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Traditional readers have taken these as signs of the patriarchs’ age, and the plan reads Job at the threshold of that age, between the tower of Babel and Abram’s call.

Many scholars date the writing much later. They often see the prose story at the start and end as an old tale, perhaps from outside Israel, with the long poetic dialogue set inside it by a later poet, most often dated between the 500s and 300s BC. They point to the Aramaic color of its Hebrew, to its argument with the belief that the righteous always prosper, and to the Accuser, who appears again in Zechariah 3, around 520 BC. Job was already a byword for righteousness by about 590 BC, when the prophet Ezekiel named Job with Noah and Daniel as righteous men (Ezekiel 14:14).

Readers have differed over Job himself, too. Ezekiel and the letter of James (5:11) both hold him up as an example, and most traditional Jewish and Christian readers have taken him as a real man. The Talmud records a rabbi who said Job never existed and was a parable, and the answer he was given: the book’s first verse names Job’s country and his name (Bava Batra 15a). Many modern scholars read the book as a poem built around an older story, whatever history lies behind it.

The Accuser. In the heavenly court of chapters 1 and 2 (in Hebrew, “the sons of God”), the figure the NLT calls “the Accuser, Satan” is, in Hebrew, haśśāṭān: “the satan,” with “the.” The word means an adversary or accuser. It is used of human enemies (1 Kings 11:14), and even of the LORD’s angel standing in Balaam’s way (Numbers 22:22). Many scholars, and much Jewish reading, take it in Job as a title or role, naming a member of God’s court who tests and accuses, not yet the devil of later writings. Traditional Christian readers identify him with Satan, the devil, whom Revelation calls the accuser (Revelation 12:9–10).

Where readers have placed Job

Five answers to when Job lived, or when his book was written, and what each rests on.

WhenOn what grounds
The Greek Job’s closing noteAmong Esau’s descendants: Job is Jobab, a king of Edom (Genesis 36:33), “the fifth from Abraam”A note at the end of the Septuagint’s Job, which says it comes from “the Syriac book”
The TalmudAnswers range from the days of Jacob or of Moses to the Persian era (the return from exile, the days of Ahasuerus); one rabbi calls Job a parableA debate in Bava Batra 15a–b, beside the teaching that Moses wrote the book (14b)
EzekielKnown as a righteous man by about 590 BCEzekiel 14:14 names him with Noah and Daniel
Many modern scholarsWritten between the 500s and 300s BC, around an older taleIts Hebrew, its argument with other biblical wisdom, the figure of the Accuser
This planBetween Genesis 11 and 12, before AbramIts setting: wealth in herds, Job as his family’s priest, God as Shaddai, no Israel or law. Against it, the names Teman, Shuah and Buz come from the families of Abraham, his brother Nahor and Esau (Genesis 22:21; 25:2; 36:11), which would point later

You are here

Day 4 of 365, the first of nine days in Job (Days 4–12). The plan steps back from Babel to a man in the land of Uz; Abram’s story begins after it, on Day 13.

Euphrates Damascus Uz? Uz? Edom Teman Chaldeans Gulf Sabeans, from Sheba desert
Schematic, not to scale. Uz has been placed in two regions: Edom, which Lamentations 4:21 links with Uz, and the country near Damascus, which Josephus says Uz, a son of Aram, founded. Eliphaz came from Teman in Edom. The raiders came from Sheba, in Arabia (1:15), and from among the Chaldeans of southern Mesopotamia (1:17).

Threads

Each one opens the plan to the days on that thread.

My notes · Day 4

Sources
  • Job 1–4 and Psalm 2, Holy Bible, New Living Translation · BibleGateway
  • BibleProject, overview of Job (video) · BibleProject
  • “The Book of Job.” Encyclopaedia Britannica · Britannica
  • Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 14b–15b · Sefaria
  • Lancelot C. L. Brenton, translator, The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, 1844. Job 42:17 · Brenton’s translation
  • Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 1.145 (Whiston, 1.6.4), on Uz · Project Gutenberg
  • Peggy L. Day, An Adversary in Heaven: śāṭān in the Hebrew Bible. Harvard Semitic Monographs 43. Scholars Press, 1988.

Something wrong here? A date, a name, a quotation? Let me know

From Dust to Glory reads the whole Bible in the order its story happened, one day at a time, at your own pace. Each day gives questions to sit with, the history behind the words, and where it sits in the story. The plan lists all 365 days.