Job 2:9 and the Narrative Function of Job’s Wife

The narrative function of Job’s wife is to pick up on the conversation between God and the Satan. She reproduces the words of God’s claim about Job that ‘he still held fast to his integrity’ (Job 2:3) by asking Job, ‘Do you still hold fast to your integrity?’ And she reproduces the challenge of the Satan that Job would ‘curse’ God when she says to Job that he should ‘curse God and die’.

Her choice of words is the same and this tells the reader that her role is comparable to that of the Satan, a role that is hostile to Job. She is not playing the part of a character who is offering a fresh feminine insight or intuition (it is not a model of husband-wife relations)—she is merely repeating what the narrator has already set up in the dynamics of the story.

The reason for her rhetorically asking why Job still held fast to his integrity is the same one that underlies God’s earlier claim: in the face of the first cycle of disasters to befall Job, he still held fast to his integrity and did not curse God (Job 2:3); likewise, in the face of the second cycle (the affliction of his body), Job still held fast to his integrity—and he does not follow her direction and then curse God.

In terms of the dynamic of the narrative, Job’s integrity is defined as (a) not cursing God as the Satan expected and, instead, (b) demonstrating the qualities that God had predicated of him: “a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil” (Job 1:8).

Throughout the rest of the book, in the dialogue, Job continues to hold fast to his integrity (Job 27:5; 31:6). If he did not do so, he would prove the Satan’s case and make God’s first judgment about him to be a lie. We should not criticize Job for maintaining what God has said about him. Equally, we should not exonerate Job’s wife.

Her narrative role is that of a flat one-dimensional character to prompt Job’s verbal response to the second cycle of affliction; this second response balances his earlier verbal response to the first cycle of disasters that befell him (Job 1:21; 2:10). Job’s assessment of his wife was that she was ‘foolish’ and the narrator’s evaluation of Job is that he ‘did not sin with his lips’ (Job 2:10).