HistoricalChristian.Faith

Who Was Job?

No book of the Old Testament wrestles God so openly as the book of Job, and no figure in it is harder to place in time or on a map than its hero. Scripture introduces him without a genealogy and outside the line of Israel: “There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil” (Job 1:1). A Gentile of the nations who fears God from the first — with no story of conversion or of coming to Israel — Job is the born-righteous pole of a figure that recurs across the Hebrew Bible, the God-fearing Gentile whose faith the New Testament reads as a foretype of the Gentile church: where Rahab, Naaman, and the Queen of Sheba are converts drawn to Israel’s God, Job is righteous among the nations already. Around that man Scripture builds its great drama of undeserved suffering — the wager between the LORD and the Satan, the loss of children, wealth, and health, the long dispute with the three friends, the whirlwind answer, and the doubled restoration at the end (Job 42:10–12). Elsewhere the canon names him only twice, but tellingly: Ezekiel ranks him with Noah and Daniel as one of three proverbially righteous men whose merit could save only themselves (Ezekiel 14:14, 20), and James holds him up as the very type of steadfastness — “ye have heard of the patience of Job” (James 5:11). That is nearly the whole of the biblical Job. Who, then, was he — and when, and where?

The questions are old and were pressed hardest by Job’s own earliest readers. Was he a real man who truly lived and suffered, or a righteous figure of a didactic parable — a debate the rabbis themselves staged, one of them declaring flatly that “Job never existed and was but a parable”? When did he live: in the patriarchal age his long life and priest-like sacrifices suggest, in the days of Moses, or later? Where was “the land of Uz” — in Edom to the south, in the Hauran or Bashan to the north-east, or in the Arabian desert? And is he the same man the Greek translators identified, in an appendix to their version, with Jobab king of Edom, a descendant of Esau (Genesis 36:33)? On these the tradition divided, and the divisions are the substance of this page.

This page is a biographical tradition-timeline: not a life of Job — the sources for that are too thin and too contested — but a history of what was said and believed about the man across the centuries, set out earliest source first. Its “witnesses” are the datable sources that report on or interpret him: the biblical portrait and its two canonical echoes, the Septuagint’s Job-is-Jobab appendix, the first-century Testament of Job, the rabbinic debate over his existence and his era, and the long line of Christian commentators — Origen, the Antiochenes, Chrysostom, Julian of Eclanum, and above all Gregory the Great, whose vast Moralia in Job made the sufferer of Uz a type of Christ and the schoolbook of Christian patience. The genuinely contested questions — was Job historical or a parable? when did he live? where was Uz? is he Jobab of Edom? — are weighed on their own argument pages rather than settled by assertion.

Related doctrines: Figures of the Hebrew Scriptures — see also Balaam son of Beor · Melchizedek · Nimrod · Enoch · Naaman the Syrian · Jannes and Jambres · the Queen of Sheba · Jethro · Rahab of Jericho · Nebuchadnezzar · Og of Bashan · Cyrus the Great · the death of Moses · the curse of Ham · Shem son of Noah · Cain

Timeline

The biblical portrait (the book of Job, with Ezekiel and James)

The whole later tradition grows from a single book and two brief backward glances at it. The book of Job opens by placing its hero outside Israel and beyond easy dating: “There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil” — the greatest of “the men of the east,” with seven sons, three daughters, and vast flocks (Job 1:1–3). Heaven itself repeats the verdict when the LORD asks the Satan, “Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?” (Job 1:8). On that testimony the wager turns: Job is stripped of children, wealth, and health, disputes with his three friends and with God, and is answered out of the whirlwind — and at the last “the LORD turned the captivity of Job… also the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before,” doubling his flocks and giving him again seven sons and three daughters (Job 42:10–12). The book supplies no king, no era, and no Israelite lineage — the very silences on which the later debates over his date, his homeland, and his historicity would turn.¹

The rest of the canon glances at Job only twice, but each time as a fixed point of reference — proof that by the time these writers wrote, “Job” was already a proverb. The prophet Ezekiel, warning that a doomed land could not be spared even by its holiest inhabitants, names him among an ancient triad: “Though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness” (Ezekiel 14:14, repeated at 14:20) — ranking Job with the two other righteous men who survived catastrophe, and setting him, like them, in a remote and non-Israelite antiquity. The Epistle of James, centuries later, fixes the other pole of his memory — not his righteousness but his endurance: “Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord” (James 5:11), the verse that made “the patience of Job” a byword and pointed, in “the end of the Lord,” to the doubled restoration as the pattern of God’s mercy. Between Ezekiel’s righteous Job and James’s patient Job stands the whole man the tradition would spend centuries interpreting: a Gentile saint of unknown age and country, held up by Jew and Christian alike as the great witness to faith kept through undeserved suffering.²

The Septuagint appendix to Job (Job 42:17b–e) — Job is Jobab, king of Edom (c. 2nd–1st century BC)

The first readers to try to place Job were the Greek translators, and their answer is the fountainhead of everything after. Where the Hebrew ends at the hero’s death, the Old Greek adds a paragraph absent from the Hebrew — conventionally Job 42:17a–e — that first affirms Job will “rise again” and then, citing “the Syriac book,” supplies the biography the canon withholds: “his name before was Jobab,” he “dwelt in the land of Ausis” (Uz) “on the borders of Idumea and Arabia,” he married an Arabian wife, and he was “the son of his father Zare, one of the sons of Esau… so that he was the fifth from Abraam.” The appendix then reproduces the Edomite king-list of Genesis 36:31–35 and slots the hero into it: “after Balac, Jobab, who is called Job” — the second king of Edom, Jobab son of Zerah of Bozrah (Genesis 36:33). At one stroke this answers all three of the questions the Hebrew leaves open — who (a great-grandson of Esau), when (the age of the Edomite kings, before Israel had a king, i.e. the patriarchal era), and where (Uz on the Edom–Arabia border) — and even harmonizes Job’s three friends into the same Esau genealogy, making Eliphaz the Temanite a son of Esau.³

The identification is older than the Greek Job itself: the Hellenistic-Jewish writer Aristeas the Exegete — excerpted by Alexander Polyhistor and preserved by Eusebius — already reports that Esau “begat Job,” who dwelt in Uz “on the borders of Idumaea and Arabia” and “was at first called Jobab,” so close to the appendix that scholars judge the Greek supplement to draw on the same tradition. Whether the equation holds is a separate question — it rests on nothing but the shared name Jobab/Job and a chain of harmonizing inferences, and it carries visible seams (the Greek makes Job the “son” of Zerah where Genesis makes Jobab a great-grandson of Esau, and turns Bozrah, Jobab’s city, into his “mother”). But as the earliest post-biblical reading it set the terms for the whole later debate over Job’s genealogy, era, and homeland; its strength is weighed on the argument pages below.⁴ Full text and context →

The Testament of Job — Job the patient king who battles Satan (c. 1st century BC–1st century AD)

The next reader to take up Job did far more than place him: he rewrote the whole story. The Testament of Job, a Greek Jewish work of the turn of the era, is cast as the dying Job’s deathbed address to his children, and it presupposes the Septuagint’s reading — Job says outright, “before the Lord had named me Job, I was called Jobab… I am of the sons of Esau,” living in the land of Ausitis (Uz). Onto that frame it builds three developments the canonical book never made. First, Job is a king and an anti-idolatry hero: puzzling over the idol his people worship, he is told by an angel that it belongs to Satan and that to destroy it means war — and he does it anyway (“I rose up in the night and took fifty slaves and went to the temple of the idol and destroyed it to the ground”).⁵

Second — and this is its lasting contribution — Job’s sufferings become a conscious, sustained duel with Satan, framed as an athletic contest that Job wins by sheer endurance. Forewarned, he enlists knowingly: “Then thou must wrestle like an athlete and resist pain… And thou shalt put on a crown of amarant,” the angel tells him, and Job answers, “I shall from love of God endure until death all that will come upon me, and I shall not shrink back.” He holds out until Satan himself concedes: “Behold, Job, I yield and give way to thee.” The virtue that wins is hypomonē, endurance — the very word behind “ye have heard of the patience of Job” (James 5:11), making this the fullest early portrait of the patient Job that the Edomite-king tradition and the whole later devotion would carry. Third, the book closes with Job’s three daughters receiving shimmering heavenly cords — “not earthly work, but celestial sparks of light” — that let them “sing and … glorify God in the holy dialect” of the angels: a spiritual inheritance worth more than their brothers’ goods.⁶ Full text and context →

The rabbinic debate (b. Bava Batra 14b–16b) — did Job exist? when did he live? (opinions c. 2nd–4th century, redacted c. AD 500)

Where the Greek and the Testament answered the open questions, the rabbis of the Talmud reopened them all. The long discussion of Job at the foot of tractate Bava Batra is the classic Jewish reckoning with the man of Uz, and it is remarkable chiefly for how little it settles. Its most famous line denies Job’s existence outright: a sage sitting before Rabbi Shmuel bar Naḥmani declared that “Job never existed and was never created… his story was a parable,” and, pressed, likened the opening “there was a man in the land of Uz” to the “two men in one city” of Nathan’s parable to David (2 Samuel 12:3). The Gemara answers that Job’s verse, unlike Nathan’s, gives a name and a homeland — “Rather, Job was clearly a real person” — but it preserves the dissent verbatim, the earliest surviving statement that Job is a didactic fiction. On when he lived the sugya is franker still about its own disagreement: it lines up a dozen incompatible eras — the days of Jacob (Job married Dinah), of Moses, of the spies, of the Judges, of the kingdom of Sheba, of Ahasuerus, of the Chaldeans under Nebuchadnezzar, and of the return from exile — each pinned to a verbal echo, and chooses none, spreading Job across the better part of fifteen centuries.⁷

Two further disputes run alongside. Was Job a Jew or a Gentile? A baraita ranks him among the seven “prophets [who] prophesied to the nations of the world” and calls him “a certain pious man among the nations,” but the Talmud reports the contrary view and concludes only that “the matter of whether or not Job was Jewish is a dispute between tanna’im” — here the rabbis part from the wiki’s two older witnesses, the Septuagint appendix and the Testament of Job, which made Job the Edomite Jobab, a Gentile son of Esau. And who wrote the book? A separate tradition, kept distinct here from the man’s era, holds that “Moses wrote his own book, and the portion of Balaam, and the book of Job” — a claim about the book’s composition, not the hero’s lifetime. Between them these disputes stage, centuries early, every question the later tradition would press: whether Job was historical, when he lived, what he was, and who wrote him.⁸ Full text and context →

Tertullian — Job the “hero” and instrument of God’s victory, the pattern of patience (c. 200)

The first Christian to enroll Job on this timeline does so not to place him but to praise him. In the closing chapter of his treatise On Patience, the Latin apologist Tertullian holds up the man of Uz — unnamed but unmistakable — as the supreme human example of endurance kept “as well in spirit as in flesh, as well in mind as in body”: a “hero” whom “neither the driving away of his cattle… nor the sweeping away of his children… nor… the agony of his own body” could estrange “from the patience and the faith which he had plighted to the Lord.” Tertullian frames the ordeal as a Roman triumph over the devil — “What a bier for the devil did God erect in the person of that hero!” — with Job answering “at every bitter message” with “nothing out of his mouth but thanks to God,” denouncing the wife who urges “crooked remedies,” and scraping his ulcers “with mighty equanimity” until “that instrument of God’s victory… possessed in redoubled measure what he had lost” (Job 42:10–12). Like the Alexandrian readers who follow, he says nothing of Job’s land, lineage, or era — he is the earliest Christian witness to the patient-Job strand that James 5:11 had made proverbial.⁹ Full text and context →

Origen of Alexandria — Job the athlete who wrestles the devil (c. 245)

With the Christian commentators the questions of land and lineage largely drop away and the drama of Job’s endurance takes their place — and it is Origen, the earliest reader on this timeline, who sets the pattern. He reads Job’s cry for a hearing as the shout of a wrestler mid-bout — “I cried out like an athlete in the stadium… if I do not bring my fight to a close, I will not get my crown” — and, on the whirlwind speeches, re-voices the heavenly wager as words God speaks back to the victorious sufferer: “A slanderer conspired against you… But, on the contrary, you were victorious.” The ordeal purifies rather than merely punishes, refining Job “like gold… in a melting pot.” It is the first Christian statement of the image the whole later devotion would carry — Job the champion of patience.¹⁰ Full text and context →

Ephrem the Syrian — the man of Uz who lived 248 years, a type of Christ (c. 370)

The Syriac tradition’s earliest sustained reading, transmitted under Ephrem’s name, does what neither the Greek nor the Talmud had: it puts a number on the ageless hero. Reading the doubled restoration as a doubling of Job’s remaining years, it reckons his life at 248 years — a Peshitta computation that fits the patriarchal longevity the Septuagint appendix had presupposed. It takes Job as a real man of Uz whom the devil, “convinced by the evidence of the facts,” could “never [bring] to blasphemy,” and — most consequentially — reads the blameless sufferer as a type of the sinless suffering Christ, whose “Redeemer lives” is prophecy of “the future manifestation of Emmanuel in the flesh.” (The commentary’s attribution to Ephrem himself is debated.)¹¹ Full text and context →

Didymus the Blind — the “marked pillar” of perseverance (c. 377)

Didymus, head of the Alexandrian school, reads Job in the spiritual key of his city: the man is deliberately set before “his contemporaries and his successors” as an “image of perseverance—like a marked pillar,” an athlete who “prays that he himself may win the crown in the competition.” The Satan, meanwhile, can strike only within bounds — “no one is tempted without God’s permission… given [only] with restrictions” — so that Job’s ordeal is a permitted, purposeful testing rather than fate or accident. His recovered commentary (lost until the 1941 Tura papyrus find) says nothing of Job’s place or era, but hands the Alexandrian athlete-of-endurance Job on intact.¹² Full text and context →

Ambrose of Milan — Job the “good athlete” whose bold complaint keeps faith (c. 388)

The Latin West’s great bishop gives Job a whole treatise. His four-book The Prayer of Job and David (De interpellatione Iob et David) pairs Job with David as the two saints who show how a righteous man may plead with God under undeserved affliction — taking as its problem the oldest scandal of faith, that “the unjust prosper… and the just [are] frequently afflicted in this world.” Ambrose answers it by reading Job as “a good athlete” and “champion of Christ” permitted to be tested “so that … he could become more glorious and reach the crown through trials,” and — his distinctive move — by taking Job’s bold complaint itself as righteous speech, not a lapse from patience: even while “he felt the arrows of the Lord in his body,” Job cries out “like a good athlete who would not yield to pain.” Sick on his dunghill, he proves “stronger” than the healthy friends who came to condemn him — “the words of a sick man are stronger than those who are not sick.” Ambrose adds nothing on Job’s place or era; his is the Latin bridge from Tertullian’s patient hero to the christological Moralia of Gregory the Great.¹³ Full text and context →

John Chrysostom — the patient sufferer, and the wife as the devil’s tool (c. 390)

Chrysostom’s running Commentary on Job gives the tradition its fullest pastoral portrait. Job’s mourning is “not… a defeat” but “a sign of victory,” a wisdom that never speaks “a single inappropriate word”; the devil, permitted to test him, unwittingly “bore witness to him from above… without realizing what he was doing”; and Job’s wife, urging him to curse God, is the devil’s own instrument — “when indeed the wife of Job speaks, a Devil is at work.” Chrysostom reads Job as a righteous man who lived before the Law, offering sacrifice as his own priest, and who even “knew the doctrine of resurrection.” He is the great witness to the moral Job — the patient sufferer whom James had already made proverbial.¹⁴ Full text and context →

Julian of Eclanum — the literal, historical Job (c. 425)

Against the allegorists stands Julian, the exiled Pelagian bishop, who reads Job in the literal, historical manner of the Antiochene school he drew on. Job and his friends are real men in a real dispute, argued “according to the rules of debating”; the wager is the devil’s calculated escalation to test “Job’s own person”; and even the monstrous verses are kept first to “the faithful understanding of the story” (Job’s “giants” are merely “wild beasts”) before any spiritual sense is allowed. Julian offers no Christ-typology of Job at all — the exact counter-position to the Syriac reading and to the christological Moralia Gregory the Great would build; that refusal to allegorize is itself his contribution to how the figure was read.¹⁵ Full text and context →

The later Greek homilists and catenists — Hesychius of Jerusalem and Olympiodorus (c. 430–515)

Two later Greek readers carry the patient-athlete Job into the fifth and sixth centuries. Hesychius of Jerusalem (c. 430), in his Homilies on Job, casts Satan as “the betrayer” defeated in single combat who, “after ripping Job’s body with his blows, as a last… resource… leads his wife against Job,” while Job’s pains only “made him appear to be a powerful fighter… deserv[ing] crowns and happiness” — and he reads Job’s “his brothers did not believe in him” prophetically of Christ.¹⁶ The Alexandrian deacon Olympiodorus (c. 515), in his catena commentary, notes in passing that Job “also was a king before” his crown was taken, and reads Behemoth and Leviathan as the devil whom Christ defeats — “Satan said to Christ, ‘I will give you all these things’” — the adversary of the wager unmasked as the tempter of the Gospel.¹⁷

Gregory the Great — the Moralia in Job: Job as type of Christ and of the Church (c. 590)

The Latin West’s reading of Job is settled, for a thousand years, by one enormous book. Gregory’s Moralia in Job — thirty-five books begun as spoken conferences to his monks at Constantinople and finished after he became pope (c. 578–595) — is the single most influential patristic treatment of the man of Uz and the fountainhead of medieval moral theology. Gregory expounds the book in three senses at once, “first historically, then in an allegorical, and lastly in a moral sense”: he keeps Job a real man, a Gentile saint holy in a heathen land (“who knows not that Uz is a land of the Gentiles?… he was good among bad men”), and upon that history builds his allegory. Its two governing moves fix the figure for the West: the blameless sufferer is a type of the sinless suffering Christ — “both the Head and the Body, i.e. both Christ and His Church, were represented by him” — so that Job’s “I know that my Redeemer liveth” (Job 19:25) becomes a Gentile’s confession of the resurrection; and Job’s three friends, falling “into sin by speaking without discretion,” “bear the likeness of heretics” who assail the Church under a friend’s guise. Around these Gregory systematises the devotion James had named — the patience of Job — making the sufferer who keeps faith through undeserved loss the schoolbook of Christian endurance.¹⁸ Full text and context →

Ishodad of Merv — the Antiochene critical reading: a poem, before the Law (c. 850)

The East Syriac bishop Ishodad preserves the rationalizing reading of “the Interpreter” (Theodore of Mopsuestia), and in doing so brings the timeline’s contested questions back to the surface among Christians. Job “lived before the law,” known to God by nature; the book may be a poetic composition whose author “reported many statements in the name of Job, of his friends and in the name of God himself that are not appropriate to them,” as against those “who assert that this book was written by the divine Moses”; and the heavenly council where Satan speaks “never took place in reality” but is “reported in a narrative style for the edification of the listeners.” Here the Christian East stages the very questions — history or composition? when did Job live? who wrote the book? — that the rabbis of Bava Batra debated.¹⁹ Full text and context →

Modern scholarship (a survey) — date, provenance, and the folktale-frame / poetic-core question

Set against the ancient witnesses, critical study grades the whole Job tradition, and four results recur. First, the composition: the book is widely read as joining an old prose folktale frame (the wager and the losses, Job 1–2; the rebuke of the friends and the doubled restoration, 42:7–17 — the patient Job of legend, already proverbial by Ezekiel 14) to a later, more radical poetic core, the dialogues in which an impatient, protesting Job arraigns God — with the Elihu speeches (chs. 32–37) often taken as a still-later insertion. This is the literary counterpart to the ancient historicity debate: a real man of legend versus a poet’s parable of protest. Second, the date of the book: proposals run from the Solomonic era to the post-exilic period, the sixth–fourth century BC most common for the poem, on linguistic and theological grounds — kept firmly distinct from the era of the figure, since the narrative’s patriarchal-looking setting is a feature of the story, not a date for the man. Third, provenance: an Edomite-wisdom setting (Uz linked to Edom in Lamentations 4:21; the friends from Teman and the south) against an Aramean/Hauran locale, with Job read as non-Israelite wisdom literature whose closest ancient kin are the Mesopotamian “righteous sufferer” texts — the Babylonian Ludlul bēl nēmeqi and the Babylonian Theodicy. Fourth, and tying the others together: the figure is read as a legendary, paradigmatic Gentile righteous man of hoary antiquity — a traditional figure, like the Noah and Dan’el (the Ugaritic hero of the Aqhat epic) beside whom Ezekiel ranks him — not a documented historical individual, a feature of the tradition rather than a puzzle to be tidied into one “real” Job. This survey opens the contested questions — was Job historical or a parable? when did he live? where was Uz? is he Jobab of Edom? — but settles none of them; each is weighed on its own argument page, on the evidence rather than on any prior assumption.²⁰ Full detail »

Arguments

Was Job a historical man, or the hero of a didactic parable? — contested

The oldest question asked of the man of Uz, and the one the rabbis of Bava Batra staged as a single debate — one sage declaring flatly that “Job never existed and was never created… his story was a parable,” the Gemara answering from the named man and homeland of Job 1:1 that “Job was clearly a real person.” The verdict is contested: strong by the received tradition’s lights (the book names a man and a land; Ezekiel ranks him with Noah and Daniel, Ezekiel 14:14; James appeals to “the patience of Job” as fact, James 5:11; the Fathers and the rabbinic majority assume he lived) and strong by the critical reading’s (the schematic doubled numbers, the courtroom staging of “the Satan,” the wisdom-dialogue genre, and the legendary company of Noah and the Ugaritic Dan’el). Within that verdict the finding is not flat: the strong parable pole — pure invention, “never existed” — is weak, since a figure with a name, a homeland, and a byword-reputation before Ezekiel is not well explained as one author’s free creation, and the Talmud itself rebuts it; the strong historical pole — a documented, datable, recoverable individual — overreaches evidence that yields no genealogy, era, or lineage. The most defensible reading is the legendary/traditional middle that modern study reaches independently: a paradigmatic Gentile righteous man of hoary antiquity, very plausibly reflecting a real ancient memory of a righteous sufferer, given canonical form by a later poet who set a radical poem inside an old folktale of patience. The man’s existence is kept distinct from the book’s authorship (the Mosaic-authorship tradition is evidence about the composition, not the hero).

When did Job live? The patriarchal age, the days of Moses, or later? — plausible

The book fixes Job in place — “the land of Uz” — but names no king, war, or covenant to fix him in time, and the tradition filled the silence a dozen incompatible ways, from the patriarchs to the return from Babylon, the rabbis of Bava Batra settling on none. The verdict is plausible: of the placements proposed, the patriarchal age is the best-supported reading of the book’s own data and is probable as to milieu — Job outlives his restoration by a hundred and forty years (Job 42:16), a patriarchal lifespan; he offers sacrifice as his own household priest with no Levitical cult, tabernacle, or Temple in view (Job 1:5); his wealth is reckoned in flocks and his kin’s gift in the archaic qesitah (Job 42:11), a unit found elsewhere only in patriarchal narratives (Genesis 33:19; Joshua 24:32); and Israel, the Exodus, and Sinai are wholly absent — a convergence the Fathers and modern study of the book’s setting reach alike, and the Septuagint appendix confirms by making Job the Edomite Jobab “fifth from Abraam.” But it stays short of sound: the cues fix a milieu, not a datable reign — an author can archaize deliberately, and the figure is best read (see the historicity argument) as a legendary paragon whose patriarchal setting is a feature of the story. The rival placements — the rabbinic “days of Moses” or “the spies,” and the later Israelite eras (the Judges, Sheba, Ahasuerus, the Chaldeans, the exile) — are weak: they rest on isolated verbal echoes, are pulled toward Israelite history by the theology that God’s Presence left the nations after Moses, and mostly track the separate debate over who wrote the book. The man’s era is kept distinct from the book’s date and authorship throughout.

Where was the land of Uz? Edom, the Hauran, or north Arabia? — contested

The book fixes Job’s place where it leaves his era open — “a man in the land of Uz” (Job 1:1) — but never explains it, and the tradition answered three ways: Edom to the south, the Hauran or Bashan to the north-east, or the north-Arabian desert. The verdict is contested, with a clear lean south. The only two passages of Scripture that anchor “the land of Uz” to a known people both point to Edom: Jeremiah sets the “daughter of Edom” dwelling “in the land of Uz” (Lamentations 4:21), and Job’s senior friend is “Eliphaz the Temanite” (Job 2:11), Teman an Edomite district proverbial for wisdom (Genesis 36:11, 15; Jeremiah 49:7; Obadiah 8) — two Edomite sages in dispute. The oldest reader, the Septuagint appendix, agrees, placing Job “on the borders of Idumea and Arabia,” and the north-Arabian clues (the “men of the east,” the Sabean and Chaldean raiders, Job 1:17) widen this southern locale eastward rather than competing with it. What keeps the verdict from rising higher is that the book names a region, not a pinpoint, and the northern rival is not baseless: “Uz” is an Aramean name in the Table of Nations (Genesis 10:23) and the line of Nahor (Genesis 22:21), and a long tradition set Job in the Hauran. But that case is onomastic and late-etiological where the southern case is scriptural and locational — and the name is in any case scattered, there being a Horite/Edomite Uz too (Genesis 36:28). Uz most probably lay on the eastern desert margin south-east of the Holy Land, in or beside Edom — the most secure of the three entangled Job cruxes, resolving on its own evidence apart from when the man lived and whether he was Jobab of Edom.

Is Job the same man as Jobab, king of Edom? — weak

The sharpest and most testable of the identity cruxes, asserted only by the Septuagint appendix (Job 42:17b–e): that Job of Uz is the second king of Edom, “Jobab the son of Zerah of Bozrah” (Genesis 36:33), a great-grandson of Esau “fifth from Abraam.” The verdict is weak. The identification rests on two supports and both give way. The first is the name: in Greek Iōb and Iōbab look like one word shortened, but in Hebrew ’Iyyob and Yobab are different names from different roots — the resemblance is an artefact of the Greek, and is likelier to have generated the equation than to attest it. The second is the text: the appendix is absent from the Hebrew (and the Peshitta and the Job Targums) and flags itself as reporting “the Syriac book” — a tradition, not a datum — and it carries plain seams, misreading Jobab’s city Bozrah as “his mother Bosorrha” and reaching “fifth from Abraam” only by dropping Reuel out of the Esau line (Genesis 36:13). Against it, the Hebrew never makes Job a king or ties him to Edom’s monarchy, and the Jobab of the king-list is a bare name with no story of suffering: the two share nothing but a look-alike name. What the tradition does honestly attest — an old, coherent, independently-transmitted belief (Aristeas, the appendix, the Testament of Job) that Job was an Edomite Gentile of the patriarchal age — converges with, without establishing, the south-Edom lean of where Uz lay and the patriarchal-age lean of when Job lived; those two resolve on their own evidence and are kept independent of this identification, which is the weakest of the three entangled cruxes and cannot bear their weight. The bare person-identification is a harmonising conjecture built on the name.

Sources