“Curse God and die!” Did Job’s wife really say that?

The easy answer to the question would be “It’s in the Bible (Job 2:10), so of course she said it!” The not-so-easy answer is that the Hebrew from which our English Bibles are translated literally says “Bless God and die!” So why did the translators reverse the meaning of the Hebrew word ברך bless and turn Job’s wife into a villain in the process?

The oldest translation of the Hebrew Bible into another language is the ancient Greek translation known as the Septuagint. Interestingly, in the Septuagint Job’s wife says much more than she does in the Hebrew. She reminds Job that she too has lost everything, and she too is grieving over the deaths of their children, and in fact she is the one that now has to carry on to provide for them both. The Septuagint then has something similar to her words in the Hebrew, but with an important difference: “Now say some word to the Lord and die!” (ἀλλὰ εἰπόν τι ῥῆμα εἰς κύριον καὶ τελεύτα). There is no suggestion here that he should curse God. It sounds more like she was suggesting he should prepare for death with a final prayer. [1]

It is also puzzling that twice elsewhere in the narrative the translators have changed “bless” to “curse.” During Satan’s two encounters with God he said “But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he [Job] has, and he will curse you to your face” (1:11; 2:5). The word translated “curse” here is the same Hebrew word ברך used by Job’s wife and means “bless.” In fact, it is precisely the same word that occurs in the previous verse (1:10) when Satan said “You have blessed the work of his hands.” Interestingly, if we translate this in the most natural way – he will bless you – then Satan was actually proven right! Job did hold on to his faith and piety, despite losing everything. [2]

After receiving news that all his children had been killed Job said “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed [same word] be the name of the LORD” (1:21). Perhaps the translators didn’t like Satan being right, and maybe they also thought it made more sense for Job’s wife to mock him rather than encouraging him to maintain his faith in God. Also, in Job 1:5, we read that Job feared that his children may have sinned: “It may be that my children have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts.” Again, this is our Hebrew word which really means “blessed” God. “Cursed God in their hearts” might make more sense to modern readers, but it’s not what the text says! It actually happens more often than most people would realise that translators go with what seems to them to make the most sense, rather than what the text actually says.

The Hebrew word ברך, to bless, is a common word in the Bible, occurring nearly 500 times. Outside of Job one would be hard pressed to find a case where the word unambiguously means “curse” rather than “bless.” However, some scholars argue that there are three other cases where this happens. In language similar to Job, 1 Kings 21:10 has “You have cursed God and the king” and here the word translated “cursed” is again ברך (see also v. 13). Like Job, the translators have figured that “you have blessed God” wouldn’t make any sense as the culprit was then taken out and executed. Similarly, Psalm 10:3 has “those greedy for gain curse (ברך) and renounce the LORD”. Again, “bless” wouldn’t seem to make much sense here, so the translators have gone for the obverse “curse.” One possible explanation is that in this handful of cases ancient scribes had a problem with putting the words “curse” and “God” side-by-side in a manuscript, so they substituted the Hebrew word for “curse” with ברך, bless. This is an interesting theory, but there is no evidence that this is what actually happened. Oddly, however, if this was the case in Psalm 10:3 then these scribes didn’t have a problem with leaving the word “renounce” beside the name of God: בֵּרֵךְ נִאֵץ ׀ יְהוָֽה. You might notice a little vertical line ׀ between נִאֵץ (renounce) and the name of God (יְהוָֽה). The technical name for this is paseq which simply means “separator” and there are more than 500 of these in the Hebrew Bible. This is a device which was used by the medieval scribes (the Masoretes) who wanted to separate certain words, such as words beginning and ending with the same letter to avoid confusion, or words which are to a high degree contradictory, such as “God” and “evil”. Out of reverence for the divine name they also did this whenever the name was preceded by a word which they felt was too negative or somehow inappropriate to be placed immediately next to it. However, they couldn’t use this device in the verses in 1 Kings and Job, either because the change from “curse” to “bless” had been made by a much earlier generation of scribes as another way of resolving the problem, or because the text really did mean “bless” and always did.

Several scholars argue that the writer of Job really did mean “bless” and that Job’s wife was forcing him to confront the possibility of death and encouraging him to “bless God” before he dies. Because he was at death’s door she was urging him to say a final blessing, in much the same way that religious people often like their final words to be a prayer or some words from a sacred text (such as the Jewish tradition of reciting the shema, the words of Deuteronomy 6:4, as one’s final words: “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One”). This argument is supported by the biblical cultural context of blessing God when dying, and the fact that grammatically the Hebrew word is in the piel or intensive form which could suggest a sense of urgency. Job, however, was not convinced he was dying and so rebuked her by saying she should not speak so foolishly (v.10). [3]

Perhaps there is a clue at the end of Job: “The LORD blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning” (42:12). The book of Job begins and ends on the subject of blessing: first there was the discussion between God and Satan about whether or not Job would continue to bless God if he lost everything with which God had blessed him (see my post about Satan in the Book of Job for my ideas about the identity of Satan); it moves on to Job’s wife encouraging Job to bless God before he dies; there is then a long debate about whether Job is in fact blessed or cursed; and the story ends with God blessing Job again. There is an interplay between God blessing Job, and Job blessing God, and between Job being blessed or cursed. However, we miss this if we change “bless” to “curse” in a handful of places.

I understand the difficulties which translators face in endeavouring to translate what the text actually says, while trying to make sure it makes sense to the reader. This requires them to interpret as well as to translate and it often can’t be easy to strike the right balance. But here, in my view, it would have been better to have translated the text precisely the way it said it, and leave the reader to make sense of it. It turns out that Job’s wife may not have been a negative, sarcastic, mocking villain after all. Rather, she was more likely a devout woman, a grieving mother, and a supportive wife who encouraged her husband to maintain his faith to the end and to bless God in his final words.

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[1] Some other ancient versions have “bless God” here, including the Latin Vulgate (“benedic Deo et morere”), and the Aramaic Targum Job (which uses בריך, the Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew ברך, i.e. bless God). The Syriac Peshitta, however, seems to be the odd one out among the ancient versions with ܨ݁ܚܐ, revile or curse God.

[2] Some scholars argue that the Hebrew can be translated “Surely, he will not bless you to your face.” The technical argument is that the particle אם־לא can be translated as a particle of asseveration, and the Hebrew text אם לא על פניך יברכך can therefore be rendered in the sense of an emphatic challenge, “He will certainly not bless you to your face” (see BalentIne, Samuel. Job. Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary. Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2006, 54).

[3] For further discussion about this see Lier, G. E. “Translating ברך in Job 2:9 – a functionalist approach.” Acta Theologica 38, no. 2 (2018): 105-122. See also Rafferty, Timothy C. “What is humanity? Who is God? The blessing, praise, and failures of human dominion over nature in the Hebrew Bible.” PhD Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2022, 128-158.