A Man in the Land of Uz

Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix’s Baby with Umbilical Cord (1927) is the kind of painting that you just cannot walk past. It depicts the artist’s son Ursus moments after birth when his mouth, hands, and feet are still purple and he cries to oxygenate his body.

Healthy though these signs are, they nonetheless create an unsettling image. The umbilical cord is freshly cut: this new life must survive alone in the world. The baby’s solitary struggle anticipates human suffering and loneliness.

When Job loses his wealth and his children in one disastrous day, he gives us the first taste of the poetry that will dominate thirty-nine chapters of the book: ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked I shall return…’ (Job 1:21).

Satan is responsible for the evil. He is the simius dei, the ‘ape of God’ to use an idea derived from Tertullian (De Baptismo 5.3), masquerading as God, making God seem unfamiliar to Job. But it is with the one true God that Job wants to do business. He knows that God is sovereign over this adversity, calling him three times by his covenant name ‘YHWH’: ‘The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away. Blessed be the name of the LORD’ (v.21).

As his identity is stripped back by loss, Job rends his robe, shaves his head, and falls in worship before God. It is a moving act of faith shaped by the ritual norms of his society. But after Satan has covered Job in painful sores (2:7), and his three friends arrive (2:12–13), a more elemental quest for truth drives the existential poetry of Job’s complaint in chapter 3. Job refuses to curse God, which Satan and his wife both suggest, but as the book moves from prose to poetry, he curses the day of his birth (3:1).

‘Why did I not die at birth, come out from the womb and expire?’ (3:11). This is an agonizing lament in which Job desires creation to be un-made and wishes that his very existence had been obliterated before he took his first breath. While Otto Dix’s painting conjures the perilous proximity of life and death as it emerges from the womb, Job’s words, for his own part, call for death to have the upper hand.

In Job 2:9, Job’s wife makes a cameo appearance and asks her husband, ‘Are you still holding fast to your integrity? Curse God and die’. The Hebrew word she uses (barak) typically means ‘bless,’ but there is little sign of blessing here, and either way Job is being asked to die.

His wife has given up hope because she has lost everything too. The only thing remaining is the ignominy of her husband’s putrid suffering and therefore she is bitter of soul.

Job’s wife feels real. She doesn’t say the ‘right things’. She’s just honest about losing her faith. God has apparently confounded the terms of his covenant to bless the upright, and therefore he appears arbitrary. Job, meanwhile, is resolute in the face of his wife’s words, but is he also more tender than we might think? In 2:10 he does not say she is foolish, just that she speaks like a foolish woman. From then on, Job’s wife will be silent during her husband’s long quest to understand God’s justice, but they are blessed together in the restoration of Job 42.

Gregory the Great, who became Pope in 590 CE, had a less favourable view of Job’s wife, considering her Satan’s ladder to her husband’s mind. His colossal and highly-influential work, Moralia in Job, written in the years c.578–91 CE, became a quasi-Bible in itself during the Middle Ages. A depiction of Job and his wife in this eleventh-century Italian manuscript of the Moralia—made for Bishop Gunther of Bamberg—portrays him covered in sores, his torso bare and grey with ash (2:8, 12). A yellow linen cloth is draped around his legs and there are bandages on his ankles. The artist does not pursue a psychological portrayal of his suffering but presents Job in a hieratic frontal pose that likens him to Christ, and by extension to the priestly role of the Church, which was Gregory’s typological emphasis. It is thus a visual statement of his significance in the history of salvation.

Job’s wife is dressed like an eleventh-century nun of the period when this manuscript was produced. She points with a didactic gesture that seems to encourage the reader to pay attention to Job, whose own upraised hand physically touches the chapter titles of Gregory’s text on the page, reinforcing this message. The artist does not demonize Job’s wife as Gregory does. Indeed, her appearance seems to commend the religious life in medieval society as a path to female wisdom.

In the heavenly council room of Job 1, God commends Job, but Satan accuses him of having a fair-weather faith: ‘Does Job fear God for naught?’ (v.9). Surely his luxurious life explains his apparent piety? It is only through the furnace of suffering that the truth will be demonstrated, so God says to Satan, ‘Behold Job is in your hand’ (1:12; 2:6).

In one day, Job loses all he has. His vast livestock and his servants are wiped out (1:15–17), but worse by far is the death of his ten children, killed by a desert storm that blows down the house where they are holding what may be a birthday party (vv.18–19).

Job’s children are depicted here in a rare artistic survival: a fourteenth-century mural fragment from St Stephen’s Chapel in the Royal Palace of Westminster. An adjacent scene shows messengers bringing news of the tragedy to Job and his wife. The children sit in a gothic stone hall with wooden ceiling beams, much like the architecture of St Stephen’s Chapel itself. The ceiling beams crash down on the children as they are feasting, causing them to bleed as they die. Satan appears in the central arch as a grinning horned devil, the orchestrator of this disaster. Their clothes are painted in the expensive pigments of vermilion and ultramarine, while the figural modelling, consistent light source, and use of perspective suggest Italian artists were among the elite painters working under the direction of Hugh of St Albans.

The chapel was begun by Edward I in the late thirteenth century as a rival to the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, but was only completed by Edward III, who commissioned these paintings between 1348 and 1363 as a visual commentary on his Christian kingship. In 1547, under Edward VI, St Stephen’s Chapel became the debating chamber of the House of Commons and was whitewashed. A fire in 1834 completely destroyed the chapel and was the final obliteration of what had been one of the greatest painted spaces of medieval England. The mural fragment, which had been saved in James Wyatt’s re-modelling of the House of Commons Chamber in 1800, is thus itself a reminder of the devastation that can occur in a day.