Job — who's who

The greatest of all the men of the east, introduced as tam ve-yashar — complete and upright. He loses everything in chapters 1–2 and then, from chapter 3 forward, becomes the speaker of the most sustained protest against unmerited suffering in any ancient literature. He demands an audience he is not granted for thirty-five chapters. When the Voice finally comes, he answers twice: first laying his hand upon his mouth, then confessing that he spoke of things too wonderful for him, things he did not know. In the epilogue he prays for the friends who condemned him and is restored twofold.

She speaks once: 'Dost thou still retain thine integrity? Curse God, and die.' The line has been read as temptation, as mercy, and as the grief of a woman who has lost the same children Job has lost and is given far less space to grieve them. The book does not adjudicate. She is assumed by the rabbis to reappear in the closing paragraph as the mother of the seven new sons and three new daughters, but she is never named.

Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, Zophar the Naamathite. They come from their own countries, agree to meet, and sit with Job in silence for seven days and seven nights. Then, in three rounds of speeches, they articulate the doctrine of retribution with increasing severity. The book takes care to make the reader feel the force of what they say — their speeches are not stupid. In the epilogue God tells them they have not spoken of him the thing that is right, as his servant Job has, and instructs them to bring sacrifices and have Job pray for them.

Appears for the first time in chapter 32, with a six-chapter speech that has no parallel elsewhere in the book. He held his peace out of deference to his elders; now he speaks, angry at Job for justifying himself rather than God, and angry at the friends for failing to answer Job. He develops a theology of suffering as divine instruction and disciplinary formation. He is not rebuked in the epilogue; the Voice from the Whirlwind arrives immediately after he stops speaking. Many scholars regard the Elihu material as a later editorial insertion. Whether his speeches advance the argument or interrupt it has been argued since the book first circulated.

Ha-satan, 'the adversary,' with the definite article — not the proper name of the medieval devil but a title for a role: divine prosecutor. He comes before the Lord with the other sons of God, proposes the wager ('Doth Job fear God for nought?'), and is given permission to test Job under successive constraints. He exits the narrative after chapter 2 and does not return. His function in the book is to ask a question the book is then committed to answer.

Speaks in chapters 38 to 41. Comes out of the whirlwind, asks Job seventy questions about the wild creation — the foundations of the earth, the sea, the constellations, the wild ass, the war horse, Behemoth, Leviathan — and never directly addresses the question Job has been asking for thirty-five chapters. The speech is the longest sustained piece of nature poetry in the Hebrew Bible. Job, when it ends, lays his hand upon his mouth.