Job's Wife - Job's Wife Answers Job

Then his wife said to him, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.” But he said to her, “You speak as any foolish woman would speak. Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” (Job 2:9-10)

Then Job’s wife answered Job out of the whirlwind:

Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge

of birth, of life, of the suffering of birth?

Gird up your defense as a man.

I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

Where were you when God laid the foundation of your life?

Tell me, if you have understanding.

Who determined your mother’s measurements, daily swelling at her belly

with the promise of some beauty through these pains—

surely you know!

Or who stretched the lines upon it?

Or who shut in the sea of labor’s seemingly endless fluids

when you burst forth from the womb?—

when your mother wrapped you in homespun garments

soft as clouds,

but her own arms were better than any swaddling band.

Have you commanded the morning since

your days began,

and have your filled the table with bread and cheese at dawn?

The dawn causes us to know our place in the rhythms of this world.

I have not entered into the springs of the sea,

or walked in the recesses of the deep.

I have not marveled at the gates of death

or seen the gates of deep darkness.

But I, like your mother, know what it is to give life,

to watch those born by me

suffer, and burn in their earthly houses.

Remember the complaint burning in the back of your heart:

‘Let the day perish in which I was born,

and listen to those who gave you life

before you curse it.

Then curse it. Curse it because in those initial pains of labor

we would be hypocrites if we didn’t shout back.

Curse it because the birth has never ended,

We are still bleeding and we are still becoming.

Curse it and remember that birth itself was a curse.

Hope that God proves us wrong.

This is integrity.