oa The Role of Women in the Testament of Job

In TJ two images of women are presented that are diametrically opposed. On the one hand Job’s first wife is presented, to be true, as a loyal and loving wife and mother, but apart from that as a creature that is easily led astray, does not have any spiritual insight and is characterized by a continuous lack of awareness of where God and Satan are at work. On the other hand there are Job’s daughters (from his second wife, Dinah, Jacob’s daughter), who play such a leading role in the final chapters as to reduce Job and his sons to the status of supernumerary actors. They are spiritually highly gifted, have insight into heavenly reality, speak the languages of the angels, and create a real reversal of roles in the story. The chapters on the daughters derive from another source than that on Job’s wife, and probably had their origin in an ecstatic-mystical Jewish group in which women played a leading role.