What Does the Doubling of Job’s Possessions Signify?
Readers of v.
12 need to have a good memory. In 1.3 they were told that before his affliction
Job had 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen and 500 donkeys. Here they
find that the number of each of his flocks after his restoration is exactly
double that. A ‘restoration’ would surely be of animals to the same number, but
this (though the text does not say so explicitly) is a doubling.
Though almost no
commentators notice it, by giving Job double what he lost, Yahweh is paying him
compensation. It appears that allusion is made to the law of Exod 22.3 (ET 4), where
a thief is required to pay double compensation for the theft of an animal, ‘whether
ox or donkey or sheep.’ Francis I. Andersen rightly makes the connection,
writing: ‘It is a wry touch that the Lord, like any thief who has been found
out (Exod. 22.4), repays Job double what he took from him’.
But if the significance
of the doubling of Job’s possessions is here rightly understood, it is far more
than a ‘wry touch’; it is critical for the narrative of the book. For it was
Job’s fundamental complaint—that he had been unjustly treated in being deprived
of his possessions and his good name—that spurred the whole argument of the
book. It has been an ethical problem for readers also, who, even if they have
not been enmeshed in the doctrine of retribution as it was taught in Job’s
world, have not been able to accept the initial act of Yahweh’s seizure of Job’s
possessions as justifiable. Yahweh, we note, says nothing about the injustice
of his theft of Job’s possessions and his honour, or that he is attempting to compensate
for it, and the narrative gives no explicit hint of the huge significance of
the doubling of Job’s wealth. But it makes a difference to our reading of the
book as a whole if we know that at the end of the day the wrong done to Job in
chap. 1 is righted—even if it is not stated in so many words, even if there is
no apology, even though Job’s dead children cannot be replaced by his new
family. Though the narrator has just now reminded us (v. 11) that the harm Job
suffered was indeed Yahweh’s responsibility, Yahweh does not verbally acknowledge
that a wrong was done to Job. But his doubling of Job’s possessions says it
all. (David J. A. Clines, “Seven Interesting Things about the Epilogue to Job,”
in Joban Papers [Hebrew Bible Monographs 102; Sheffield: Sheffield
Phoenix Press, 2023], 388-89)
