Job 2 Bible study: Skin for skin

Chapter 2 opens almost as chapter 1's scene did: "Again, on the day when God’s sons came to present themselves before the LORD, Satan came also among them to present himself before the LORD" (2:1) (tap Satan). The words to present himself before the LORD are new; 1:6 says only, "Satan also came among them" (1:6). The LORD asks the question he asked before, "Where have you come from?", and Satan gives the same answer, "From going back and forth on the earth, and from walking up and down in it" (2:2; 1:7). Then the LORD names Job, as he did in 1:8: "Have you considered my servant Job? For there is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and an upright man, one who fears God, and turns away from evil" (2:3). This time he says one thing more: "He still maintains his integrity, although you incited me against him, to ruin him without cause" (2:3) (tap integrity, incited, without cause). In chapter 1 Satan had asked, "Does Job fear God for nothing?" (1:9). In Hebrew the LORD's without cause here is the same word as Satan's for nothing.

Job 2:5→leads toLuke 22:31

Satan says to the LORD, "But stretch out your hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh" (2:5), and the LORD answers, "Behold, he is in your hand. Only spare his life" (2:6). Jesus told Simon, "Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to have all of you, that he might sift you as wheat" (Luke 22:31). Jesus doesn't cite Job, so setting the two side by side is a reading, resting on a shared subject: Satan asking concerning those who belong to God (the LORD calls Job "my servant Job", 2:3). Some hear in Jesus' words what Job 2 shows: Satan asks, and what he asks concerns God's own. Others read each in its own setting: Job 2 tells a scene before the LORD, with the LORD's own limit, "Only spare his life" (2:6), while Luke tells no such scene and gives only Jesus' words to Simon about "all of you" (Luke 22:31); they draw no line between the two. Neither reading makes Job a picture of Simon or of anyone else, and nothing more is said about Satan than each passage says.

תֻּמָּהtummahsay toom-MAH

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "integrity". The LORD says of Job, "He still maintains his integrity" (2:3), and Job's wife asks him, "Do you still maintain your integrity?" (2:9). In Hebrew the two use the same three words, od (still), machaziq (maintain) and tummah (integrity); only the pronoun endings differ (he and his in 2:3, you and your in 2:9), and 2:3 has and in front. The word comes five times in the Hebrew Bible, four of them in Job; the fifth is "The integrity of the upright shall guide them" (Proverbs 11:3). Job comes back to it: "Until I die I will not put away my integrity from me" (27:5), and "let me be weighed in an even balance, that God may know my integrity" (31:6). (The integrity of 4:6 is a different Hebrew word.)