SUMMARY
Job’s three daughters are the most beautiful women in the land. Job gives them unusual names and an inheritance alongside their brothers.
ANALYSIS
The book of Job ends with some unusual details about Job’s three daughters. The daughters, not the sons, are named, and the names Job gives them are sensual: Jemimah (Dove), Keziah (Cinnamon Stick), and Keren-happuch (Horn of Eyeshadow). Job also gives them an inheritance alongside their brothers, a practice virtually unheard of in ancient Israel (the daughters of Zelophehad who inherit in Numbers 27 have no brothers).
What is going on here? It seems that Job has learned through the whirlwind speeches to give his children the freedom that God gives all of God’s creatures. Recall that in chapter 1, Job offered sacrifices for his children after they had feasts in one another’s homes just in case they sinned “and cursed God in their hearts” (1:5). Now, he gives his beautiful daughters wild names and an inheritance! Biblical scholar Ellen Davis writes of this transformation of Job: “And now Job loves with the abandon characteristic of God’s love – revolutionary in seeking our freedom, reveling in the untamed beauty of every child” [Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God (Cowley, 2001), 143].
Job’s daughters are given the freedom to be who they were created to be, and their father delights in their beauty just as God delights in the wild creatures of the whirlwind speeches. At the end of the Book of Job, these final strange details reveal a man who has been transformed both by the profound suffering that he has experienced and by his encounter with God in the wildness of God’s creationCreation, in biblical terms, is the universe as we know or perceive it. Genesis says that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. In the book of Revelation (which speaks of end times) the author declares that God created all things and... More.
