Job Rose at Dawn to Bless God for Discipline and for Bread

The fire was lit before the birds woke. Job stood at the altar in the gray hour, smoke climbing straight up in the windless dawn, and he counted his children on his fingers as he laid down each offering. Seven sons. Three daughters. Ten times the knife, ten times the flame, ten times the same low blessing pressed out between his teeth. The servants thought him strange for it. The whole land of Uz knew he was the wealthiest man in the East (Job 1:3), and a wealthy man does not rise in the dark to worry over the souls of grown children who slept off another feast.

Why Job Rose Before the Birds

His sons kept open houses. Each held his feast in turn and sent for the sisters to come eat and drink, and the wine ran late and the laughter carried across the fields to where their father lay awake. He did not begrudge them the joy. He begrudged himself the certainty. Perhaps in all that brightness one of them had cursed God in his heart and not known it (Job 1:5). A thought is a quiet thing. A man cannot hear his own son blaspheme inside his own skull.

So Job did the only thing a careful father could do. He woke while the feast-fires were still embers in his children's houses, and he kindled his own fire, and he offered up a korban (a burnt offering) for each of them, just in case. He blessed the God who gave him the seven sons. He blessed the God who gave him the three daughters. He blessed the God who gave him the herds that blackened the hills.

The Question Hidden in a Single Verse

Long after, a teacher sat with students and turned a verse over and over like a stone he could not set down. The words were plain enough. You shall eat, and you shall be satisfied, and you shall bless (Deuteronomy 8:10). A man fills his belly and thanks the One who filled it. Simple. The students nodded. The obligation was obvious.

But the teacher would not let it go. There were two extra words in the verse, he said, and the Torah does not spend words for nothing. After "you shall bless" it adds: that He gave to you. He held the phrase up in the lamplight. "Why this?" he asked. "We already know to bless after we eat. What do these words add?"

The room was quiet. The teacher answered himself, and his answer cut against everything the body wants. "That He gave to you" means all of it, he said. Not only the bread and the abundance. The discipline too. The blow as much as the bounty. A man must bless God for what is taken from him in the same breath he blesses God for what is laid in his hands.

The Two Kinds of Worshipper

To see what he meant, the teacher pointed his students toward the men who do the opposite, who treat their gods like fishermen treat a net. When the catch is heavy they burn incense to the net and bow to the dragnet that filled their boats, sacrificing to the thing that fed them (Habakkuk 1:16). The net is honored only because the net delivered.

And when the net comes up empty? Those same men turn their faces upward, hungry and enraged, and they curse their king and curse their God (Isaiah 8:21). The teacher let the two verses hang side by side. Here is a worshipper, he said, and there is a worshipper. One blesses the hand that gives and one curses the hand that withholds, and they are the same man on two different mornings. That man has no God. He has a machine that he praises when it pays and damns when it stalls. You cannot stand in covenant with a mechanism. You can only stand in covenant with the One you bless either way.

Job in the Ash

Then think of the man in the land of Uz when the dawn fires went out. The messengers came one behind the next, each before the one before him had finished speaking. The oxen and donkeys, gone. The sheep, gone. The camels, gone. And then the worst runner of all, the one who said the great wind had come across the desert and brought down the house where all the children sat at their feast, and not one of the seven sons or three daughters rose from under it.

Job stood. He tore his robe. He shaved his head. The man who had risen every dawn to bless God for the children now stood with no children left to bless God for. And he went down to the ground, the way a man goes down who has nothing under him anymore, and out of his mouth came the same shape of words that had risen with his morning smoke. The Lord gave. The Lord took. Blessed be the Name (Job 1:21).

The Same Words Either Way

That is the whole of it, and it is almost unbearable. The blessing Job spoke over the burnt offerings at dawn and the blessing he spoke sitting in the ash were not two blessings. They were one blessing, said in two weathers. He did not have a fair-weather God and a foul-weather God. He had the God who gave and the God who took, and they wore the same Name, and he answered both with the same mouth.

The teacher's two small words held all of that. That He gave to you. The giving includes the taking. The hand that fills the bowl and the hand that empties the house are not two hands. A man who blesses only the first is bowing to a net. A man who blesses both is the man from Uz, on the ground, with his head shaved, blessing.