Job and His Family

Two open books lie at the centre of William Blake’s Job and His Family. Job supports one across his knees, his long beard descending towards its pages. Beside him, his wife joins her hands above the other. Their children kneel around them beneath a tree hung with musical instruments. A harp, a stringed instrument with a rounded body and several wind instruments occupy the branches, close enough to seem available, yet untouched. Below the gathering, sheep settle into a broad band across the foreground. Almost everything is at rest. ^[1]

This is the first numbered engraving in Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job, following the separate title plate. It establishes a household before the losses that will overturn its life. Its peace is immediately appealing, but the words engraved around the scene complicate our response. A prayer rises over the family, while an inscription on the altar below distinguishes the killing letter from the life-giving spirit. The image offers security; the whole page asks how that security is understood. ^[1]

A household gathered around two books

The central tree gives the family a sheltering structure. Its trunk rises behind the seated parents, spreading into branches above them, while the kneeling bodies extend to either side. Flowing robes connect one figure to the next. At the outer edges, the long curves of bent legs lead back towards the middle, making the group feel gathered rather than dispersed. The parents’ upright bodies form its centre, supported by this lower sweep of cloth and limbs. ^[1]

The gestures vary within that order. Some figures press their palms together; one clasps his hands beneath his chin. The young woman immediately to Job’s right folds her arms across her chest and inclines towards him. Another kneels in front of the parents with her back towards us, her long hair descending between her shoulders. Through her position, we look into the gathering from just behind its nearest member. Her body makes the central books partly inaccessible, preserving the intimacy of the circle. ^[1]

Job himself is looking upwards. Although his hands support an open volume, his face is raised beyond its pages. His wife also directs her attention above the book on her lap. These details matter when the scene is described as an image of reading: the books provide a focus, but the figures’ actions include prayer, expectation and inward attention. Their expressions do not all repeat the same emotion. Bowed heads, open eyes and upward glances give the formally arranged family a range of responses. ^[1]

Tate’s display caption identifies the volumes as “books of the Law” and interprets Job’s starting condition as piety governed by that law. This is a reading of the books within Blake’s finished engraved page. No legible title on their open leaves tells us what each contains. The distinction keeps a visible object and an interpretation in productive relation: we can see two substantial books, then consider why their presence has acquired such weight in accounts of the series. ^[1]

What Job does continually

The words beneath the picture, “Thus did Job continually”, come from the end of Job 1:5. That verse describes a repeated action prompted by concern for his children. After their rounds of feasting, Job sanctifies them and offers burnt offerings for each, fearing that they may have sinned inwardly. His care extends to offences he cannot see. Blake uses the verse’s concluding phrase to give the family gathering the character of an established practice. ^[2]

The rest of the opening chapter makes his prosperity concrete. Job has seven sons and three daughters, an extensive household and great numbers of sheep, camels, oxen and asses. The sons hold feasts in their own houses and invite their sisters. The biblical family therefore already has a life spread across several homes. Blake gathers its members into one devotional image, giving visible unity to people whom the narrative also describes through movement, invitations and separate celebrations. The books and hanging instruments belong to his interpretation of that household; chapter 1 does not prescribe them. ^[2]

The chapter also insists on Job’s integrity. Its opening judgement of him is repeated in God’s address to Satan. Satan challenges the motive for his faith, asking whether prosperity has made devotion easy, and receives permission to attack what he possesses. The disasters are a test arising from that exchange. They are not introduced as the exposure of a secret crime. At the chapter’s end, after the deaths and losses, the narrator again declares that Job has not sinned in his response. ^[2]

Remembering this prevents the opening engraving from becoming a comfortable explanation of suffering. Blake’s marginal words can question a form of religious understanding without making the destruction of a family a deserved penalty. The people kneeling here are also the people whose lives matter to the story’s terrible next movement. The familiar gestures give us a household to recognise before we encounter the report of its destruction. ^{[1] [2]}

A later passage supplies another way to feel the gathering’s value. In chapter 29, Job remembers the time when his children surrounded him and divine favour seemed present in his home. He also remembers helping poor people, the fatherless, widows and those who could not defend themselves. This is Job’s retrospective account of his earlier life, rather than a quotation engraved on this plate. It gives that life a dimension beyond possession: the prosperity he recalls includes responsibilities, relationships and acts of care. ^[2]

Music held above the hands

The instruments make an unusually conspicuous crown for the tree. A triangular harp occupies the middle, its closely spaced strings rising above the parents. Beside it hangs the broad, curved body of another stringed instrument; curling and flaring wind instruments spread towards the right. Their curved contours stand out against the worked texture of bark and foliage. Blake has put the means of making sound in one of the image’s most prominent positions. ^[1]

The family’s hands, meanwhile, are occupied with books and prayer. This distance between hands and instruments is small in space but large in action. It lets the viewer imagine an activity that has not begun. Tate reads their silence as part of the engraving’s criticism of Job’s religious state: instruments that could praise God remain unused. The interpretation becomes especially persuasive when this page is compared with the final engraving, where people actually take them up. ^[1]

Here, their absence of use also shapes the scene’s mood. The branches hold a whole range of possible sounds above a gathering absorbed in quieter forms of attention. The instruments remain intact within the family’s world, suspended over it. Their visible availability gives the still gathering a sense of possibility. ^[1]

Resting sheep and the evening landscape

The flock brings the biblical account of wealth into the immediate foreground. Large woolly bodies settle at either side, smaller animals fitting between them. Curled horns, rounded backs and lowered heads make a low, irregular barrier between the family and the viewer. The animals share the people’s stillness while retaining their own weight and texture. Fine repeated marks give the wool a different surface from the smooth robes above. ^{[1] [2]}

Tate’s catalogue describes the sheep as asleep and includes them among the details contributing to its critical reading. Looking closely, however, we can distinguish several visible faces among the resting bodies. It is safer to attend to their quietness than to imagine every eye closed. The flock makes the household’s security palpable: possessions here are living creatures gathered close to the people who own them. When chapter 1 later reports the destruction of sheep and servants, that news reaches back into a world Blake has allowed us to inspect. ^{[1] [2]}

Behind the figures, the landscape extends the sense of an ordered estate. A tall, pointed building rises on the left; tents occupy the right. The contrast brings permanent-looking architecture and portable dwellings into the same setting. The distant forms remain secondary to the family, yet they prevent the tree from becoming an isolated emblem against an empty background. People, animals, buildings and shelter all belong to the scene’s abundance. ^[1]

Light divides the sky. The sun sits low behind the hills on the left, sending rays upwards, while a crescent moon and a star stand out against the darker sky on the right. Tate identifies this as sunset, paired with sunrise in the last engraving. The change of light gives the gathering a particular time and a quiet pressure: the household is together as the day closes. The lowered sun and rising darkness enter the image without disturbing anyone’s posture. ^[1]

The prayer above and the altar below

Blake surrounds the rectangular scene with a much larger, lightly drawn enclosure. Cloud-like contours rise into a pointed canopy, then curve down the sides and beneath the main inscription. Above the family, the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer run along the two upper curves. Below, the verses identifying Job and his children spread to either side of a flaming altar. Looking between the top and bottom of the sheet becomes a movement between prayer, narrative and interpretation. ^[1]

The upper prayer comes from the Gospels, centuries beyond the setting of the Book of Job. Matthew and Luke place it in Christ’s teaching about how to pray. Blake’s page brings that Christian wording over the Old Testament household, making the scene a meeting of scriptural passages. The pronoun in the prayer also suits the gathering: a whole family can address a shared father. Yet the words are in the border, not printed as speech emerging from any one mouth. ^{[1] [2]}

At the bottom, flames rise from an altar whose upper corners end in ram heads. On its face, “The Letter Killeth” is followed by “The Spirit giveth Life”. The words derive from 2 Corinthians 3:6, where Paul contrasts letter and spirit while discussing the new covenant. In the surrounding chapter he moves from ink and stone to writing in human hearts, and from condemnation towards spiritual liberty. Blake has placed that distinction beneath an image dominated by open books and habitual devotion. ^{[1] [2]}

A second inscription, “It is Spiritually Discerned”, draws on 1 Corinthians 2:14. Paul’s passage concerns the understanding of spiritual things through the Spirit. Together, the two inscriptions make reading itself a question. Possessing written words and following their outward form may leave something essential unresolved. The page asks the viewer to bring a kind of discernment to its words and images, even as it presents a family whose relation to scripture has become the subject of debate. ^{[1] [2]}

The altar’s position sharpens that question. Its fire lies outside the central scene, under the caption drawn from Job’s repeated sacrifices. It belongs to the page’s framing argument as well as to the household’s religious world. The family, the habitual act recalled by the caption and Paul’s distinction are held together without being collapsed into a single literal event. This is why the margins deserve as much attention as the kneeling figures. ^{[1] [2]}

How severe is the judgement?

Martin Butlin’s Tate catalogue gives a strongly critical account of the opening. The silent instruments, sunset, sleeping flock and lower inscriptions prepare a movement beyond Job’s initial religious condition. That interpretation brings many details into a coherent relationship. It can nevertheless become harsher in retelling than the affectionate gathering before us warrants. Joined hands, inward inclinations and the sheltered central pair also sustain an impression of devotion and care. ^[1]

Robert N. Essick identified evidence that complicates this judgement. A 1936 auction catalogue described and reproduced early proofs carrying additional inscriptions beneath the altars. On the first plate, prayer was associated with studying imaginative art; on the last, praise with exercising it. The proof sheets were untraced when Essick published his account in 1985–86: his evidence came from the catalogue’s descriptions and reproductions. He could compare these with known later states, but the catalogue did not permit a precise position for every sheet in the sequence of proofs. ^[15]

Essick argued that the first plate’s earlier wording gave the family’s prayer a positive purpose, capable of spiritual insight. Its removal accompanied the addition of the opposition between letter and spirit on the altar. He proposed that Blake’s conception changed during engraving, making the opening more critical and sharpening its contrast with the final scene. The altered words are evidence; a corresponding change in Blake’s understanding is Essick’s interpretation of that evidence. ^[15]

Penelope Minney questions whether those revisions require such a sharply negative account of Job’s starting condition. Her study also challenges the assumption that books must signify self-righteousness. That extended discussion concerns the earlier Butts watercolours, so it cannot simply erase the engraved version’s added margins. It does raise a useful caution against treating every book in Blake as a fixed sign of spiritual failure. Its meaning depends on the actions and surrounding details of a particular design. ^[16]

The removed sentence cannot be treated as another inscription on this sheet. The reported earlier state nevertheless shows why the family’s prayer need not carry one unchanging meaning throughout the design’s history. In the issued engraving, the marginal contrast between letter and spirit places its devotion under pressure. The tenderness of the kneeling group remains visible within that more searching arrangement. ^{[1] [15] [16]}

A beginning that changes when we return

In the twenty-first and final engraving, the family stands beneath the tree, holding and playing instruments. Job has taken up the harp. The landscape’s light reverses, and sheep remain at the front. That repetition helps us identify the change through bodies and objects: the resources for music that hung above the first gathering have become part of its shared activity. The fuller journey belongs to the complete Book of Job series, but the ending sends us back to look more carefully at this beginning. ^[3]

The return does not make the first family’s vulnerability disappear. Job 1 records the deaths of the children whose presence establishes his early prosperity; chapter 42 describes a later household after his ordeal. Blake’s repeated family arrangement gives the sequence a powerful formal correspondence, while the primary story preserves the weight of what has been lost. The first plate has its own human force before it acquires its later counterpart. ^{[2] [3]}

There is also a smaller puzzle at the foot of the first engraving. Its publication line bears 8 March 1828, which Tate’s catalogue identifies as an error. The series’ usual engraved date is 1825, while the finished prints were issued in 1826. Tate’s own A00012 is catalogued as reprinted in 1874. These dates refer to different kinds of evidence: a line cut into copper, the appearance of the suite and a particular later printing. ^[1]

Yale’s separately identified impression, B1978.43.1503, is dated 1826 in its official image manifest. Comparing it with Tate’s sheet lets us study the same designed gestures and inscriptions in distinct collection objects. The date and paper of one impression do not automatically describe another reproduction. What continues across them is Blake’s finely articulated arrangement: books below lifted faces, instruments above waiting hands, and a family held for a moment within the stillness of evening. ^{[17] [1]}