Job's Comforters

Three men arrive with both hands raised. Their robes sweep forward, their faces turn towards the seated figure, and their open palms rise above their heads. Across from them, Job scarcely moves. His legs extend over the rough heap beneath him; his head inclines towards his wife, who sits behind him with her own hands lifted. William Blake makes this meeting painfully unequal: the visitors can express their shock through their whole bodies, while the man they have come to comfort seems almost emptied of strength. ^[1]

Job’s Comforters is the seventh numbered engraving in Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job. It follows the attack on Job’s body by Satan and pictures the arrival of Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar. Their first response is mourning. The long inscription below the scene describes people who have come looking for someone they know and find him so changed that recognition fails. That moment gives the engraving its particular sorrow. ^{[1] [2]}

Recognising a friend in suffering

The biblical visitors have heard about Job’s misfortunes and agreed to meet him. Each comes from his own place; their shared purpose is to mourn with him and comfort him. In chapter 1, Job has lost his possessions, servants and children. In chapter 2, his affliction reaches his skin, and he sits among ashes, scraping himself with a broken piece of pottery. The friends encounter a catastrophe already beyond anything they can repair. ^[2]

The reader knows something the arriving men cannot see. In the heavenly exchange at the beginning of chapter 2, God praises Job’s continuing integrity and describes the attack on him as without cause. His damaged body therefore gives the visitors evidence of suffering; its appearance supplies no reliable verdict on his character. The difficulty of recognising their friend is also a difficulty in knowing what his suffering means. ^[2]

Blake places their response beneath the picture in three broad lines:

And when they lifted up their eyes afar off & knew him not they lifted up their voice & wept. & they rent every Man his mantle & sprinkled dust upon their heads towards heaven. ^{[1] [2]}

The words come from Job 2:12, with small changes in wording and punctuation. They describe recognition through its initial absence: the familiar person cannot immediately be found in the afflicted body. The men’s lifted arms belong to weeping and the ritual scattering of dust. Read with this inscription, their movement has the urgency of grief. They are confronting what has happened to their friend. ^{[1] [2]}

The following verse gives that first response a remarkable duration. The friends sit on the ground with Job for seven days and seven nights, and nobody speaks to him because they see the greatness of his grief. Blake chooses the more visibly dramatic arrival, before their bodies settle beside his. The silence that follows nevertheless changes how we understand the raised hands. These men have come to remain with him, and for a time their company consists of bearing witness. ^[2]

Six hands and one exhausted body

The visitors form a close group at the left. Each face is distinct, but the arms create a repeated upward movement, passing from the partly concealed man at the edge to the foremost figure. Fingers spread at different angles. The nearest man’s elbows bend over his head; the others reach higher. Their flowing hair and the curling hems of their garments carry the approach forward. Blake gives three people a shared action without making them exact duplicates. ^[1]

At ground level, the foremost visitor’s bare foot advances towards Job. Above it, the folds of his robe stream diagonally across his body. The group therefore rises and moves at once. Its dark clothing gives the pale hands particular force against the worked sky. The repeated gesture catches the eye before the faces do; closer looking restores the individuals whose grief it gathers. ^[1]

Job occupies a wider, lower shape. His knees are bent, his feet lie close together on the ground, and one hand rests along the covering over his thigh while the other spreads against the heap beside him. His exposed torso shows small marks across the skin. The long beard descends over his chest, joining the fall of his head to the sagging line of his body. The visitors lift their arms into open space; Job’s hands remain close to the surfaces supporting him. ^[1]

This arrangement makes bodily weakness tangible. Job remains a substantial figure, with broad shoulders and muscular limbs, but those limbs have little active work to do. The raised mound gives him a seat while leaving his feet at the level of the approaching men. His position is both elevated and helpless. He receives their arrival without acquiring their freedom of movement. ^[1]

His wife and the words above them

Job’s wife sits immediately behind him, beside the architectural upright at the right. Her head tilts towards his. Both hands are raised near her shoulders, palms open, making a smaller, more intimate answer to the visitors’ expansive gesture. Her long dress forms a continuous light shape behind his bare torso. Tate’s 1998 display caption describes Job as supported by her; the grouping makes her the nearest human presence to his slumped head. ^[1]

The inscription above the scene brings their earlier exchange into the meeting:

What! shall we recieve Good at the hand of God & shall we not also recieve Evil ^{[1] [2]}

These are Job’s words to his wife, drawn from Job 2:10. She has asked whether he still retains his integrity and urged him to curse God and die. He rebukes her, then asks the question Blake engraves above their heads. The biblical narrator follows it by saying that Job has not sinned with his lips. The upper sentence therefore belongs to the sufferer’s answer within a particular exchange between husband and wife. ^[2]

Blake’s arrangement lets that exchange remain present while showing the wife close beside him. She, too, has suffered the loss of their children. Her open hands and inclined face give her a continuing place in the ordeal, beyond the severity of the words recorded in the biblical narrative. The two figures are physically gathered together at a moment when their different responses to catastrophe have already strained their understanding of one another. ^{[1] [2]}

The page now contains two kinds of speech around the same scene. Above, Job answers his wife; below, the narrator describes the friends’ response. Neither sentence is a lecture delivered by the three visitors. Following those speakers matters because the later biblical argument will turn upon people claiming to explain Job’s experience. Here, his own voice still has a separate place above their arrival. ^{[1] [2]}

The country between them

Through the space between the two groups, the eye travels towards a distant settlement. Blocklike buildings, openings and low walls spread across the middle ground. Higher up, smaller structures stand beneath a mountain ridge. Their scale makes the foreground bodies feel large and close, while their distance opens a world beyond this immediate encounter. Job’s exposed body sits outside the ordered shapes of human habitation. ^[1]

The sky intensifies that separation. Long, dark, diagonal marks descend towards a pale opening behind the ridge. There is no need to identify every line as a particular weather effect to feel their pressure against the comparatively clear horizon. The visitors’ lifted hands occupy the dark area, while the wife’s head appears beside the light. The landscape helps divide the encounter into moving, seated and distant forms. ^[1]

At the right edge, squared masonry rises behind the wife and descends beside Job’s seat. Its sharp steps and dense small marks differ from the long, loose strokes of the heap under his body. Martin Butlin’s Tate catalogue notes that the biblical ashes have become something resembling straw. He places this treatment within a tradition of representing Job on a dunghill, associated with the Greek and Latin versions of the story. That account explains a visual inheritance; it does not make the strawlike heap a literal transcription of the King James wording. ^[1]

Sorrow at the edges

Outside the central rectangle, the engraving becomes much quieter. Two lightly outlined figures sit on its upper corners. Each bends inward, with the head lowered towards the arms. Their elongated drapery falls down beside the frame. Beneath the bustle of arriving bodies, and around the upper words, Blake supplies another posture of grief: the person folded into stillness. ^[1]

Lower down, two standing figures lean towards the centre on long staffs. Their robes extend into the slender vertical forms along the sides. Small animals occupy the ground near their feet, including a curled-horned ram at the right. Much of this border remains open paper. Its lines allow a change of pace after the densely engraved robes, skin and landscape within the main scene. ^[1]

Tate’s display caption associates these small marginal figures with sorrow and patience. Their bowed heads make that reading readily understandable. They also distribute grief across the entire page. The arrival is confined to the central picture, but the quieter attitudes recur above and below it, giving the reader places to pause while moving between the inscriptions. ^[1]

What patience includes

At the foot of the page, a third biblical voice speaks:

Ye have heard of the Patience of Job and have seen the end of the Lord. ^{[1] [2]}

This sentence comes from James 5:11. Around it, the epistle urges endurance, recalls the prophets’ suffering and warns readers against complaining against one another. The verse continues beyond Blake’s selected words by emphasising the Lord’s compassion and mercy. In that setting, patience concerns both enduring affliction and treating other people with care while awaiting its outcome. ^[2]

Placed below this exhausted Job, the sentence asks the reader to understand his present condition through a longer history. Yet the Book of Job itself soon gives endurance a much more turbulent voice. After the seven days of silence, Job is the first to speak. In chapter 3, he curses the day of his birth, imagines the rest of the grave and asks why life continues for someone in such misery. His suffering has not been made easy by the acceptance expressed above the engraving. ^[2]

The distinction between those moments gives the plate depth. The seated man can bear catastrophe, answer his wife and later cry out against his existence. His integrity does not require a single, unchanging emotional posture. Blake’s page holds its declaration of patience around a body whose depleted strength makes the cost of that endurance visible. Reading on into chapter 3 prevents the lower inscription from turning Job into a person who never protests. ^{[1] [2]}

A Christian lamentation within the story

The relation between Job and his wife has also invited comparison with Christian images of mourning over Christ. Butlin describes their pose as recalling a Lamentation and reports Bo Lindberg’s comparison with an engraving after Michelangelo’s Pietà in St Peter’s. The crosslike architectural shape at the extreme right strengthens this interpretation in the catalogue’s account. The comparison concerns the arrangement of a suffering male body and a woman close behind it. ^[1]

Job remains alive in this scene. His head, extended legs and exhausted torso nevertheless allow the familiar devotional image of a mourned body to enter the biblical meeting. The effect is to place his suffering within another tradition of innocent affliction. His wife acquires some of the visual gravity of a mourner, and the friends’ approach can be experienced as an encounter with someone almost overwhelmed by what he has endured. ^{[1] [2]}

Penelope Minney’s study of Blake’s Job illustrations places this resemblance within the long Christian tradition of treating Job as a figure anticipating Christ. She discusses the seventh design alongside the James inscription and the imagery of lamentation. Her account helps explain how a scene from the Hebrew Bible could carry these later associations for Blake and his viewers. It is a history of interpretation, carried through poses and inherited images as well as through the words chosen for the margin. ^[13]

Before comfort becomes argument

Knowledge of the later dispute can make it tempting to read hostility into the visitors from their first appearance. Butlin records Wicksteed’s theory that their advancing left feet signal a spiritually adverse role. Such readings treat the arrival in the light of the complete series. The inscription’s immediate action remains more particular: the friends see Job, weep, tear their garments and scatter dust. Their grief has its own place in the story. ^{[1] [2]}

When Eliphaz speaks in chapter 4, he recalls how Job once strengthened other people, then asks whether the innocent have ever perished. Explanation begins to place pressure on the person it was supposed to help. Blake gives the later confrontation its own image in Job Rebuked by his Friends, the tenth plate. The change from lifted palms to accusing arms gains force because the earlier encounter began with mourning and shared silence. ^{[2] [1]}

The engraving and its impressions

The small number 7 at the upper right locates this composition within the sequence. The publication line below carries the date 8 March 1825 and Blake’s Fountain Court address. Tate’s shared catalogue distinguishes that engraved date from the finished suite’s issue in 1826. A composition, the copperplate carrying it and the individual sheet printed from it each have a history. ^[1]

Tate dates its own impression, accession A00018, 1825, reprinted 1874, and describes it as a line engraving on paper with an image measuring 198 × 153 millimetres. Butlin identifies Tate’s suite as apparently belonging to the later printing arranged by John Linnell. These facts belong to Tate’s physical sheet. Yale’s separately identified example, B1978.43.1509, is dated 1826 in its official digital record. Its clear image preserves the small distinctions between fingers, facial expressions and marginal outlines. ^{[1] [14]}

The larger publication history belongs to the Illustrations of the Book of Job. Here, the seventh plate’s particular achievement lies in the difficult interval between seeing suffering and finding words for it. The friends have arrived, the wife remains beside her husband, and Job’s exhausted body receives their attention. The hands are raised; the long silence is about to begin. ^{[1] [2]}