Job and Ayyūb: the patience of a servant

Job is the man of patience in the Bible, and Ayyūb (أيوب) is the same man in the Qur’an. Both lose their health, their wealth and their children, and both are restored. The Bible spends 42 chapters on why. The Qur’an spends about a dozen verses, and gives a different reason.

Job in the Bible

The Book of Job opens in heaven. The heavenly beings come before God, and among them is the satan, the accuser. God points to Job as a blameless and upright man. The accuser answers that Job is good only because God has blessed him, and God allows him to strike first Job’s goods and children, then his body.¹

Job will not curse God. He sits in ashes, and three friends come to comfort him. For some 35 chapters they argue: the friends say suffering is punishment, so Job must have sinned, and Job insists he has not and demands a hearing from God.²

God answers out of the whirlwind. The speeches ask Job where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid, and walk him through the sea, the stars, the wild animals and two great beasts.³ Job never learns about the scene in heaven. He repents in dust and ashes, God rebukes the friends for failing to speak rightly as Job did, and Job receives twice what he had before.⁴

Jewish readers have long argued over the book. One sage in the Talmud held that “Job never existed and was never created”, that the story was a parable, and Rabbi Shmuel bar Naḥmani answered him from the first verse: “There was a man in the land of Uz.”⁵

Ayyūb in the Qur’an

The Qur’an names Ayyūb among the prophets who received revelation, beside Jesus, Jonah and Solomon.⁶ His story is told twice, in Sūrat al-Anbiyāʾ and in Sūrat Ṣād, and both tellings begin with his prayer.

۞ وَأَيُّوبَ إِذۡ نَادَىٰ رَبَّهُۥٓ أَنِّى مَسَّنِىَ ٱلضُّرُّ وَأَنتَ أَرۡحَمُ ٱلرَّٰحِمِينَ ٨٣

And [mention] Job, when he called to his Lord, “Indeed, adversity has touched me, and you are the Most Merciful of the merciful.”

Qur’an 21:83⁷

The next verse gives the answer at once: “So We responded to him and removed what afflicted him of adversity. And We gave him [back] his family and the like thereof with them as mercy from Us and a reminder for the worshippers [of Allah].”⁸

Sūrat Ṣād adds detail. Ayyūb calls to his Lord that Satan has touched him with hardship and torment. He is told to strike the ground with his foot, and a spring rises for him to wash in and drink. His family is given back to him, and as many again with them. The passage closes with God’s own verdict: “Indeed, We found him patient, an excellent servant. Indeed, he was one repeatedly turning back [to Allah].”⁹

In Sūrat Ṣād the touch of Satan is the affliction itself. The Qur’an has no council in heaven and no exchange in which God lets the accuser test a righteous man to prove a point. Ayyūb’s part is a prayer and an act of obedience, and God answers him with a spring of water.

Job and Ayyūb: suffering as a test

Why, then, does a righteous man suffer? The Qur’an’s answer is general and applies to everyone. God “created death and life to test you [as to] which of you is best in deed.”¹⁰ Loss and pain belong to that test, and they fall on the righteous too, so suffering proves nothing about a person’s guilt.

Al-Fārūqī put the principle in its widest form. Creation is a cosmos with a purpose, made “not in vain or in sport”, and man is the creature who does God’s will freely. A trial makes sense only inside that purpose: it is the place where a free person shows what he will do. Ayyūb’s patience is moral because he could have despaired. That is how this site reads the Qur’anic account, and it is our reading, offered as such.

The Bible’s Job reaches part of the same place. He refuses to curse God, and in the end he is vindicated over friends who turned suffering into a ledger of sins. The New Testament remembers him as the model of endurance: “You have heard of the endurance of Job.”¹¹ What the Qur’an leaves out is the frame around him, the contest in heaven and a divine answer that surveys creation and leaves Job’s question about his own suffering unanswered.

The difference matters for the doctrine of God. A Lord who stakes a man’s children on a point against the accuser is hard to square with “There is nothing like unto Him.” The Qur’an keeps the God who hears the prayer of a servant in distress. Its picture of revelation, and how the earlier record was handed down, is set out in The transmission of scripture.

The philosophical side of the question, why a good God permits evil at all, belongs to a different kind of article. Compelling Evidence answers it in The problem of evil: a response. The scriptures stay with one man in ashes, calling on his Lord, and why faith and reason cannot finally conflict is the subject of Faith and reason.

Further reading: Faith and reason in the Abrahamic traditions, The transmission of scripture, A prophet like Moses.

Notes

1. Job 1-2. The Hebrew ha-satan (הַשָּׂטָן) means “the accuser”. ↩
2. Job 3-37. ↩
3. Job 38-41. ↩
4. Job 42:6-10. ↩
5. Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 15a, William Davidson translation, Sefaria; Job 1:1. ↩
6. Qur’an 4:163. ↩
7. Qur’an 21:83, trans. Saheeh International; Arabic text from Quran.com. ↩
8. Qur’an 21:84, trans. Saheeh International. ↩
9. Qur’an 38:41-44, trans. Saheeh International. ↩
10. Qur’an 67:2, trans. Saheeh International; 42:11. ↩
11. James 5:11, NRSVUE. ↩