"The patience of Job"

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“I’ve got to have the patience of Job!” many a mother used to say when she caught the boys hanging upside down from the eaves, which she told them not to do no matter how much fun it was, or when the girls came into the kitchen bickering, just while she was getting the roast ready to go into the oven. How many of our readers have heard or used the phrase? I’ve long thought there was something odd about it, since Job was patient in the first go-round with disaster, but not so obviously patient in the second round, when God allowed Satan to afflict him with boils from head to toe. So there sat Job, on a heap of garbage, scraping his sores with the sharp edge of a broken pot, while his three friends said not a word, and then he bursts out with some of the most sublime poetry ever written — which begins with his cursing the day he was born and wishing it were torn right out of the year. Patience, my good man!

And then his friends pitch in. We did once have a phrase in English, a “Job’s comforter,” and it didn’t mean a nice soft quilt he threw about his shoulders. It’s the type of friend you hate to see when you’re in trouble, the friend who says, “I told you so,” or “You’ve got to make an effort,” or “It was your own fault,” or, “You’re not the only one with troubles, you know.” His friends say, “God wouldn’t be doing this to you if you didn’t deserve it,” and I guess Job’s patience meant that he held back from punching them in the nose, though he does lash out at them for slandering him, as he maintains his guiltlessness. Yet there’s a deeper sense in which we might use the phrase which serves for our Word of the Week, “the patience of Job.”

Let’s look at that word, patience. What does it mean? We derive it from the Latin verb pati, which means to suffer, to endure. It’s a kind of verb whose action doesn’t proceed from the subject to an object, as in “I pat the dog,” but from the subject into or back upon the subject: “I shall endure.” A lot of verbs that describe the condition of your mind or heart are like that. The relations and descendants of pati are all over the place in English: a patient may be lying on a table, putting up with what the doctor is doing to him. If you’re passive, you let things happen to you, without rising up against them. The Greek cousin pathein also meant to suffer, with a strong sense of the feelings involved: so if you are sympathetic, which Job’s friends were not, you suffer alongside someone, just as a bell that’s tuned to the same pitch will begin to vibrate when another bell like it is struck nearby. It’s a fine and friendly thing when your heart moves in harmony with another heart, and that’s why the Italians started to call such a person simpatico, and the word has entered English with pretty much the same meaning. But the word pathetic, which used to describe something that would wring your heart, is now used colloquially to do just the opposite, to harden the heart, like so: “Job, you’re just pathetic!” one of his comforters might say, shaking his head and feeling how nice it is not to have lost all your children and your wealth and not to have boils from head to toe.

So “the patience of Job” suggests not passivity, and not insensibility, since Job isn’t passive and he certainly feels all his losses keenly. It suggests, in Job’s story, a manly willingness to remain steadfast. He doesn’t curse God and die, as Mrs. Job tells him he should do. He doesn’t pretend to have committed sins he didn’t commit. He cries out, he questions, he wants his case to be heard; but he still doesn’t accuse God of injustice. And if we go to where the phrase actually shows up, in the Epistle of James, we see where the stress lies. “We call them happy who endure,” says the apostle. “You have heard of the patience of Job,” he says, and then reminds the people of the end of that story, which shows that the Lord is “full of pity and tender mercy.” Now the verb he makes a noun out of isn’t pathein, to suffer; instead it’s one that describes staying in one place, being steadfast, not leaving your post. Different, isn’t it? When we think of being patient, we start to drum our fingers; we watch the clock, which must be gummed up with glue, so slowly the hands seem to move. But when we think of being steadfast, the time doesn’t matter anymore. We say, “Here’s my place, and here I stay!”

“Job visited by demons and berated by his wife,” Jan Mandijn. Public Domain.

Here’s an odd thing, by the way: the flower that’s called impatiens in the greenhouse used to be called, simply, patience; it’s also been called touch-me-not, because the seed pods will pop open at the slightest touch. So I suppose you have to be patient with the flower, or the seed pods are impatient; either way of thinking about it will work. And then, if you’re reading a novel by Dickens or George Eliot and you come upon somebody playing patience, it’s a form of what we in the United States call solitaire, though there were a lot of patience games and some of them could be played by two people. The goal of each of these games was to discard or to arrange the cards in a certain prescribed order. They were called patience because you had to be patient to play them. Heck, you might lose ten or twelve of those games in a row! It would take the patience of Job!

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and on-demand access to our full archive, and may add their comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!