Christ and Job: Easter Sunday

This mini-series looks at the Easter story through the lens of the Book of Job.

Today is Easter Sunday. A time where Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. God restores Him back to life, in a resurrected body.

At the end of Job, God also restores back to him all that he had lost, and more. He received double the amount of sheep, oxen, camels and donkeys. He then had seven sons and three daughters, the same number as before.

Job 42 v 14

The first daughter he named Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Keren-Happuch.

The daughters are named but the sons are not. Names are very important in the Bible as they can reveal more about the text than is immediately clear at the first reading.

Jemimah has an uncertain root and can be translated as ‘day by day’, though it could also be translated as a female dove. This word doesn’t appear anywhere else in the Bible.

The second daughter, Keziah comes from the word cassia which is a fragrant powered bark. And again, the word doesn’t appear anywhere else either.

The last daughter has a very unusual name, Keren-Happuch. It means a horn of antimony. This phrase is again unique in the Bible. Keren means horn and traditionally caused a translation issues. It is similar to a word which is used to describe Moses’s shining face after he came down from Mount Sinai in Exodus 34. In fact, early Christian depictions of this event show Moses with horns, rather than a shining face.

Happuch is a metallic element known as antinomy. It was ground down by the ancients and used as a cosmetic, particularly as an eyeliner.

Could Keren-Happuch be an attempt to try to represent a horn which is also shining and arcs like eyeshadow on the eye lid? Could this be a way of describing a rainbow?

In summary, the three daughters are Jemimah (dove), Kezia (wood) and Keren-Happuch (rainbow). These three elements, dove, wood and rainbow, also appear in the story of Noah.

The writer of the Book of Job might be alluding to how Job is like Noah, and his suffering was similar to Noah’s in the bowels of the Ark.

And as Noah exits the boat, he sees the World has been renewed. A new creation is presented to him. Similarly, after Job’s experience, his personal world is renewed and abundantly restored back to him.

Similarly, as Christ leaves the Garden tomb, the world is renewed, and His position is restored.

In some way, the Easter story gives us an unbreakable hope. Not just that we will get through times of suffering, but God will renew and restore us, either in this life or the next.

By seeing the story of Easter through the lens of the Book of Job, it highlights themes we might not have fully noticed before. I hope during this Eastertide, the bittersweet joy of this time will draw us closer to Christ, in both His death and resurrection.