Plate 10 from Illustrations to the Book of Job

This is the 10^th of Blake’s 22 engraved prints of The Book of Job. In this print, Satan, with God’s permission, has already deprived Job of his family and wealth. And Job’s friends are rebuking him. The highly expressive hands of the friends impress me a lot. Instead of fiercely pointing to Job, the hands of the friends have strangely smooth lines. If I don’t know what this engraving is supposed to be about, I might think that the three friends are magicians casting spells over Job, because their hand gestures look so much like that of magicians’. Take a look at the picture of a wizard.

Or are the friends somehow like magicians in the story? Yes, they are. Although they are depicted in the story as hateful figures rebuking Job, they do cast light on Job’s blindness in a way. Job wrongly believes that he is so righteous that God surely will protect his wealth and family. The friends make Job accept that he doesn’t behave blamelessly and he has sins, even if Job barely knows what he has done wrong.

Do the friends know what Job has done wrong? No. This is a question that the friends, Job, and viewers keep asking but can hardly find an answer. It is not until the 13^th print(the picture on the left) that God answers Job out of the whirlwind, showing Job’s fault of being blind to the transcendent power of divinity and trying to understand God’s ways with limited human intelligence. Asserting that Job is punished because he is a sinner, Job’s friends also go wrong in this way. Thus, the 10^th print at the very top, (in which the friends rebuke Job), has a hidden irony of human’s blindness of their limited intelligence and God’s transcendent power.