What Does Job 2:10 Mean in the King James?
But he said unto her, Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
The Hebrew word translated “evil” can mean what is harmful or adverse, so Job is speaking of painful reality, not simply moral wickedness.
THE MEANING
Good and adversity both arrive in a life held before God; neither word cancels the other. The verse locates Job’s integrity in the speech that meets suffering, not in the fact that he suffers.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that receiving pain means goodness has disappeared from the relationship with God.
THE ROOT
רָע
raʿ
GROWS FROM
רעע
raʿaʿ
To be bad or harmful; to cause harm.
“evil” in this verse is raʿ. The word can cover both moral wrong and harmful adversity. Here it names what is painful, so the verse does not reduce Job’s suffering to wickedness or call the suffering itself a sin.
ALSO GROWS
raʿ: Bad, harmful, or adverse.
רָע
This is the word Job uses for what he receives alongside good.
hēreaʿ: To do harm or act wickedly.
הֵרֵעַ
This verbal branch shows the root can describe harmful action as well as a painful condition.
חָטָא
chata
GROWS FROM
חטא
ḥṭʾ
To miss or err.
“sinned” in this verse is chata. The verse’s final judgment concerns what Job says with his lips: he does not miss in his speech. The painful event and the spoken response remain distinct; suffering itself is not named as his error.
ALSO GROWS
chet: A missing or error.
חֵטְא
This noun gives the root’s sense of missing that lies beneath “sin.”
chatta't: A missing, or an offering for the missing.
חַטָּאת
This branch carries the same root into the language of an offering addressing what has gone wrong.
THE PATTERN
A life before God contains both welcome and painful conditions, and speech reveals how they are received.
And said, Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider: God also hath set the one over against the other, to the end that man should find nothing after him.Wherefore let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping of their souls to him in well doing, as unto a faithful Creator.THE THREAD
I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.Isaiah pairs the same Hebrew word for adversity, רָע (raʿ, harmful adversity), with שָׁלוֹם (shalom, wholeness). That pairing opens Job’s question as one about painful conditions alongside good, while leaving its unsoftened claim that both come from God’s hand.
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