Job and His Friends
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Job 2:11
The passage
Now when Job’s three friends heard of all this evil that was come upon him, they came every one from his own place; Eliphaz the Temanite, and Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite: for they had made an appointment together to come to mourn with him and to comfort him.
Job 2:11
About this plate
Job sits on a heap of straw and ash in the open, stripped to the waist, wasted, one arm thrown up and his mouth open in the middle of speaking. Three men are round him. One stands at the left in a cloak with his head down. One sits with his chin on his hand. One leans in close, older, and looks at him without expression. The horizon is flat and empty and the sky is bare.
The friends are the interesting part. Doré does not draw them as villains. They look tired, patient, and out of ideas, which is exactly what the book describes for the first seven days, when they sat with him and none spake a word unto him.
Job is the only one moving. Everyone else has settled into the poses of people who have been there a long time. Whatever he is saying, he is saying it into a silence that has already lasted a week, and Doré draws the silence rather than the speech.
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