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Job's Wife[1] is a play byPhilip Begho, written inverse. It was the winner of theAssociation of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Drama Prize in 2002.[2] It is an interpretation of the biblicalBook of Job.
Job himself never appears onstage, the crucial character beinghis wife who is hardly mentioned in theBible except for her spurious advice to Job.[3] We meet her packing to leave him and dissociate herself from his misfortunes. It is evident that she believes hesuffers for hissins and has become separated fromGod, so she is free to start a new life on her own. Her maid Reibah tries to stop her with the only means she can come up with – the lie that a powerful healer is coming,[4] only for her conscience to trouble her afterwards.[5] She is soothed by Nali, who promises to do her own bit to delay Job's wife; Nali has a vague belief that Reibah'slie has a kernel oftruth, that in one way or another, time will bring healing.
Thus Nali works at cross-purposes rather than helping her mistress in the way she wants to be helped, as well as her ridiculous speech about how she will accompany her.[6]
When the mysterious Healer actually does appear, thesupernatural is dramatically tamed by Job's wife's indignation that he wasn't announced by a servant, and that he should have knocked; she naturally presumes he is the one Reibah spoke of. The Healer eases Job's suffering offstage, but his real business is with the wife'shypocrisy, brought out as he questions the reason for her behaviour.
What he gradually teaches her and theaudience is balanced with the mutual incomprehension and comic exchanges between mistress and Nali, who can't see the Healer, and yet speaks the truth about him even as the woman concludes the girl is mad. When the Healer condemns the harm Job's friends[7] have done, she defends them, showing that their error is also hers, in weakening Job and depleting hismoral courage andfaith. He explains to her that suffering is purposeful and meant to teach, but not necessarily the sufferer, who sometimes far from beingguilty, is sometimes one “found worthy to bear the suffering that instructs his fellows and for this service his reward is sure.”[8]
The Healer gets the wife to turn her attention to what Job's suffering has taught her about herself, for rather than deepening incompassion andlove, she became a hypocrite, deceiving herself about her real motives, which have more to do with the loss of Job'sprosperity. What she must learn is introduced in bits, for Job's wife has a positiveself-image and resists seeing her guilt and Job'sinnocence.
