Job

JOB begins, in its most ancient formation, as a Biblical Hebrew name (Iyóv or אִיּוֹב) of unclear origins. Etymologists speculate that the term may be derived somewhere within the oldest Semitic dialects, between the word for father (ʾôb or אב) and enemy (oyév or אויב) – perhaps it is through these senses that the meaning of the name Job is often given as a question: “Where is the father?” Others however, have found the meaning of Job not as an enemy – the absentee parent – but rather as the Persecuted or the object of enmity, a sentiment borne out in its most famous namesake The Book of Job.

Within the Hebrew Tanakh Job appears as one of the oldest Biblical figures – a supposedly blameless, righteous man whose health and livelihood is taken by God in a test of faith. Throughout his trials Job reflects on the will of God and retains his faith, an interpretation echoed in a related Arabic noun أَوَّابً (Awwab) meaning the Returner or ‘he who turns to God’. Indeed, in the Qur’an Job (Ayyūb or أيّوب) is similarly held to be a prophet, renowned and rewarded for his patience and endurance. And in its adoption of the Old Testament, the Christian faith – through which the Latin form of Iob or Job becomes prevalent – Job is held in similar stead, as a man whose patience in suffering demonstrates a virtue from which we all might learn. In Wycliffe’s C14th translation of the Bible we read:

“Ȝe herden the suffring or pacience of Job”

And so, the ‘patience of Job’ in particular becomes a key phrase throughout Middle English, seen in all forms of literature. In Chaucer’s C14th collection The Canterbury Tales, the Wyf of Bathe laments:

Ye sholden be al pacient and meke And han a swete spyced conscience Sith ye so preche of Iobes pacience.

In monk and poet John Lydgate’s Fabula Duorum Mercatorum (The Tale of Two Merchants) composed in the mid C15th, we read of the misfortunes and miseries of a trader cast in the image of a ‘newe Job’:

This newe Job, icast in indigence, He weepith, wayleth, soleyn and solitarye, Allone he drouh hym, fleeyng al presence, And evir his lif he gan to curse and warye.

So popular is the figure and the phrase that, by 1571, the Bishop of Salisbury John Jewel can rhetorically ask:

Who hath not heard of the patience of Iob?

Who indeed? However, this is not the common sense in which we use the word today, even if one's own job evokes a similar sense of misfortune and misery. The idea of a job as a piece of work emerges, it has been suggested, from an obsolete use of the term as a unit of measurement – a jobble or jobbet – a cartload for transportation. This somewhat less illustrious use is attested in the accounts of churchwardens from the mid C16th on:

For faching a Jobbe of thorns and mending the hedges aboute the churche howsse

To begin then, a job was not the whole of one’s work but rather a small task or piece within it – a ‘job of work’ or ‘Iobbe of woorke’. And often, it seems, particularly as the noun job transforms into the verb to job, and adjective jobbing – as in a jobbing job jobbed – to do said task poorly, opportunistically and without commitment. It may be that this depreciative sense derives from a contemporaneous understanding of the term Jobber or stock-jobber, a term which defined the middlemen of the burgeoning stock-exchange in C17–18th England. Daniel Defoe in particular detested such jobbers and in his use of the term perhaps coloured it within this disdain, as in his poem for the Duke of Marlborough, The Double Welcome:

…a starving Mercenary Priest, A Jobbing, Hackney, Vicious Pulpit Jest

Indeed, a distrust of jobs, jobbing and jobbers was not unwarranted, as the term quickly enlisted itself into criminal slang. For example, in William B. Rhodes 1810 burlesque opera, Bombastes Furioso, we hear of the titular character’s criminal exploits:

I knock'd him down, then snatched it from his fob; “Watch, watch,” he cried, when I had done the job

However this criminal, or otherwise distrustful view of jobs and jobbers softened over the C19th, presumably as such piece-work or odd jobs (a phrase first evidenced in 1704) became more commonplace and as such jobs themselves lengthened into longer-term employment.

Returning, perhaps, to its holier origins, the idea of a job morphed slowly into an enduring and regular form of paid employment – a post, an occupation or a profession. In the early C20th a whole swathe of job-related terms emerged as enormous firms like Ford and General Electric created a new economy which reconfigured the language of work. By way of illustration, the 20 years between 1910 and 1930 saw the introduction of: job application, job hunting, job market, job description, job discrimination, job hunt, job opportunity, office job, job security… the list goes on.

Job is a self-evidently elastic term (we’ve not even started on the hand-jobs of the C20th). Contained within it we find the rectitude of Job’s patience reconfigured as capitalist accumulation; Max Weber’s ‘Protestant work ethic’ sat alongside what Samuel Johnson labelled the ‘piddling work’ of piecemeal labour and criminal insiders. History accumulates itself, and today the moral compass rotates continuously, the idea of a good job at once a necessity and a fantasy – patience, how! We are all now Job – or jobseekers at least – although it is not God that tests our patience, but capital. Perhaps what the great resignation of the 2020’s shows is that our endurance is waning – as they say on TikTok:

“Darling, I’ve told you several times before, I have no dream job — I do not dream of labour.”

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout