Catholic Commentary
Satan's Second Wager: Attacking Body and Flesh
4Satan answered Yahweh, and said, “Skin for skin. Yes, all that a man has he will give for his life.5But stretch out your hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will renounce you to your face.”6Yahweh said to Satan, “Behold, he is in your hand. Only spare his life.”
Job 2:4–6 depicts Satan wagering with God that Job will curse Him if afflicted physically, arguing that self-interest, not genuine faith, drives human devotion. God grants Satan permission to attack Job's body but preserves his life as an inviolable boundary, establishing that the adversary's power has divinely ordained limits.
Satan bets that when pain strips away everything else, a person will abandon God—but God draws an unbreakable line: the soul itself is untouchable.
Job 2:4 — "Skin for skin. Yes, all that a man has he will give for his life."
Satan's opening gambit is a proverb — almost certainly a trader's idiom from the ancient Near East, evoking the bartering of animal hides. The sense is equivalence by substitution: one skin buys another. Applied to Job, Satan's argument is coldly transactional: Job lost his possessions and his children (Job 1:13–19), but his skin — his own body — was untouched. Of course a man can endure the loss of external goods when his body remains intact. Satan is not simply predicting cowardice; he is advancing a philosophy of thoroughgoing self-interest as the engine of all apparent virtue. In Satan's anthropology, there is no such thing as disinterested love of God — only a rational calculation of personal benefit. This is the adversary's deepest lie: that grace does not genuinely transform the human person, that beneath every act of worship lurks a hidden barter.
The phrase "all that a man has he will give for his life" carries a double edge. Literally, it means a person will sacrifice every possession, every relationship, for physical survival. But it also anticipates the spiritual stakes of the entire book: will Job, when his very flesh is assaulted, give up his integrity — his inner life, his covenantal fidelity — for the sake of relief? Satan bets that he will. The wager is ultimately about whether authentic love of God is possible for a creature who suffers in the body.
Job 2:5 — "But stretch out your hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will renounce you to your face."
Satan escalates the terms. In the first test, God's hand was restrained from Job's person (Job 1:12). Now Satan demands that God Himself act — "stretch out your hand" — or at minimum, authorize the attack on Job's "bone and flesh." This phrase is significant: in Hebrew idiom, "bone and flesh" (עֶצֶם וּבָשָׂר, etzem u'vasar) denotes the deepest, most intimate constitution of a person — it is the language Adam uses to recognize Eve as his kin (Gen 2:23). Satan is not merely asking for skin-deep suffering; he is demanding access to the very core of Job's creaturely being.
The word translated "renounce" (יְבָרֶכְךָ, yevarech'kha) is, paradoxically, the Hebrew word for "bless" — a well-documented euphemism that biblical scribes employed to avoid writing the theologically scandalous phrase "curse God." The irony cuts deep: Satan predicts that Job's last act toward God will be a blasphemous inversion of the worship he has offered all his life. The adversary believes that the mouth formed for blessing can be reduced, by pain, to cursing.
Job 2:6 — "Behold, he is in your hand. Only spare his life."
God's response is terse and sovereign. He neither argues with Satan's theory nor withdraws from the wager. He grants the permission — "he is in your hand" — but immediately circumscribes it with a single absolute limit: nepeš (נֶפֶשׁ), Job's life, his animating principle, is untouchable. This boundary is theologically loaded. The nepeš in Hebrew thought is not merely biological survival; it encompasses the breath of life given directly by God (Gen 2:7). Satan may afflict the body to its uttermost extremity, but the seat of Job's God-given existence is beyond his reach. This anticipates the New Testament teaching that the adversary can kill the body but has no ultimate power over the soul (Matt 10:28).
The typological movement of these verses points forward to the Passion. As Christ's body was handed over — "delivered into the hands of sinners" (Luke 24:7) — so Job's body is handed over to the adversary. In both cases, a sovereign limit is observed: "you will not let your Holy One see corruption" (Ps 16:10). The suffering is real, the permission genuine, but the divine boundary holds.
Catholic tradition reads this passage at multiple levels, each illuminated by the Church's engagement with the problem of suffering.
The Adversary's Anthropology vs. Catholic Anthropology. Satan's claim that self-interest underlies all human virtue is a direct assault on what the Catechism calls the human person's capacity for genuine love — a love that, elevated by grace, can be truly ordered to God for His own sake (CCC 1822–1829). The entire Augustinian tradition, summarized in the Confessions, insists that the heart is restless until it rests in God — not as a transaction, but as the creature's deepest telos. Satan denies this; Job, by enduring, refutes it.
Permitted Suffering and Divine Providence. The limiting clause of verse 6 — "spare his life" — is a cornerstone for patristic reflection on why God permits evil. St. Gregory the Great, in his monumental Moralia in Job (the most extensive patristic commentary on this book), reads God's permission not as indifference but as the ordered sovereignty of a craftsman who permits the fire to test gold but controls the temperature. Gregory writes: "The ancient enemy is allowed to afflict the holy man's body so that, the flesh being weakened, the virtue of the soul might shine the more brightly." This resonates with CCC 272: God is almighty not despite permitting evil but precisely in His capacity to bring good from it.
Job as Type of Christ. The Church Fathers — particularly St. John Chrysostom in his Commentary on Job — see Job as a figura Christi: an innocent man handed over to suffering, tested to the bone, yet ultimately vindicated. The phrase "he is in your hand" (v. 6) prefigures Pilate's handing over of Christ (John 19:16). As Pope John Paul II wrote in Salvifici Doloris (1984, §26), Job's suffering participates proleptically in the redemptive mystery: innocent suffering, when accepted in fidelity, becomes a locus of encounter with the suffering God.
The Inviolability of the Soul. God's protection of Job's nepeš reflects the Church's teaching on the inalienable dignity of the human person. No created power — including demonic — can finally destroy what God has breathed into being (CCC 362–368). This is the ground of Christian hope in martyrdom: the body may be destroyed; the soul cannot be seized.
Satan's proverb — "all that a man has he will give for his life" — is no ancient curiosity. It describes a recognizable modern temptation: the willingness to compromise faith, integrity, and vocation when physical comfort, health, or security is threatened. Catholics facing serious illness, chronic pain, or the fear of death often feel the pull of Satan's logic: What good is your faith now? Bargain your way out. The medical, therapeutic, and cultural pressure to treat suffering as the supreme evil — something to be eliminated at any cost, including moral cost — echoes Satan's wager precisely.
These verses invite the Catholic reader to ask: What is the boundary God has drawn around my life? Just as God told Satan "spare his life," He guards the nepeš — the deep self — from being finally consumed by suffering. No diagnosis, no betrayal, no desolation has the last word over the soul God breathed into being.
Concretely: when suffering strips away consolations and leaves only raw endurance, the practice of simply refusing to curse — continuing, however barely, to pray — is itself a participation in Job's fidelity. The Liturgy of the Hours, offered in pain even without feeling, is "skin for skin" returned to God rather than surrendered to despair.
Commentary