Catholic Commentary
Job's Long Life and Blessed Death
16After this Job lived one hundred forty years, and saw his sons, and his sons’ sons, to four generations.17So Job died, being old and full of days.
Job 42:16–17 describes Job's restoration and death after his vindication by God: he lives 140 years (double the typical lifespan, symbolizing divine favor), witnesses four generations of descendants (the supreme earthly blessing), and dies "old and full of days"—the exact epitaph reserved in Scripture for patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and David. This closing elevates the non-Israelite Job to patriarchal stature, signifying that his suffering was completed and made meaningful by God's restoration.
Job does not merely survive his suffering—he dies satisfied, witnessed by four generations, restored to the stature of the patriarchs, proving that God's faithfulness outlasts even the longest darkness.
Job 42:16 — "After this Job lived one hundred forty years…"
The phrase "after this" (Hebrew: aḥărê-kēn) is a deliberate structural marker tying the epilogue directly to Job's intercessory prayer and God's vindication in 42:7–15. The 140 years are almost certainly symbolic: exactly double the proverbial lifespan of 70 years cited in Psalm 90:10. The Septuagint tradition is even more expansive, giving Job 170 years after his restoration, and the Testament of Job (a deuterocanonical-adjacent text known to the early Church) amplifies this to make Job a quasi-patriarchal figure. In the Hebrew narrative world, doubled lifespan signals divine favor and covenant blessing — the same logic governs the long lives of the antediluvian patriarchs and the double inheritance of the firstborn (Deuteronomy 21:17). Job, who had lost everything, now receives the "double portion" not merely in cattle and children (42:10, 12) but in time itself. God gives him back life in abundance.
"And saw his sons, and his sons' sons, to four generations" — To behold four generations of one's descendants was considered in Israelite culture the supreme earthly blessing, a sign that one's name and covenant inheritance would endure. Psalm 128:6 captures the aspiration: "May you see your children's children!" The specific number four echoes the covenantal promise to Abraham, to whom God pledged fidelity "to a thousand generations" (Deuteronomy 7:9), and implicitly recalls the curse of sin visited upon "the third and fourth generation" (Exodus 20:5) — here inverted into blessing. Job, who sat in ash and cried that his witness was in heaven (16:19), now sees that witness embodied in living flesh around him.
Job 42:17 — "So Job died, being old and full of days."
This epitaph — wayyāmot ʾIyyôb zāqēn ûśĕbāʿ yāmîm — is among the most theologically loaded death-notices in the Hebrew Bible. The exact formula "old and full of days" (zāqēn ûśĕbāʿ yāmîm) is used elsewhere only for Abraham (Genesis 25:8), Isaac (Genesis 35:29), and David (1 Chronicles 23:1; 29:28). This is not accidental. By closing Job's story with the same words used for the founding fathers of Israel, the inspired author elevates Job — a non-Israelite from the land of Uz — to the stature of a patriarch. He dies not in bitterness or complaint, though he had expressed both, but satisfied: the Hebrew śābēaʿ (full, satiated) implies not merely length of days but a life that has reached its proper completion, like bread risen and finished.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
The Church Fathers read the entire Book of Job as a type of Christ's Passion, and this epilogue as a figure of the Resurrection. Just as Christ descended into the deepest suffering and emerged glorified, Job passes through ash and affliction to superabundant life. St. Gregory the Great, in his monumental Moralia in Job, devotes sustained attention to how Job's restoration prefigures not only individual resurrection but the renewal of all things in Christ. Gregory notes that Job's 140 years point to the fullness of time that the redeemed will enjoy — not measured in years but in eternal life. The "four generations" Gregory interprets allegorically as the four cardinal virtues or the four Gospels carried forward by the Church.
The phrase "full of days" also resists reduction to mere biological longevity. In the Catholic understanding, a life "full of days" is a life fully given — to God, to suffering, to intercession (42:8–10), to praise. Job's death is good death: prepared, fruitful, and consonant with a life that, however broken, was never ultimately turned away from God.
Catholic tradition uniquely illuminates this passage at several interlocking levels.
Resurrection and Eschatological Hope. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "in the face of death, the riddle of human existence becomes most acute" (CCC §1006). Job 42:17 is one of the Old Testament's most profound anticipations of an answer: a death that is telos, not truncation. St. Gregory the Great (Moralia in Job, Book 35) argued that Job's restored life was a figure (figura) of the bodily resurrection, since God does not merely repair but doubles and glorifies what was lost. The Council of Trent's teaching on the resurrection of the flesh finds in Job's famous exclamation — "I know that my Redeemer lives" (19:25) — its Old Testament anchor, and this epilogue its narrative seal.
Providence and Suffering. The Catechism states that God "permits" evil with a view to a greater good (CCC §312), and Job's story is the canonical demonstration of this principle. The restoration is not a retraction of the suffering but its completion. Pope John Paul II, in Salvifici Doloris (§26), explicitly cited Job as the paradigm of redemptive suffering: one who held fast through the darkness and thereby bore witness to the transcendence of the human spirit under God.
Patriarchal Typology and Universal Salvation. That Job — a Gentile — receives the patriarchal epitaph points toward the Catholic understanding of salus extra Israel, the seeds of salvation sown beyond covenant Israel. St. Thomas Aquinas noted in his Expositio super Iob that Job's righteousness demonstrated that grace was operative beyond the visible boundaries of the chosen people, anticipating the Church's universal mission.
The Dignity of Old Age. The Church's consistent teaching on the dignity of every stage of human life (CCC §2276–2279) finds in Job's "full of days" a canonical warrant. Old age, in this vision, is not a deficit but a fullness — a theology directly opposed to contemporary cultures that marginalize the elderly.
For a Catholic reader today, these two verses offer a counter-cultural meditation on what a completed life looks like. In an age that fears death, medicalizes aging, and treats suffering as pure malfunction, Job's death "full of days" is a provocation. The Church calls Catholics to ars moriendi — the art of dying well — and Job models it: he does not die fleeing his story, but having inhabited it fully, including its darkest chapters.
Practically, these verses invite an examination of how we narrate our own suffering. Job did not edit his afflictions out of his biography; he lived through them to the other side. The four generations he witnessed suggest a spirituality of transmission: the faithful life does not end with us but is handed forward. Parents, grandparents, godparents, teachers, and priests are all called to this kind of generativity — to become, like Job, living witnesses whose endurance becomes inheritance for those who follow.
Finally, for anyone currently in the "ash heap" — grief, illness, spiritual desolation, unanswered prayer — these closing verses of Job function as a quiet, authoritative promise: this is not where the story ends.
Commentary