Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Book of Job trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Job is the Bible's hardest argument. A blameless man loses his herds, his servants and his ten children in a single afternoon, then his health, and spends most of the book demanding that God explain why, while three visitors insist he must have deserved it. These 50 questions cover the whole arc: the wager in heaven, the four messengers, the wife who tells him to give up, the long debate with his visitors and the outsider Elihu, the voice from the storm with its catalogue of beasts and constellations, and the restoration that follows. The final stretch follows Job out of scripture and into Handel, Hobbes, a Pulitzer-winning play and the Quran. It suits a church quiz night, a Bible study group or anyone who half-remembers the story and wants to find out how strange it really is. Play on your phone with instant answers and explanations, or print it out and read it aloud.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does Job's wife urge him to do after asking 'Dost thou still retain thine integrity?'
Curse God and die
Curse God and die is the only line Job's wife speaks in the whole book, and Job answers that she talks like one of the foolish women. She is never named in the Bible.
Q 02In which land does the Book of Job place its hero, a man 'perfect and upright' who eschewed evil?
Uz
Uz is named in the book's opening verse, which then counts Job's wealth in sheep, camels, oxen and she-asses before any person speaks.
Q 03Out of what does God finally answer Job, demanding 'Gird up now thy loins like a man'?
A whirlwind
A whirlwind is where God speaks from in chapter 38, and instead of explaining Job's suffering he fires off questions about the sea, the snow and the wild animals.
Q 04Which affliction does Satan inflict on Job 'from the sole of his foot unto his crown'?
Boils
Boils cover Job from sole to crown, yet the text insists that 'in all this did not Job sin with his lips', the same verdict given after his first losses.
Q 05What does Job pick up to scrape his sores after Satan strikes him, as he sits on the ground?
A potsherd
A potsherd is a fragment of broken pottery, and the same chapter has Job's wife tell him to give up his integrity as he scrapes away.
Q 06Which smoke-snorting creature of Job 41 gave Thomas Hobbes the title of his 1651 treatise?
Leviathan
Leviathan in Job 41 cannot be drawn out 'with an hook', and Hobbes borrowed the untameable sea monster as his image of the all-powerful commonwealth.
Q 07Which New Testament letter says 'Ye have heard of the patience of Job', giving English a proverb?
James
James is the letter that holds the line, at 5:11, and it pairs Job with the prophets as an example of enduring suffering and being counted 'happy'.
Q 08For how long do Job's three visitors sit with him on the ground with no one speaking a word?
Seven days
Seven days and seven nights pass in silence because the visitors see how severe his grief is, and when Job finally speaks it is to wish he had never been born.
Q 09Which people, raiding in three bands, carry off Job's camels and put the herdsmen to the sword?
The Chaldeans
The Chaldeans take the camels while the Sabeans take the oxen and donkeys, and each disaster is reported by a lone survivor saying 'I only am escaped alone to tell thee'.
Q 10What strikes the house where Job's children are feasting, killing every one of them at once?
A great wind
A great wind 'from the wilderness' smites the four corners of the eldest brother's house, the fourth blow in a single afternoon after raiders and fire from heaven took the herds.
Q 11Which of Job's visitors speaks first, recalling a vision when 'the hair of my flesh stood up'?
Eliphaz
Eliphaz the Temanite opens the debate, and his spectre's question, 'Shall mortal man be more just than God?', sets the visitors' whole case that suffering must be deserved.
Q 12Why does Elihu say he held back his opinion while Job and the three visitors argued?
He was the youngest
He was the youngest, saying 'I am young, and ye are very old', and once he does speak he rages at the older men for condemning Job while finding no answer.
Q 13What does Job call his three visitors in chapter 16, having 'heard many such things' from them?
Miserable comforters
Q 21Which beast of Job 40, with a tail 'like a cedar', has long been identified with the hippopotamus?
Behemoth
Behemoth 'eateth grass as an ox', and the hippopotamus identification predates the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs in the early nineteenth century.
Q 22In Job 38, God asks where Job was when God laid what, 'if thou hast understanding'?
The foundations of the earth
The foundations of the earth open a barrage of questions that goes on to ask who 'shut up the sea with doors' and where light dwells.
Q 23What 'sang together' at creation in Job 38, as 'all the sons of God shouted for joy'?
The morning stars
Miserable comforters is Job's verdict on men who came to console him, and earlier he called them 'forgers of lies' and 'physicians of no value'.
Q 14Which phrase opens Job's vow in chapter 13 to keep trusting God even if God kills him?
Though he slay me
Though he slay me is followed by 'yet will I trust in him', but the same verse has Job insist he will still 'maintain mine own ways before him'.
Q 15Which word fills 'I know that my ___ liveth', the Job 19 line Handel set for soprano in Messiah?
Redeemer
Redeemer is the word, and Handel's soprano air on it opens Part III of Messiah, where the Job verse is joined to Paul's 'For now is Christ risen from the dead' from 1 Corinthians.
Q 16Which idiom for a narrow escape does Job coin in chapter 19, where his bone 'cleaveth' to his flesh?
The skin of my teeth
The skin of my teeth is all Job says he has escaped with, a puzzle of a phrase since teeth have no skin, and it now means surviving by the narrowest margin.
Q 17Job 5:7 has a friend declare that man 'is born unto trouble' as surely as what 'fly upward'?
Sparks
Sparks are the image, and the speaker's point is not sympathy but that trouble is the human lot, so Job should accept God's correction as a blessing.
Q 18To what does Job 14 compare a man who 'cometh forth' only to be 'cut down', fleeing like a shadow?
A flower
A flower is the image in a chapter that opens 'Man that is born of a woman', and Job then argues that a felled tree at least sprouts again.
Q 19Job complains in chapter 7 that his time races by 'swifter than' what, spent with no hope left?
A weaver's shuttle
A weaver's shuttle is the image in chapter 7, and two chapters later Job tries again with a running post, swift ships and an eagle swooping on its prey.
Q 20Elihu, the angry fourth speaker of Job 32, is introduced as 'the Buzite' and the son of whom?
Barachel
Barachel is named twice in Job 32, and the chapter adds that Elihu was 'of the kindred of Ram', a pedigree none of the three older visitors receives.
The morning stars sing in a verse that became the title of one of the most reproduced engravings of the book, and the 'sons of God' are the same court Satan joined in chapter 1.
Q 24Which constellation's 'bands' does God ask whether Job can loose, paired with the Pleiades?
Orion
Orion's bands are beyond Job's loosing, says God, and the same pair of constellations appears in Job 9 alongside Arcturus and 'the chambers of the south'.
Q 25What does a humbled Job say he will do after God's first speech, having spoken 'once' and 'twice'?
Lay his hand on his mouth
Lay his hand on his mouth is Job's pledge to stop talking, calling himself 'vile', yet God answers with a second speech anyway, about two monstrous beasts.
Q 26In what does Job say he repents, right after confessing 'now mine eye seeth thee'?
Dust and ashes
Dust and ashes is the phrase, in a speech of only six verses, and Job adds that he had known God 'by the hearing of the ear' but now sees him.
Q 27What gift does each relative bring on coming to eat bread with Job in his house after his trials?
Money and a gold earring
Money and a gold earring come from every visitor, given after God has already doubled Job's herds, so the gifts are less relief than tribute.
Q 28What is Job doing at the moment God 'turned the captivity of Job' and restores his fortunes?
Praying for his friends
Praying for his friends, the men just told they spoke wrongly of God, is what Job is doing when his fortune turns, and God gives him 'twice as much as he had before'.
Q 29How many sheep does the epilogue credit to Job, exactly double the flock he owned at the start?
Fourteen thousand
Fourteen thousand sheep join six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand she-asses, each figure precisely twice the prologue's count.
Q 30How many years does Job live after his restoration, seeing his descendants to 'four generations'?
140
140 years is the span for a man who already had ten grown children when the story opens, and the book's last verse says he died old and full of years.