Book of Job Trivia
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100 free Book of Job trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 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 100 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 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does Job's wife urge him to do after asking whether he still holds to his 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, and because Lamentations puts the 'daughter of Edom' in the land of Uz, the story is usually set outside Israel, in Edom or northern Arabia.
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 himself with after Satan afflicts his body?
A potsherd
A potsherd is a shard of broken pottery, and Job is so disfigured that when his three friends arrive they do not recognise him from a distance.
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 08What do Job's three visitors do for seven days when they first reach him?
Sit in silence
Sit in silence on the ground beside him is what they do, 'for they saw that his grief was very great', and the hush ends only when Job speaks 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 day 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 reading took such hold that Russian still calls the animal a 'begemot'.
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 words open Job's vow that ends 'yet will I trust in him'?
Though he slay me
Though he slay me opens the vow, but the same verse has Job insist he will still 'maintain mine own ways before him', so his trust arrives with an argument attached.
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 comes from Job's lament in chapter 19?
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 20After his children's feasts, what does Job rise early to offer for each of them, in case they had sinned?
Burnt offerings
Burnt offerings, one for each child, follow every round of feasting, 'It may be that my sons have sinned', and the narrator adds 'Thus did Job continually' before any test begins.
The morning stars sing in God's first speech, and the 'sons of God' shouting beside them are the same heavenly court where Satan's challenge set Job's ordeal in motion.
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, and the jab lands because Job himself had named Orion and the Pleiades in chapter 9 while praising the God who made them.
Q 25What does a humbled Job say he will do after God's first speech?
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 end Job's last speech in the book, and God's next words go to the three friends, telling them that they, unlike Job, have not spoken rightly of him.
Q 27What gift does each relative bring on coming to eat with Job after his trials?
Money and a gold earring
Money and a gold earring come from every brother, sister and old acquaintance, who turn up to 'bemoan' him and share his bread only once the ordeal is over.
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 29The epilogue doubles Job's largest herd from seven thousand to fourteen thousand of which animal?
Sheep
Sheep go from seven thousand to fourteen thousand, and the camels, oxen and she-asses double as well, yet Job's new family is the same size as before: seven sons and three daughters.
Q 30What do Job's daughters receive in the epilogue alongside their brothers?
An inheritance
An inheritance 'among their brethren' goes to all three daughters, although Numbers passes a man's property to a daughter only 'if a man die, and have no son', and Job has seven.