"So I think it is true, Job, that after your 'restoration' you never again entered into your judicial capacity. You had already done that. It was a lifetime removed from you. You found new things to occupy your time and life. Perhaps it was having 10 kids and caring for them. Possibly you decided to become a 'house-husband' for the second batch of kids. After all, you conquered the world the first time around, before your disaster. Maybe, just maybe, you would learn to find joy in your "second life" in other ways.
I rather think you did because it helps explain why only your daughters have names and why you divided your inheritance among them as well as your sons. In my earlier writing (Hard-Fought Hope), I came up with a theory of why you did this--that once you realized that the wisdom theology could be stood on its head by the rush of life's events, all other beliefs were thereby relativized and thus it wasn't so important that you observe society's customs about how to divide property--and I still think that theory has a lot to be said for it, but I want to advance an alternative here. Your daughters were named and you gave them some property because you spent lots of time with them and began to see them as valuable, unique and worthy of this honor.
Picking up on a theme I developed in my two essays on "Job's Wife," I would say that you finally realized during this "after distress" time that it was your wife who saved you. Her line, in 2:9, which I have literally translated "Bless God, and you will die" and interpreted to mean, "If you keep blessing God (which you did in 1:21--thus this was a blessing that arose from instinct and immediate reaction, or of denial, rather than of thought and feeling), you will die (meaning that you will become overwhelmed with the dissonance and possibly do damage to yourself), now came back to you. I think you said to yourself, 'My wife saved me. She was the one who encouraged me to get beyond my denial, to get to my heart's distress and put words on it. She was the one who urged me, therefore, to find and speak all my words. I had thousands of words, but finally I got all 'talked out' by 31:40. Then, and only then, was I in a situation to begin to listen--to Elihu and God--and hear life differently.'
Thus, Job, I think you realized in your 'after restoration' life that your wife's one line was the key to your life. You must have thought that women are a peculiar and a wonderful gift to man. How is it that a woman knows exactly what her husband needs, and knows that he needs it even more than he does? How is it that she can speak it in one line and then it takes him 2000 lines to "work it out?" What is a woman that she is able in three seconds to diagnose what ails a man and then it takes him months to speak his distress but then HE gets all the credit for the great thoughts (It is, after all, the Book of Job and not the book of Job's Wife--she is never, actually, given a name)? Is that fair? Is that just? But what is it about women that they don't seem to mind? That is, your wife, Job, was probably content just to get you back, just to try to establish the semblance of normal family life, while you had to go through your gigantic Wagnerian-type thundering process of mental and emotional collapse. Don't you think that is true?
You know, Job, I wonder whether women are sometimes like that--that they just instinctively KNOW what a man needs and can supply it, and then they want no credit for it at all. My first marriage was so bad, Job, that I never believed that it was a woman's role to be interested in her husband, much less be able to 'diagnose' him, encourage him and help him. I thought women wanted their independent lives and only wanted a husband to have the appearance of respectabililty as they lived their lives. If someone had told me in 1982 or 1992 that a woman's role is to understand her husband, and that some women actually not only understand them but "saved" their husbands, I would have laughed out loud. I still don't know, Job, 3 1/2 years after my divorce, if I ever really can believe that a woman can help me.
But I think that was your realization, Job. You realized in your 'after restoration' mode that it was your wife who had saved you. One line, and your life was saved. And I believe it is this insight that then affected the way you brought up your second family. I think the names of your daughters are mentioned (even though it is only added by the editor/author, of course--but I think you had special 'pull' with the editor/author) because it reflects your new approach to women. They are to be valued more than gold, even much fine gold. You experienced, didn't you Job, how a woman had absolutely saved your life, and you were going to treasure those three new girls as if they were the most valuable gift in the universe. And so you name them and so you give them inheritance. Social rules, customs that have reigned for hundreds of years, all go out the window because you know, with an unshakable belief that is as true as your knowledge of the redeemer (19:25) or your knowledge that God can do all things (42:2), that women are good and can save men. And, you know that men need saving.
So you get seven replacement sons. They are certainly good for something, of course. They will provide the economic engine, probably, to keep the "house of Job" going. They will be the breadwinners and probably, if things work out well, will be good fathers and good citizens in the next generation of the Land of Uz. But, when push comes to shove, maybe there is an inkling of truth in the notion that the sons are fungible (hence no names are given for the old or new sons) while the daughters, really, are not.
You have learned a valuable lesson in life, Job--that a good woman is more valuable than much gold. I am sure that you told that to Jemimah, Keziah and Keren-happuch every day.
[Last Essay]