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Originally Posted by weinhold  As just a quick example, consider Job's children, who die as part of God's wager with Satan. At the end of the book, God "replaces" them with additional children as a part of Job's restoration. Such an understanding of one's children as essentially expendable seems problematic, even more so if one reads Job as a historical account. |
I always have been so blessed by the fact that Job 42:10 says that 'the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before" yet he only gave him the exact number of children than he had had previously; indicating that God was not replacing twofold the ones he had like he did with the cattle and camels, but simply doubling his blessing. The original children were still his, or as Matthew Henry put it - 'the children that were dead were not lost, but gone before to a better world'. So the passage is saying the exact opposite as you indicated - the children were not expendable, and they were not replaced. He was simply given an additional 10 children to double his first blessing.
And not to allow this thread to get sidetracked off the OP, I agree with the posters who showed from other passage of Scripture (Ez 14: 14, 20, James 5:11) that God referred to Job as a real man alongside all the other real men of the Bible, therefore, we have no reason to interpret it any other way than the book being an historical book of real people.