Job 1:2

2. Seven sons The head of a large family has always been regarded in the East as pre-eminently happy. In the patriarchal age especially a large progeny was a source of military strength, each son, as well as each bondman, being a possible soldier. Elements of power, they, more than any other worldly gifts, entitled their possessor to distinction and honour. “Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them.” “They shall speak with the enemy in the gate.” Hence “the young men” appear first in the enumeration of the blessings of Providence, even as in the series of terrible calamities their destruction is the last climactic stroke. The number ten, as Hitzig and others have remarked, is here divided into seven and three, as well as in the following verse, where the seven and three also appear together with the halves of ten. In other portions of the Bible, however, similar numerical relationships appear. (Comp. 1 Kings 17:21 with 2 Kings 4:35; 1 Samuel 20:41 with Genesis 33:3. See note on sacred numbers, Luke 6:13.) The exact round numbers, seven and three, and their symbolic selection, so frequent in the Book of Job, in the opinion of some indicate the poetical overlying the historical.