Job 1:4

4. Every one his day Which, for insufficient reasons, Hirtzel refers to national festive days either of the spring or of the harvest. As there were seven sons, Oehler, Delitzsch, and Clericus would understand by the above phrase a week of festivity, with its attendant lustration and sacrifice on the seventh day, or sabbath. Thus they infer a high antiquity for the division of time into weeks and the observance of the sabbath. But it probably indicates their respective birthdays. (Hahn, Schlottmann.) “ ‘ His day,’ par excellence,” says Umbreit, “is the birthday.” There was apparently a fixed reason for such family festivals. Among the people of the East, birthdays have been ever commemorated with marked festivity. Pharaoh’s was celebrated with a feast to all his servants. Wilkinson, in Ancient Egyptians, says: “Every Egyptian attached much importance to the day, and even to the hour, of his birth, and it is probable that, as in Persia, each individual kept his birthday with great rejoicings, welcoming his friends with all the amusements of society, and a more than usual profusion of the delicacies of the table.” “Of all the days in the year,” says Herodotus, (i, 133,) “the one which the Persians celebrate most is their birthday.”

Called for their three sisters A joyous home, over which religion shed its heavenly light. Its influence is seen in the spirit of pure affection that bound together the hearts of the ten children. It was honourable in “the young men” that they should thus at the same time consult their own and their sisters’ happiness; as if the festive circle must be incomplete without the crowning joy of their presence. The Egyptian monuments also testify to the high esteem in which woman was held in the earliest ages. “In the treatment of women they (the Egyptians) seem to have been very far advanced beyond other wealthy communities of the same era, having usages very similar to those of modern Europe; and such was the respect shown to women that precedence was given to them over men, and the wives and daughters of kings succeeded to the throne, like the male branches of the royal family.” Sir G. Wilkinson.