---
title: Job 1:4
url: https://jw-apologetics.app/verses/job-1-4/
markdown: https://jw-apologetics.app/verses/job-1-4.md
type: verse
perspective: Protestant (historic Nicene) response to Jehovah's Witness teaching
reference: Job 1:4
testament: OT
section: Poetry
index: https://jw-apologetics.app/llms.txt
---

# Job 1:4

## Text (Berean Standard Bible)

> Job’s sons would take turns holding feasts in their homes, and they would invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them.

## NWT Wording of the Key Phrase

- NWT (2013 revision): "Each of his sons would hold a banquet at his house on his own set day. They would invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them."

## JW Usage

Read as a rotation of family feasts — each son hosting on a fixed weekday or seasonal date, not on his birthday — to deny that birth-day feasting was practised among the righteous. The NWT's insertion of "set" before "day" pushes the reader gently toward the rotation reading. Job's subsequent sanctification of his children (1:5) is then cited as evidence that even rotational feasts carried spiritual risk.

## Protestant Usage

The commentators are divided — Ellicott, Pulpit Commentary, and Gill read "each on his day" as a birthday cycle, and the NIV renders it "on their birthdays." But the stronger point is that the rotation reading itself does not save the birthday-ban argument: a recurring family feast among the righteous is incompatible with the Watchtower's claim that birth-day-style feasting is biblically unknown. Whatever precise day each son hosted on, the family pattern was recurring, cyclical, and joyful — which is exactly what the rule is supposed to forbid. Pair Job 1:4 with Jeremiah 20:14, Job 3:1, and Luke 1:14, and the cumulative pattern of Old and New Testament references to the day of one's birth is positive, not negative.

## NWT Issue

The NWT inserts "set" before "day" — "his own set day" — where the Hebrew yôm has no qualifier of that kind. The added word nudges the reader toward "fixed rotation day" rather than "birthday," favouring the reading the Watchtower's birthday-ban argument requires. Standard English translations leave the noun unmodified ("each on his day," ESV; "on his day," NASB; "on their birthdays," NIV — the last with a footnote). The translator's choice is not a manuscript variant; it is a paraphrase shaped by doctrinal commitment.

## Arguments Using This Verse

- [The Birthday Ban — A Rule Generalised From Two Pagan Tyrants](https://jw-apologetics.app/arguments/birthday-ban-extrabiblical-canon.md) — Romans 14:5-6 / Jeremiah 20:14 / Job 3:1 [Practice]