Job 1:4
Job 1:44Job’s sons would take turns holding feasts in their homes, and they would invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them.
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.
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 with , , and , and the cumulative pattern of Old and New Testament references to the day of one's birth is positive, not negative.
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.