Righteous Job the Long-Suffering

Righteous Job lived in the land of Uz (on the border of Edom and Arabia) and was, according to Septuagint tradition, a descendant of Esau in the fifth generation from Abraham — that is, he lived outside the direct patriarchal line of Abraham-Isaac-Jacob. He was a God-fearing, blameless man who shunned evil, possessing great wealth, seven sons, and three daughters.

With God's permission, Satan deprived him in a single day of all his possessions and all his children; he then afflicted his body with leprosy from head to foot. Despite losing everything, Job did not curse God, saying instead: "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!" He rejected his wife's counsel to renounce God and die; he endured the long accusatory speeches of three friends who wrongly attributed his sufferings to hidden sin.

After Job interceded for his friends who had judged him unjustly, the Lord restored to him twice his former wealth and granted him seven new sons and three daughters; he lived another 140 years afterward (per the Septuagint addition, 248 years in total), seeing four generations of descendants. The Book of Job is one of the greatest monuments of biblical wisdom, interpreted patristically as a prefiguration of Christ's redemptive suffering.

IMPORTANT CORRECTION: the original stub listed FOUR commemoration dates ("May 6/19/August 28/September 10"), of which only the first pair (May 6/19) is Righteous Job's genuine feast (itself not two separate dates, but the old/new style of the same single feast). The other two dates were established as foreign contamination: August 28 is the feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos; September 10 is the commemoration of Martyrs Minodora, Mitrodora, and Nymphodora; neither has any connection to Job and both have been removed.