Job's Mountain

A hill with a prophet's name

“Locals say the Prophet Job was healed on this hill.”From the film

Above the city of Jalal-Abad in southern Kyrgyzstan, renamed Manas in 2025, rises a low, dry ridge. It is called Ayub-Too, the mountain of Ayub, and Ayub is the name the Quran gives to the man the Bible calls Job.110

Job is the patient sufferer of both books: a righteous man who loses his children, his wealth and his health, is covered in sores from head to foot, and still does not curse God.153 On the slope of this hill warm water comes out of the ground, and the people of the valley say that this is where his suffering ended.

That is a legend, and this page tells it as one. But it is not a new one. In 1893 the Brockhaus and Efron encyclopaedia, writing about the springs of Hazret-Ayub, already mentioned “a local legend” of the long-suffering Job healed by their water.1 Hazret is a word of respect, something like “his holiness”. The hill, the springs and the shrine on it all carry the prophet's name.

One stamp of the foot

“The story goes: he stamped his foot on the rock, and hot water burst out.”From the film

In the spring of 1907 the writer Ivan Yuvachev travelled through the Fergana Valley and wrote the story down as it was told to him.2

When Job's time of trial was over, the tale goes, God told him to strike the rock with his right foot, and a spring of hot water burst out. Then he struck it with his left foot, and cold water came. He bathed in the hot water, drank the cold, and was healed of his terrible disease.2

The scene is older than the hill. In the Quran, God answers Job's prayer: “Stomp your foot: here is a cool spring for washing and drinking.”3 The verse names no place. Fergana gave it an address.

Yuvachev was not naive about it. Fergana, he wrote, will show you where Enoch, Noah, Job, David and Solomon prayed or were buried, as if the great sacred events had all happened here; he saw in such tales the wish of believers to carry the Bible story onto their own ground.2 And Ayub-Too is one of several claimants. Places in Syria, Oman, Lebanon and Uzbekistan are also shown as Job's tomb or the place of his healing.11

Warm water, measured

“The springs are real, and still warm.”From the film

Whatever one believes about Job, the water is no legend. The encyclopaedia of 1893 gives the numbers.1

There were several springs, and the local people held only one of them sacred. That one gave 8,640 buckets a day, about 106,000 litres,8 at 38 to 39 °C, with a faint trace of hydrogen sulphide.1 Today the water comes up through seven wells 75 to 130 metres deep, warm up to 44 °C.7

Russians, the encyclopaedia says, learned of the springs in 1877.1 Local people had been bathing in them long before; how long, no record we found can say. Dates like “the 2nd century BC” go around the internet without a source, so we leave them out.

On the postcard the spring is no spa: a low roof on wooden posts, a domed building behind it, trees, and the people of the place sitting on the ground for the camera. The caption is printed twice, in Russian and in French.

Sick soldiers, three baths

“By the 1880s, the Russian army was sending sick soldiers to bathe in them.”From the film

Within a few years of learning about the springs, the army had found a use for them.

From 1884, the encyclopaedia records, chronically ill soldiers of the lower ranks were sent to the waters. From 1885 there was a sanitary station; for the season an infirmary of 25 beds opened, and baths were built at three of the springs.1

When the geographer Vladimir Voshchinin came in 1914, he found a military infirmary and a bath-house kept clean enough, and among the bathers, besides the local people, many Russian patients.4 Doctors measured, soldiers bathed, and the legend went on being told beside the bath-house.

The Maiden's Spring

“And Job's wife? Legend says she bathed in a second spring and turned seventeen again. It's still called the Maiden's Spring.”From the film

The story does not end with Job.

In 2010 two Turkish researchers recorded what the imam of the resort's mosque and others told them on the hill. Job's wife came to the springs, they said, and bathed in the water of a second spring, and she became a girl of seventeen. That spring was named Kyz-Bulak, the Maiden's Spring. Job himself, in the same telling, became a young man of eighteen.5

Kyz-Bulak is a real place: it is the name of one of the resort's two holy springs, next to the spring of Ayub.5 The name is a fact. The seventeen years belong to the legend.

One more version is told about the hill, and it belongs to the cloth of this page. The Russian Wikipedia retells an article of 1900 by M. Brodovsky: the healed Ayub stuck his staff into the worms that had fallen from his sores; the staff became a mulberry tree, the worms became silkworms, and his wife, Bibi Rahim, began to spin silk.4 We could not open that article, so take it as a story about a story.

Silk itself is no legend in the Fergana Valley. Margilan, in the south of the valley, has been known for its silk since the 10th century,14 and the valley's bright silk is patterned in ikat, the cloth the film is woven in.13

The tomb we did not draw

Voshchinin climbed the hill in 1914 for more than the baths.

At the top, he wrote, were the springs that drew crowds of local people to bathe and to bow at the tomb of the prophet Job, Hazret-Ayub: by tradition Job was healed by these waters and died here too.4 From the cliff beside the grave he looked down on a golden-green valley, with countless groups of pyramidal poplars and the Kugart river running through it like a silver ribbon.4

He saw something else beside the grave: a long flat stone set on its edge on a pedestal, walled like the tomb, where women who had no children came to sit and pray.4 Whether the stone is still there, we could not find out.

Nor do we know what the tomb looks like today. We found no recent description or photograph of it, so the film does not show it, and neither does this page. The domed Chashma-Ayub in Bukhara, another spring of Job, is a different building with its own legend.11

The town under the hill was a market town of clay and poplars then. It grew into the regional capital, changed its name, and kept the hill.