Job 3:1-26
3 After this Job opened his mouth and cursed his day,
2 * and said
3 “Perish the day on which I was to be born,and the night that said ‘A man is conceived’!
4 Be that day darkness;let God not concern himself with it from aboveand no brightness beam into it.
5 Let darkness and gloom claim it,let clouds settle over it,let eclipses overwhelm it.
6 * That night let blackness take;let it not form part of the days of the yearnor come into the count of the months.
7 O be that night bleak and bare,let no jubilation come into it;
8 Let day-cursers lay a curse on it,those who are ready to rouse Leviathan.
9 Let its twilight-stars be dark,let it hope for light and there be none,and let it not descry the eyelashes of the dawn,
10 * Because it did not shut the doors of the body I was inand shut off torment from my eyes.
11 * Why was I not to die in birth,come out of my mother’s body and perish?
12 How came it that knees welcomed me,and breasts for me to suck?
13 For now I should be lying down quiet,asleep and so at rest,
14 With kings and statesmen of earthwho built for themselves sites that lie waste
15 Or with generals who owned gold,who filled their houses with silver,
16 Or like an abortion tucked underground I should not exist,like infants that had never seen light.
17 There wicked men forbear to rage,and there exhausted men rest,
18 Prisoners are at ease together,hear no overseer’s voice.
19 Small and great are there,and a slave is free from his owner.
20 Why give light to a tormented man,and life to men of aching hearts,
21 Who wait for death and it is not there,and hunt more industriously for it than for buried treasure,
22 Who are gleefully glad at it,overjoyed when they find a grave?
23 To a man whose road is curtained offand God has fenced him in?
24 * For my moans come in before my breadand my roars pour out like water.
25 * For when I dread a thing it arrives,and what I have quailed at the thought of comes true for me.
26 I have had no comfort, no quiet time,no rest, and a spasm comes.”
Footnotes
^ 3:2 Var. day, and Job answered “Perish
^ 3:6 Lit. be united with the days of
^ 3:10 Lit. shut the doors of my belly and shut off
^ 3:11 Lit. die from the womb, come
^ 3:24 Or come in as if they were my
^ 3:25 Lit. For I dread a dread and it comes to me
