Job 3 ⓘ
3:1 After this Job opened his mouth, and cursed the day of his birth.
3:2 Job answered:
3:3 “Let the day perish in which I was born, the night which said, ‘There is a boy conceived.’
3:4 Let that day be darkness. Don’t let God from above seek for it, neither let the light shine on it.
3:5 Let darkness and the shadow of death claim it for their own. Let a cloud dwell on it. Let all that makes the day black terrify it.
3:6 As for that night, let thick darkness seize on it. Let it not rejoice amongst the days of the year. Let it not come into the number of the months.
3:7 Behold, let that night be barren. Let no joyful voice come therein.
3:8 Let them curse it who curse the day, who are ready to rouse up leviathan.
3:9 Let the stars of its twilight be dark. Let it look for light, but have none, neither let it see the eyelids of the morning,
3:10 because it didn’t shut up the doors of my mother’s womb, nor did it hide trouble from my eyes.
3:11 “Why didn’t I die from the womb? Why didn’t I give up the spirit when my mother bore me?
3:12 Why did the knees receive me? Or why the breast, that I should nurse?
3:13 For now I should have lain down and been quiet. I should have slept, then I would have been at rest,
3:14 with kings and counsellors of the earth, who built up waste places for themselves;
3:15 or with princes who had gold, who filled their houses with silver;
3:16 or as a hidden untimely birth I had not been, as infants who never saw light.
3:17 There the wicked cease from troubling. There the weary are at rest.
3:18 There the prisoners are at ease together. They don’t hear the voice of the taskmaster.
3:19 The small and the great are there. The servant is free from his master.
3:20 “Why is light given to him who is in misery, life to the bitter in soul,
3:21 who long for death, but it doesn’t come; and dig for it more than for hidden treasures,
3:22 who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad, when they can find the grave?
3:23 Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in?
3:24 For my sighing comes before I eat. My groanings are poured out like water.
3:25 For the thing which I fear comes on me, that which I am afraid of comes to me.
3:26 I am not at ease, neither am I quiet, neither do I have rest; but trouble comes.”