Chapter 3

¹After this Job opened his mouth, and cursed the day of his birth. ²Job answered:

³“Let the day perish in which I was born,

The night which said, ‘There is a boy conceived.’

⁴Let that day be darkness;

Don’t let God from above seek for it,

Neither let the light shine on it.

⁵Let darkness and the shadow of death claim it for their own.

Let a cloud dwell on it.

Let all that makes black the day terrify it.

⁶As for that night, let thick darkness seize on it.

Let it not rejoice among the days of the year.

Let it not come into the number of the months.

⁷Behold, let that night be barren.

Let no joyful voice come therein.

⁸Let them curse it who curse the day,

Who are ready to rouse up leviathan.

⁹Let the stars of the twilight of it be dark.

Let it look for light, but have none,

Neither let it see the eyelids of the morning,

¹⁰Because it didn’t shut up the doors of my mother’s womb,

Nor did it hide trouble from my eyes.

¹¹“Why didn’t I die from the womb?

Why didn’t I give up the spirit when my mother bore me?

¹²Why did the knees receive me?

Or why the breast, that I should suck?

¹³For now should I have lain down and been quiet.

I should have slept, then I would have been at rest,

¹⁴With kings and counselors of the earth,

Who built up waste places for themselves;

¹⁵Or with princes who had gold,

Who filled their houses with silver:

¹⁶Or as a hidden untimely birth I had not been,

As infants who never saw light.

¹⁷There the wicked cease from troubling;

There the weary are at rest.

¹⁸There the prisoners are at ease together.

They don’t hear the voice of the taskmaster.

¹⁹The small and the great are there.

The servant is free from his master.

²⁰“Why is light given to him who is in misery,

Life to the bitter in soul,

²¹Who long for death, but it doesn’t come;

Dig for it more than for hidden treasures,

²²Who rejoice exceedingly,

Are glad, when they can find the grave?

²³Why is light given to a man whose way is hid,

Whom God has hedged in?

²⁴For my sighing comes before I eat,

My groanings are poured out like water.

²⁵For the thing which I fear comes on me,

That which I am afraid of comes to me.

²⁶I am not at ease, neither am I quiet, neither have I rest;

But trouble comes.”