Job 3

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

² Job answered:

³ “Let the day perish in which I was born, the night which said, ‘There is a boy conceived.’

⁴ Let that day be darkness. Don’t let God from above seek for it, neither let the light shine on it.

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.

⁶ As 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.

⁷ Behold, let that night be barren. Let no joyful voice come therein.

⁸ Let them curse it who curse the day, who are ready to rouse up leviathan.

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,

¹⁰ because 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?

¹² Why did the knees receive me? Or why the breast, that I should nurse?

¹³ For now I should have lain down and been quiet. I should have slept, then I would have been at rest,

¹⁴ with kings and counselors of the earth, who built up waste places for themselves;

¹⁵ or with princes who had gold, who filled their houses with silver;

¹⁶ or as a hidden untimely birth I had not been, as infants who never saw light.

¹⁷ There the wicked cease from troubling. There the weary are at rest.

¹⁸ There the prisoners are at ease together. They don’t hear the voice of the taskmaster.

¹⁹ The 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,

²¹ who long for death, but it doesn’t come; and dig for it more than for hidden treasures,

²² who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad, when they can find the grave?

²³ Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in?

²⁴ For my sighing comes before I eat. My groanings are poured out like water.

²⁵ For the thing which I fear comes on me, that which I am afraid of comes to me.

²⁶ I am not at ease, neither am I quiet, neither do I have rest; but trouble comes.”