Job 3

3After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day. ²And Job answered and said:

³Let the day perish wherein I was born,

And the night which said,

There is a man-child conceived.

⁴Let that day be darkness;

Let not God from above seek for it,

Neither let the light shine upon it.

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

Let a cloud dwell upon it;

Let all that maketh black the day terrify it.

⁶As for that night, let thick darkness seize upon it:

Let it not rejoice among the days of the year;

Let it not come into the number of the months.

⁷Lo, let that night be barren;

Let no joyful voice come therein.

⁸Let them curse it that curse the day,

Who are ready to rouse up leviathan.

⁹Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark:

Let it look for light, but have none;

Neither let it behold the eyelids of the morning:

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

Nor hid trouble from mine eyes.

¹¹Why died I not from the womb?

Why did I not give up the ghost when my mother bare me?

¹²Why did the knees receive me?

Or why the breasts, that I should suck?

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

I should have slept; then had I been at rest,

¹⁴With kings and counsellors of the earth,

Who built up waste places for themselves;

¹⁵Or with princes that had gold,

Who filled their houses with silver

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

As infants that never saw light.

¹⁷There the wicked cease from troubling;

And there the weary are at rest.

¹⁸There the prisoners are at ease together;

They hear not the voice of the taskmaster.

¹⁹The small and the great are there:

And the servant is free from his master.

²⁰Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery,

And life unto the bitter in soul;

²¹Who long for death, but it cometh not,

And dig for it more than for hid treasures;

²²Who rejoice exceedingly,

And are glad, when they can find the grave?

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

And whom God hath hedged in?

²⁴For my sighing cometh before I eat,

And my groanings are poured out like water.

²⁵For the thing which I fear cometh upon me,

And that which I am afraid of cometh unto me.

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

But trouble cometh.