- 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 its twilight 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 nurse?
- 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; and dig for it more than for hidden treasures,
- 22who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad, when they can find the grave?
- 23Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden, 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.”