Job 3

¹After 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 regard it from above,

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 I came out of the belly?

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,

Which built up waste places for themselves;

¹⁵Or with princes that had gold,

Who filled their houses with silver:

¹⁶Or as an hidden untimely birth I had not been;

As infants which never saw light

¹⁷There the wicked cease from troubling;

And there the weary be at rest

¹⁸There the prisoners are at ease together;

They hear not the voice of the taskmaster

¹⁹The small and 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;

²¹Which long for death, but it cometh not;

And dig for it more than for hid treasures;

²²Which 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 roarings 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.