Home Master Index
←Prev   Job 3 as rendered by/in  Next→ 


3:1  At last Job spoke and cursed the day of his birth.
3:2  “Let the day of my birth be cursed,” he said, “and the night when I was conceived.
3:3  “Let the day of my birth be cursed,” he said, “and the night when I was conceived.
3:4  Let that day be forever forgotten. Let it be lost even to God, shrouded in eternal darkness.
3:5  Yes, let the darkness claim it for its own, and may a black cloud overshadow it.
3:6  May it be blotted off the calendar, never again to be counted among the days of the month of that year.
3:7  Let that night be bleak and joyless.
3:8  Let those who are experts at cursing curse it.
3:9  Let the stars of the night disappear. Let it long for light but never see it, never see the morning light.
3:10  Curse it for its failure to shut my mother’s womb, for letting me be born to come to all this trouble.
3:11  “Why didn’t I die at birth?
3:12  Why did the midwife let me live? Why did she nurse me at her breasts?
3:13  For if only I had died at birth, then I would be quiet now, asleep and at rest,
3:14  along with prime ministers and kings with all their pomp, and wealthy princes whose castles are full of rich treasures.
3:15  along with prime ministers and kings with all their pomp, and wealthy princes whose castles are full of rich treasures.
3:16  Oh, to have been stillborn!—to have never breathed or seen the light.
3:17  For there in death the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest.
3:18  There even prisoners are at ease, with no brutal jailer to curse them.
3:19  Both rich and poor alike are there, and the slave is free at last from his master.
3:20  “Oh, why should light and life be given to those in misery and bitterness, who long for death, and it won’t come; who search for death as others search for food or money?
3:21  “Oh, why should light and life be given to those in misery and bitterness, who long for death, and it won’t come; who search for death as others search for food or money?
3:22  What blessed relief when at last they die!
3:23  Why is a man allowed to be born if God is only going to give him a hopeless life of uselessness and frustration?
3:24  I cannot eat for sighing; my groans pour out like water.
3:25  What I always feared has happened to me.
3:26  I was not fat and lazy, yet trouble struck me down.”