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 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 breast, 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.