Job - Chapter 3 - A Conservative Version
- After this Job opened his mouth, and cursed his day.
- And Job answered and said,
- Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night which said, There is a man-child conceived.
- Let that day be darkness. Let not God from above seek for it, nor let the light shine upon it.
- Let darkness and the shadow of death claim it for their own. Let a cloud dwell upon it. Let blackness come upon it.
- As 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.
- Lo, let that night be barren. Let no joyful voice come in it.
- Let them curse it who curse the day, who are ready to rouse up leviathan.
- Let the stars of the twilight of it be dark. Let it look for light, but have none, nor let it behold the eyelids of the morning.
- Because it did not shut up the doors of my [mother's] womb, nor hide trouble from my eyes.
- Why did I not die from the womb? Why did I not give up the spirit when my mother bore me?
- Why did the knees receive me? Or why the breast, that I should suck?
- For now I should have lain down and been quiet. I should have slept. Then I would have been at rest
- with kings and counselors of the earth, who built waste places for themselves,
- or with rulers who had gold, who filled their houses with silver.
- Or I should have been as a hidden untimely birth, as infants that never saw light.
- There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest.
- There the prisoners are at ease together. They do not hear the voice of the taskmaster.
- The small and the great are there. And the servant is free from his master.
- Why is light given to him who is in misery, and life to the bitter in soul,
- who long for death, but it comes not, and dig for it more than for hid treasures,
- who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they can find the grave?
- [Why is light given] to a man whose way is hid, and whom God has hedged in?
- For my sighing comes before I eat, and my groanings are poured out like water.
- For the thing which I fear comes upon me, and that which I am afraid of comes to me.
- I am not at ease, nor am I quiet, neither have I rest, but trouble comes.