Job 3  American Standard Version

² And Job answered and said:
³ Let the day perish wherein I was born,
And the night which said, There is a man-child conceived.
⁴ Let that day be darkness;
Let not God from above seek for it,
Neither let the light shine upon it.
⁵ Let darkness and ^[a]the shadow of death claim it for their own;
Let a cloud dwell upon it;
Let all that maketh black the day terrify it.
⁶ 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.
⁷ Lo, let that night be ^[b]barren;
Let no joyful voice come therein.
⁸ Let them curse it that curse the day,
Who are ^[c]ready to rouse up leviathan.
⁹ Let 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:
¹⁰ Because it shut not up the doors of my mother’s womb,
Nor hid trouble from mine eyes.
¹¹ Why died I not from the womb?
Why did I not give up the ghost when my mother bare me?
¹² Why did the knees receive me?
Or why the breasts, that I should suck?
¹³ For now should I have lain down and been quiet;
I should have slept; then had I been at rest,
¹⁴ With kings and counsellors of the earth,
Who ^[d]built up waste places for themselves;
¹⁵ Or with princes that had gold,
Who filled their houses with silver:
¹⁶ Or as a hidden untimely birth I had not been,
As infants that never saw light.
¹⁷ There the wicked cease from ^[e]troubling;
And there the weary are at rest.
¹⁸ There the prisoners are at ease together;
They hear not the voice of the taskmaster.
¹⁹ The small and the great are there:
And the servant is free from his master.

²⁰ Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery,
And life unto the bitter in soul;
²¹ Who ^[f]long for death, but it cometh not,
And dig for it more than for hid treasures;
²² Who rejoice ^[g]exceedingly,
And are glad, when they can find the grave?
²³ Why is light given to a man whose way is hid,
And whom God hath hedged in?
²⁴ For my sighing cometh ^[h]before I eat,
And my ^[i]groanings are poured out like water.
²⁵ For ^[j]the thing which I fear cometh upon me,
And that which I am afraid of cometh unto me.
²⁶ I ^[k]am not at ease, neither am I quiet, neither have I rest;
But trouble cometh.