Overview
Breaking seven days of silence, Job erupts in anguished lament — cursing the day of his birth, longing for the undifferentiated rest of Sheol, and crying out against a life of unrelenting suffering — in a torrent of grief that the Catholic tradition reads not as despair or blasphemy but as radical honesty before a God who enters into, rather than merely observes, human anguish.
Passages
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Job 3
1After this Job opened his mouth, and cursed the day of his birth. 2Job answered:
3“Let the day perish in which I was born, the night which said, ‘There is a boy conceived.’
4Let that day be darkness. Don’t let God from above seek for it, neither let the light shine on it.
5Let darkness and the shadow of death claim it for their own. Let a cloud dwell on it. Let all that makes the day black terrify it.
6As for that night, let thick darkness seize on it. Let it not rejoice among the days of the year. Let it not come into the number of the months.
7Behold, let that night be barren. Let no joyful voice come therein.
8Let them curse it who curse the day, who are ready to rouse up leviathan.
9Let the stars of its twilight be dark. Let it look for light, but have none, neither let it see the eyelids of the morning,
10because it didn’t shut up the doors of my mother’s womb, nor did it hide trouble from my eyes.
11“Why didn’t I die from the womb? Why didn’t I give up the spirit when my mother bore me?
12Why did the knees receive me? Or why the breast, that I should nurse?
13For now I should have lain down and been quiet. I should have slept, then I would have been at rest,
14with kings and counselors of the earth, who built up waste places for themselves;
15or with princes who had gold, who filled their houses with silver;
16or as a hidden untimely birth I had not been, as infants who never saw light.
17There the wicked cease from troubling. There the weary are at rest.
18There the prisoners are at ease together. They don’t hear the voice of the taskmaster.
19The small and the great are there. The servant is free from his master.
20“Why is light given to him who is in misery, life to the bitter in soul,
21who long for death, but it doesn’t come; and dig for it more than for hidden treasures,
22who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad, when they can find the grave?
23Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in?
24For my sighing comes before I eat. My groanings are poured out like water.
25For the thing which I fear comes on me, that which I am afraid of comes to me.
26I am not at ease, neither am I quiet, neither do I have rest; but trouble comes.”