Job 3:8

These verses come straight after the opening chapters of the book (Job 1–2), where Job loses his wealth and his children and is then struck with painful boils. Through it all he worships. “The LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD,” he says (Job 1:21). When his wife tells him to “curse God, and die” (Job 2:9), he answers, “shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” (Job 2:10). Then Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar come to mourn with him, and they sit beside him in silence for seven days and seven nights (Job 2:13).

“After this” looks back over that whole week. Job’s lament is the fruit of long suffering borne in silence, and it has been building all that time. A seven-day mourning was a known custom among the men of the east, and the friends’ silent company was a real kindness, perhaps the kindest thing they did for Job before their long speeches began.

“Opened Job his mouth” uses pâthach, to open wide. After a week without a word, the phrase marks a weighty moment, when the grief Job has held inside comes out. Verse 2 then opens his speech in the usual Hebrew way, “And Job spake, and said”. The first verb, ʻânâh, means to answer or respond, whether to words or to a situation. Nobody has put a question to Job, so he is answering what has happened to him: his losses, his pain and the silent friends beside him. The second verb, ʼâmar, is the everyday word for saying, and it brings in the words that follow.

Here the book moves from a prose story to poetry. Job’s lament fills Job 3, and it opens the long debate with his friends in Job 4–37 about suffering, righteousness and the justice of God. We know what Job is unaware of. In heaven Satan had claimed that Job would curse God to his face (Job 1:11). Job knows only his losses and his pain, and what he says next comes out of that darkness.

“And cursed his day.” The verb is qâlal, whose range runs from being light, swift or of little account to being eased, and in the form used here it means to curse. “His day” is the day he was born. The word yôwm means a day or a span of time, and verse 3 names the day Job means: “Let the day perish wherein I was born.”

“Perish” is ʼâbad, to wander away or be lost, and so to perish. Job wishes his birthday lost, gone from time altogether. Then he reaches back further, to “the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.” The verb hârâh means to conceive or become pregnant, and the KJV elsewhere renders it “with child”. The noun geber properly means a valiant man and generally a man or simply a person, and in poetry it often names a human being in his weakness and mortality. In the households of the east the news of a son was a great joy, the promise that the family line would go on, and that glad news is what Job now wishes undone. The day of his birth was public and seen by all, while the night of his conception was hidden, and by cursing both Job wishes away his whole life from its first beginning.

Job is in the company of other sufferers in Scripture here. Jeremiah, persecuted for his message, also cursed the day of his birth (Jeremiah 20:14–18). Ecclesiastes counts the dead, and those yet unborn, better off than the living who see the evil done under the sun (Ecclesiastes 4:2–3), and it calls the day of death better than the day of one’s birth (Ecclesiastes 7:1–2).

Job’s first wish for the day, “Let that day be darkness”, turns around the first words God speaks in the Bible. At creation darkness lay over the deep, and God said, “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:2–3). Job asks for his day to go back into the dark. His word, chôshek, is the darkness of Genesis 1:2, and Scripture also uses it for calamity and judgment, as in the plague of darkness on Egypt (Exodus 10:21–23).

“Let not God regard it from above” uses dârash, to seek, inquire of, require or care for. “From above” is God in heaven, overseeing all he has made. Job asks that God leave that one day unsought and uncared for, so that it drops out of his notice.

“Neither let the light shine upon it” uses nᵉhârâh, daylight, from a root meaning to shine. Light in Scripture goes with life, joy and God’s favour, so Job is asking that his day be stripped of all of them. He speaks to and about the day as if it could hear him, and in that way his grief finds words while his curse stays on the day.

Verse 6 turns to the night of conception from verse 3. “Let darkness seize upon it” uses ʼôphel, darkness or gloom, a word often joined with calamity, suffering and death, and lâqach, the common verb to take. Job wants the gloom to take that night and carry it off.

“Let it not be joined unto the days of the year.” The verb, châdâh, usually means to rejoice, and it can also mean to be joined, which is how the KJV reads it here. People in the east kept careful count of days, months and years, for harvests, feasts and the life of a family. Job asks that his night be left out of that count, “let it not come into the number of the months”, so that it drops out of the year and out of memory.

Verse 7 opens with “Lo”, a word that calls for attention. “Let that night be solitary” uses galmûwd, barren, sterile or desolate. The night, layil, is the time of darkness between sunset and sunrise, and elsewhere it can picture a season of trouble. Job wishes that night barren, empty of new life, and above all empty of him.

“Let no joyful voice come therein.” The noun rᵉnânâh is a shout of joy or a song. A son’s birth was welcomed with feasting, singing and music, and Job wishes all of it silenced. The night that once rang with gladness he would leave empty and alone, as alone as he now feels.

Job calls on the people whose work is cursing days to curse his day as well, and on those who are ready to rouse Leviathan. Where the KJV reads “their mourning”, the Hebrew word is livyâthân, Leviathan, the serpent or great sea monster. That is what the word means in every place it stands, Job 3:8 included, and “mourning” is only how the KJV renders it here. Scripture shows Leviathan as a creature of the sea that God alone can subdue. One psalm praises God’s defeat of Leviathan (Psalm 74:14), and Isaiah foretells the LORD’s victory over him (Isaiah 27:1). He stands for untamed power and disorder.

“Ready” is ʻâthîyd, prepared, and “raise up” is ʻûwr, to wake or rouse. So Job means those prepared to wake Leviathan. People ask who “them that curse the day” are. They are most likely people thought to have power to bring evil on a day by their words, such as the sorcerers and diviners of the nations around. Their cursing is ʼârar, to execrate or curse bitterly, a different verb from the qâlal of verse 1, though both are “curse” in English. Job reaches for anyone who might make his day’s undoing sure, and he wants it swallowed by the forces of disorder, so that his private grief now speaks in terms of the whole creation.

“Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark.” The Hebrew, kôwkĕbê nišpô, is “the stars of its twilight”, from the word for star and nesheph, twilight. Stars pierce the dark and give the night its beauty, and Job wishes even them put out. The verb châshak means to be dark or grow dark, and it stands here as a wish.

“Let it look for light, but have none.” Job pictures the night watching for ʼôwr, light, and waiting in vain. Scripture calls the LORD his people’s light (Psalm 27:1) and speaks of seeing light in God’s light (Psalm 36:9), and Job wishes the night of his conception shut away from light of every kind. The night’s hopeless watching is a picture of Job himself, looking for relief and finding none.

“Neither let it see the dawning of the day.” The Hebrew says “the eyelids of the dawn”, with ʻaphʻaph, an eyelash or a ray of morning, and shachar, the dawn. The dawn opens its eyes on a new day, and Job wants that night kept from seeing it. In Genesis 1 God divides light from darkness and every evening is followed by a morning, and Job asks for one night that stays dark for ever. The wish for death returns later in his speeches (Job 6:8–9).

Verse 10 gives the reason for every curse before it: “Because it shut not up the doors of my mother’s womb, nor hid sorrow from mine eyes.” The “it” is the night Job has been cursing. The verb çâgar means to shut, close or shut in, and deleth, door, is something that swings, from a root meaning to dangle. Job pictures his mother’s womb as a door that could have been shut and kept him from coming into the world.

“Sorrow” is ʻâmâl, toil and wearing effort, and so trouble and grief of body or mind. Job has seen it with his own eyes, in his losses and his sores, and he ties it to the plain fact that he was born. Had that night kept the door shut, his eyes would have been spared all of it. Here the whole question of the book comes into view, why a righteous man should suffer, and Job’s friends will spend chapter after chapter trying to answer it.

Job wished his day undone. Jesus, the sinless Son of God, went willingly into the day of his own suffering. In Gethsemane he prayed, “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matthew 26:39), and Hebrews says that in the days of his flesh he offered up prayers with strong crying and tears (Hebrews 5:7). Isaiah calls him “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). On the cross, as darkness came over the land and the sun was darkened (Luke 23:44–45), he cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). The Son of God himself brought his anguish to his Father in words.

Job’s suffering tested a righteous man, and Christ’s suffering was borne for the sins of others. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). He was made a curse for us (Galatians 3:13), and God made him to be sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in him (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Job called down the shadow of death on his day. Christ went into death itself and broke its power. By his death he set free those who were held all their lives by the fear of death (Hebrews 2:14–15), he triumphed over principalities and powers (Colossians 2:15), and in his resurrection death is swallowed up in victory (1 Corinthians 15:54–57).

Job asked that the light stay off his day. Christ is the life that is the light of men, shining in the darkness (John 1:4–5), the great light Isaiah promised to the people who walked in darkness (Isaiah 9:2). Luke tells of “the dayspring from on high” that has visited us “to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death” (Luke 1:78–79). Jesus says, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12). God has delivered his people from the power of darkness into the kingdom of his dear Son (Colossians 1:13) and called them out of darkness into his marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9).

Job wished to erase his beginning, and in Christ God gives a new one: “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17). He gives everlasting life (John 3:16) and life more abundantly (John 10:10), and he works all things together for good to those who love him (Romans 8:28). In his presence is fulness of joy (Psalm 16:11), and in the new heaven and new earth God will wipe away all tears, and death, sorrow, crying and pain will be gone (Revelation 21:1–4).

This passage gives us the words of a righteous man at the end of his strength, and God has kept them in Scripture. The faith of Job’s first two chapters was real, and so is the anguish of this one, and the book holds both together. Lament has its place in a life of faith, alongside the psalms of distress and the cries of the prophets, and God hears the darkest words his children bring to him.

The passage also shows what Job’s friends did well before they began to argue. For seven days they sat with him and kept silent, and that quiet company was the best comfort they gave him.

And it shows us the God of the night as well as the day. Job asked for darkness to swallow the night of his birth, and the God he cried to is the God who said “Let there be light”, who answered Job and restored him at the end of the book, and who sent his Son into the darkness of the cross and raised him again. Job’s words can be our words when the night is long, and his story shows that the night belongs to God.