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 black the day 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 should I 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 have I rest;
• but trouble comes.”