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.”