Job 3

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 3:1-26

Why is it important that we understand the literary form in which Job is written?

Who speaks the most in this bookJob or his friends? What could this suggest as to the problem of suffering?

What is a lament?

Why are the three friends all prepared for a psalm of penitence?

Job’s consolers only manage to intensify his anguish. Why?

What are the two subordinate themes that enter Job’s lament? Why?

There is only one ultimate answer to the question, If God loves me, why all this suffering and evil? What is it?

Job seems to have a short memory. Why curse the day of his birth? He had lived much longer in prosperity than pain.

Does Job consider suicide as an escape? Is suicide ever justified?

Even in Job’s selection there is an affirmation of God. Explain.

The word darkness is important in these verses. How is it used?

What is meant by asking that the night be barren? (Job 3:7)

Cursing is used in at least two ways. What are they?

What is Leviathan as used in verse eight?

What are the eyelids of the morning?

Why blame the night? Discuss.

Whose knees are involved in Job 3:12?

Why has man been preoccupied with the subject of death?

What is Sheol?

To what does the expression waste places in Job 3:14 refer?

Death is a great equalizer. Explain.

Show how God’s grace is seen in our forgetfulness.

Death offers welcome relief. Explain. Is this a present day attitude?

There is an indirect charge against God in Job 3:20. Why?

B.

CALAMITOUS COMFORTERELIPHAZ (Job 4:1, Job 5:27)

Job should not complain; the righteous will not be cut off (mild rebuke; Job 4:1-11).

TODAY’S ENGLISH VERSION

Job’s Complaint to God

3 Finally Job broke the silence and called down a curse on the day on which he had been born.

Job

2-3 God, put a curse on the day I was born;

put a curse on the night when I was conceived.

4 Turn that day into darkness, God;

never again remember that day; never again let light shine on it.

5 Make it a day of gloom and thick darkness;

cover it with clouds and blot out the sun.

6 Blot that night out of the year,

and never let it be counted again;

7 make it a barren, joyless night. 8 Tell the sorcerers to curse that day,

those who know how to command Leviathan.

9 Keep the morning star from shining;

give that night no hope of dawn.

10** **Curse that night for letting me be born,

for exposing me to grief and trouble.

11 I wish I had died in my mother’s womb,

or died the moment I was born.

12 Why did my mother hold me on her knees?

Why did she feed me at her breast?

13 If I had died then, I would be at rest now, 14 sleeping like the kings and rulers

who rebuilt ancient palaces.

15 Then I would be sleeping like princes

who filled their houses with gold and silver,

16 or sleeping like children born dead. 17 In the grave wicked men stop their evil,

and tired workmen rest at last.

18 Even prisoners enjoy peace,

free from shouts and harsh commands.

19 Everyone is there, great and small alike,

and slaves at last are free.

20 Why let men go on living in misery?

Why give light to men in grief?

21 They wait for death, but it never comes;

they prefer a grave to any treasure.

22 They are not happy till they are dead and buried; 23 God keeps their future hidden

and hems them in on every side.

24 Instead of eating, I mourn,

and I can never stop groaning;

25 everything I fear and dread comes true. 26 I have no peace, no rest, and my trouble never ends.

Job 3:1-10

THE MEANING OF SILENCE

Chapter s 314

I.

NO EXIT: HELL IS OTHER PEOPLESartre SPEECHES FULL OF SOUND AND FURY Job 3:1, Job 14:22

A.

WHY ME, LORD? (Job 3:1-26)

He curses his day. (Job 3:1-10)

TEXT 3:1-10

**3

After this opened Job his month, and coned his day. 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 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 barren;

Let no joyful voice come therein.

8

Let them curse it that curse the day,

Who are 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’Swomb,

Nor hid trouble from mine eyes.**

COMMENT 3:1-10

Job on Dover Beach?

The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl-’d. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar Retreating to the breath Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.

M. Arnold, Dover Beach

**Job 3:1-2**Why Me, Lord? Except for Job 3:1-2, the entire section from Job 3:1, Job 31:40 is in poetic form. This is important for understanding the text, as poetry is parallel in literary form, which means that each line is not necessarily a new thought. In between Job’s initial (chp. 3) and concluding (chps. 29-31) soliloquies, we encounter a series of alternate speeches by the three friends with Job’s response.[45] Eliphaz speaks first (chps. 4-5), after chp. 3, Zophar perhaps speaks last, before chps. 29-31. Thus, we are presented with nine speeches by Job’s friends alternating with eight responses from Job. The literary form is that of a lament, i.e., a prayer of petition in which Job appeals to God for a hearing, describes his destitution, anxieties, and attacks from his enemies, and asks God to break His silence and heal or explain his suffering. The three wise men attempt to console Job by entering in the lamentation. Each of the three consolers conveys his doctrine on retribution. Because of their concept of retribution, they come prepared to participate in a psalm of penitence, whereas Job cries out from the depth of his anguish in a psalm of innocence. Does suffering always imply guilt? Does a successful life always imply innocence?[46] Job’s consolers only manage to intensify his anguish. Here we are faced with the paradoxconsolers that are not consolers. One of the results of this fact is that two subordinate themes enter Job’s lament: (1) denunciation of enemies, and (2) his oath of exultation. As Job’s condition worsens, the consolers persist in claiming that they are merely pronouncing God’s judgment on Job. As a result, he includes God as one of his enemies, i.e., the nature of God as presented by his calamitous comforters. The central issue in Job’s trial is the nature of God, not the nature of suffering and evil. If God loves him, why all the suffering? The ultimate answer is available only in the resurrected Suffering Servant.[47] After this means after the seven days of silence (Genesis 15:14; Genesis 25:26). Job now breaks his silence as he opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. When he prospered, he perhaps never thought of such a response. Though Jeremiah (chp. Job 20:14-18) too cursed the day of his birth, he was mindful of the futility of cursing a past event. What will he do with the present? As with Job, he must face the present, but how and why? Many people in the twentieth century can identify with him. These verses are clearly the introduction to Job’s ensuing soliloquy.

[45] The textual problems in chps. 25-27 confront us with dilemmas regarding the last few speeches; note commentary regarding these matters. The conventional grouping of the speeches into three cycles might not represent the author’s style. [46] As America enters its third century, it is a most appropriate matter to consider. The American Dream has turned into a nightmare because most Americans share the doctrine of Job’s three friends, i.e., if we-’re successful, this means God is blessing our existence; if we are failures, we are not pleasing God, thus the presence of suffering. Biblically, much of the Bicentennial emphasis is heretical. We are Christians by vocation and Americans by *avocation.

[47]* A. Feuillet, L-’enigme de la souffrance et al response de Dieu, Dieu vivant, 17 (1950), 77-91; and D. Barthelemy, Dieu meconnu par le vieil homme, Job, Vie spirituelle, 105 (1961), 445-63.

**Job 3:3Job is so embittered that he wishes that life had never begun. Like Schopenhauer and Camus, Job is suggesting that suicide is the answer to unrelenting suffering. There is not one word suggesting this response as solution to Job’s plight. But why not? Only if there is a God to whom we will give account because neither suffering nor death is our ultimate concern. Job telescopes the night of conception and day of birth. The night is personified with power to know the sex of the child conceived. In the Near East, the news of the birth of a son is a momentous event. Job even curses the man who brought the news of his birth to his father. Note that Job does not include direct petition for relief but begins his soliloquy with the most radical assertion of his misery, utterly rejecting life itself. Other parallels, such as Jeremiah 20:14-18; 1 Kings 19:4; Jonah 4:3-8, reveal the realism of the biblical record.[48] Each in his own way denies that the life that God has given him is good, and would have preferred not to have received it from him. Even in this rejection, there is affirmation of belief in God as creative source of life.[49] Affirmation in the Midst of Resentment! The imagery conceives God as summoning the days to take their place as their turn comes. Even in Job’s denial, God is indispensable. If He can control the days, why not evil? Job, like others, wants darkness at noon. The good things in his life prior to his suffering did not produce such a response. All sunshine makes the desert.

[48] The differences between the LXX and M.T. are examined by Dhorme, Job, pp. 24ff; Pope, Job, p. 28; and W. B. Stevenson, Critical Notes on the Hebrew Text of the Poem of Job, 1951.

[49] After western man moves into the 19th and 20th scientific revolutions and is less committed to Christian theism, we are confronted with The Death of God from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra to Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz.

**Job 3:4**Our limited English vocabulary for darkness makes translation difficult in Job 3:4-6. Different words for darkness express everything that is mysterious and evil (Job 12:25; Exodus 20:21; Isaiah 5:20; Psalms 82:5; and see also Matthew 5:23).

**Job 3:5**Our text (A.V.) translates salmawet as the shadow of death. If the older view is correct, i.e., that the word is a compound word from shadow and death, then the translation is sound; but more recent lexicography prefers salmut as the reading, thus the root for dark. May the day be eclipsed (M.T. kimrire yom) meaning like bitterness of the day. The word is used in the context where there is no thought of deathAmo 5:9; Job 28:3.[50]

[50] See discussion by Dhorme, Job, pp. 26ff; D. W. Thomas, Journal of Semitic Studies, VII, 1962, 191ff, who argues for the salmawet reading.

**Job 3:6**Let thick darkness seize it in the sense of claim[51] it for its own.

[51] See N. H. Snaith’s discussion of this root in Annual of Leeds University Oriental Society, III, 1963, 60ff.

**Job 3:7**Job asks that the night be barren, (Hebrew galmud), stony or unproductive. The word is used in Isaiah 49:21 for childlessness, i.e., barren. May the night never again see offspring, so that no one else experiences the misery known by Job. May the night be sterile, then surely suffering will cease.[52]

[52] For the magnificent witness of a contemporary sufferer, read Corrie Ten Boom, Tramp for The Lord and The Hiding Place (New Jersey: Spire, Revell, pbs., 1976 printing.)

**Job 3:8**Out of his resentful heart comes only cursing. CurseCurse! Here we have two different Hebrew words, both different from the one used in Job 3:1. Speiser has demonstrated that the word means to cast a spell on.[53] Job calls for a professional curser, i.e., those who are skilled to rouse up Leviathan, (Hebrew liwyah, wreath, meaning something coiled). There has been much discussion concerning the supposed mythological allusion since Gunkel published his Schopfung und Chaos, 1895 (see esp. pp. 59-61), but the text makes perfectly good sense without any such origin for its imagery.[54]

[53] E. H. Speiser, Journal of American Oriental Society, LXXX, 1960, 198ff; see also the Balaam account in Numbers 22-24 for expert in cursing or blessing.

[54] See W. F. Albright, Journal of Biblical Literature, LVII, 1938, 227, and his arguments for repointing yom-day, toyam-sea. But this is unnecessary; the text makes perfectly good sense without it.

**Job 3:9**The word nesep means twilight, either the morning as here and Job 7:4 or evening twilight as in Job 24:15 and Proverbs 7:9. The reference here is surely to the morning stars Mercury and Venus. If they had remained dark, Job’s day would not have come. Without the light of the dawn, he would not be able to see[55] the new day.

[55] For the discussion concerning the Hebrew -ap appayim, see Mitchell Dahood, Psalms, Vol. III, note on Psalms 132:4 where he cites a Qumran text 4Q184.-13 in support of eyes instead of eyelids in the above verse; also Dhorme’s Job, pp. 29ff modification of the text is unnecessary.

**Job 3:10**The A. V. correctly sees reference to Job’s mother’s womb from the literal Hebrew which says my womb, i.e., the womb from which I came. The night did not prevent the womb from conceiving, nor hid trouble, i.e., toil, sorrow and suffering from Job. Now the sufferer turns from God to himself, and a new factor enters Job’s complaint. The query why in Job 3:11-12, and again in Job 3:20, is a crucial new development.

Job 3:11-19

2. Asks why he was born (Job 3:11-19)

TEXT 3:11-19

**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 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 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.**

COMMENT 3:11-19

**Job 3:11**A.V. is a literal rendering of the Hebrew and means at birth, Job 10:18-19.[56]

[56] M. Dahood, Biblica, 1963, p. 205. Job 3:11-16 present a problem of chronology. Some of the verses do not seem to follow, egs. 16 does not follow naturally from IS. See Dhorme, Job, pp. 31ff.

**Job 3:12**Perhaps the knees refers to the father receiving the child as his ownGen 50:23 and Eccl. 15:2a. But both Dhorme and Buttenwieser interpret the phrase to mean the mother’s knees as receiving the child to nurse it.

**Job 3:13**Job is now preoccupied with death, as is contemporary man. His measure of misery is that death would be better. Since Elizabeth K. Ross published her Death and Dying, there has been an epidemic of literature on the phenomenon of death. Note that throughout this Jobian soliloquy there has been no intimation of Job taking his own life. Hebrew eschatology maintained that Sheol is not necessarily a place of victory over death. Only when Job knows that his vindicator lives does he resolve his existential crisis. His sickness is thennot unto death. For references to Sheol in Job read Job 3:19; Job 7:9; Job 10:12 ff; Job 14:10 ff; Job 14:21-22; Job 17:16.

**Job 3:14**Though the Hebrew could mean rebuilt ruins, (A.V. build up, i.e., rebuild), it makes little sense in this passage. Kings do not build among ruins. Efforts at repointing the text fare no better. Perhaps the meaning is that suggested by Rowley who build for themselves the ruins. Nothing lasts forever.

**Job 3:15**Great kings were prosperous, but they, too, died. Rich and poor alike are leveled in death. If equality is unavailable in life, it is a virtue shared by all in death.

**Job 3:16**Job’s present misery blots out all the happy memories of the good years. We could not bear to carry every hurt (or joy) forever, so God’s grace is involved in our forgetfulness.

**Job 3:17**In Sheol we are not troubled, or as the text says, we cease from agitating ourselves. The same word is rendered rage of horses in Job 39:24 and rumbling of thunder in Job 37:2.

**Job 3:18**Even slaves suffer less than does Job. Captives who are in forced labor and are brutally treated are more at ease than Job. Job in Auschwitz? The hard Egyptian taskmaster (used in Exodus 3:7; Exodus 5:6 of the Egyptian taskmasters over the Hebrew slaves) left a lasting effect on Israel’s memory; as a result both Old and New Testaments employ in vital theological sections, The Exodus Motif.

**Job 3:19**In Sheol everyone is equal. The slave (servant) is free.[57]

[57] I. Mendelsohn, Bulletin of American Society Oriental Research, 83 (1941), 36-9, has shown that the root significance of this important wordhopsiis free proletarian or tenant farmer; and E. R. Lacheman, ibid, 86, 1942, shows that in the Nuzi tablets this word means a semi-free man.

Job 3:20-26

3. And why he should go on living (Job 3:20-26)

TEXT 3:20-26

**20 Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery,

And life unto the bitter in soul;

21 Who long for death, but it cometh not,

And dig for it more than for hid treasures;

22 Who rejoice 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 hi?

24 For my sighing cometh before I eat,

And my groanings are poured out like water.

25 For the thing which I fear cometh upon me,

And that which I am afraid of cometh unto me.

26 I am not at ease, neither am I quiet, neither have I rest;

But trouble cometh.**

COMMENT 3:20-26

**Job 3:20**Though the verb in the Hebrew text should be translated actively, i.e., gives, the versions construe the verb to be passive. The omission of the subject may be due to the reluctance to charge God directly (Job 3:23 provides an implied subject). But under the attack of his three consolers, Job later charges God directly. Here light is life. The bitter in soul is plural, thus Job has reference to all those who suffer, not only himself. So, he clearly identifies himself with the fellowship of suffering (1 Samuel 1:10; 2 Samuel 17:8).

**Job 3:21**In Hosea 6:9 the same verb used here means lying in ambush. The term who long for death expresses Job’s eagerness for death. Buried treasure creates its own fever to dominate all searchers. Even the rumor of treasure creates almost uncontrolled excitement. This is the kind of frenzied search for death which is enslaving Job.

**Job 3:22**Job searches beyond measure, literally to the point of exultation for the place to house his body racked with excruciating pain. The grave would also free his agonizing soul. Spiritual hurt is always more painful than physical malady.

**Job 3:23**Why is life (light) given when the way of fulfillment is hidden?[58] Bewilderment intensifies because he cannot see any way out. Whom God has hedged in in a restrictive sense. The same verb hedge appears in Job 1:10 in the conversation of Satan, when he said that God has put a protective hedge about Job.

[58] This is the thesis of Kafka’s The Castle: There is no way, what appears to be the way is only wavering. The theme is that of a man who has been invited to the castle of the prince-king, but he can only look from afar; he can never arrive. Deep despair is inevitable.

**Job 3:24**The first clause makes little sense. The phrase before I eat in the A.V. is literally in Hebrew as or like my bread[59] (see 1 Samuel 1:16 and Psalms 42:3). The word translated my groanings is used of the roaring of the lion, and here emphasizes Job’s loud cries.

[59] For examination of the meaning of this rare word, see G. R. Driver, Jewish Quarterly Review, XXVIII, 1937-8, 121ff. Some needlessly omit the verse because of difficulty in attaining the meaning of this word.

**Job 3:25**The torturous power of fear is actively controlling Job’s imagination. What new evil will befall him next? Why make a gift that is a painful burden to the recipient? (The Jerome Biblical Commentary, Job, p. 515).[60]

[60] Jesus said of Judas, It would have been better for that man if he had not been own. Matthew 26:24. See my essay, The Nature of Gifts, in The Christian Standard; and P. Tournier’s Gifts. Many gifts are given for the purpose of domination, or to get something in return. Is that what God has done with His gift of life?

**Job 3:26**Continual agony (same word as in Job 3:10; Job 3:20). The patient submissiveness of the Prologue has turned to bitter complaint throughout this soliloquy. But still Job has not cursed God! Surrounded by trouble, drowned by trouble, agitation keeps coming. Will it ever stop? What does it all mean? Why me, Lord? Note that Job does not merely ask why? He asks Why me?