✧After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day. ✧2And Job answered and said: ✧3Let the day perish wherein I was born, And the night which said, There is a man-child conceived. ✧4Let that day be darkness; Let not God from above seek for it, Neither let the light shine upon it. ✧5Let 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. ✧6As 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. ✧7Lo, let that night be barren; Let no joyful voice come therein. ✧8Let them curse it that curse the day, Who are ready to rouse up leviathan. ✧9Let 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: ✧10Because it shut not up the doors of my [mother’s] womb, Nor hid trouble from mine eyes. ✧11Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when my mother bare me? ✧12Why did the knees receive me? Or why the breasts, that I should suck? ✧13For now should I have lain down and been quiet; I should have slept; then had I been at rest, ✧14With kings and counsellors of the earth, Who built up waste places for themselves; ✧15Or with princes that had gold, Who filled their houses with silver: ✧16Or as a hidden untimely birth I had not been, As infants that never saw light. ✧17There the wicked cease from troubling; And there the weary are at rest. ✧18There the prisoners are at ease together; They hear not the voice of the taskmaster. ✧19The small and the great are there: And the servant is free from his master. ✧20Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, And life unto the bitter in soul; ✧21Who long for death, but it cometh not, And dig for it more than for hid treasures; ✧22Who 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 in? ✧24For my sighing cometh before I eat, And my groanings are poured out like water. ✧25For the thing which I fear cometh upon me, And that which I am afraid of cometh unto me. ✧26I am not at ease, neither am I quiet, neither have I rest; But trouble cometh.
American Standard Version (ASV). American Standard Version (1901). Public domain.