✧After 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.”