1After 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 counselors 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 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,
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.