Job 3

Key Terms

Translator Notes

1. This verse is prose — it is the narrator's introduction to the poem that follows. The poetry begins in verse 3. The narrator uses the verb qillel without judgment: there is no editorial verdict here as there was in 1:22 and 2:10. The narrator simply reports what Job does. The absence of any 'Job did not sin' statement is conspicuous.

Translator Notes

1. The formula vayyaan Iyov vayyomar ('Job answered and said') is the standard introduction for speech in the dialogue sections of the book. The verb anah ('answered') does not necessarily imply a response to someone else's words — it can simply mean 'spoke up, raised one's voice.' Job is answering the silence, answering his own suffering, answering the unanswerable.

Translator Notes

1. The verb yovad (Qal jussive of avad, 'to perish') is a wish for total destruction — the day should cease to exist, not merely be forgotten. The personification of the night as speaking (amar) gives the night agency in the act of creation, which Job now wants revoked. The parallelism between day/birth and night/conception is the poem's structural spine: what follows will alternate between cursing the day and cursing the night.

Key Terms

Translator Notes

1. The verb darash ('to seek, to inquire') applied to God seeking a day suggests that God's attention sustains creation — if God stops seeking a day, it ceases to exist in any meaningful sense. The word neharah is a poetic synonym for light, possibly with connotations of streaming or flooding light. Job wants that stream cut off.

Translator Notes

1. The verb yig'aluhu ('let them redeem/claim it') from ga'al is striking — the same root used for the kinsman-redeemer (go'el). Job wants darkness to redeem the day, to claim it as its own, to take possession of it. The word tsalmaveth (traditionally 'shadow of death') may be a compound of tsel ('shadow') and maveth ('death'), or it may derive from tsalmut ('deep darkness'). Either way, it describes the densest, most impenetrable darkness imaginable.
2. The phrase kimrirei yom ('like the bitternesses of day' or 'like day-darkeners') is textually uncertain. It may refer to eclipses, storms, or demonic forces that darken the day. The verb yeva'atuhu ('let them terrify it') personifies the day as something that can experience terror — Job wants the day itself to know fear.

Translator Notes

1. Job now turns from the day of birth to the night of conception. The word ofel ('thick darkness, gloom') is the deepest form of darkness — darker than choshekh. The verb yiqqachehu ('let it seize it') personifies darkness as a predator taking the night captive. The phrase al yichad bimei shanah ('let it not rejoice among the days of the year') uses the verb chadah ('to rejoice') — the night should be excluded from the calendar's celebration of time. It should not be counted (al yavo bemispar yerachim, 'let it not come into the number of months'). Job wants this night stricken from the record of time itself.

Translator Notes

1. The word galmud ('barren, desolate, solitary') describes a night stripped of all fruitfulness. Given that this is the night of conception, the word barren is deliberately ironic — Job wants the night that produced him to be incapable of producing anything. The word renanah ('cry of joy, shout of gladness') refers to the celebratory cry that would greet a birth announcement. Job wants silence where there was joy.

Translator Notes

1. The orerey yom ('cursers of the day') are sorcerers or enchanters who possess the power to curse specific days — to make them unlucky or to blot them from existence. The reference to Leviathan (livyatan) is extraordinary: Leviathan is the primordial sea monster of chaos, the embodiment of cosmic disorder (see Psalm 74:14, Isaiah 27:1). Those who can rouse Leviathan are practitioners of anti-creation magic — they can awaken the forces that existed before God imposed order. Job summons these cosmic anarchists to curse the night of his conception. He is calling on the powers of chaos to unmake one moment in time.

Translator Notes

1. Job curses the stars of the night's twilight — nishpo ('its twilight, its dusk') — calling for them to be extinguished. Then the night is personified as waiting for dawn: yeqav le-or va-ayin ('let it hope for light, but there be none'). The night should wait endlessly for a morning that never comes. The final image — al yir'eh be-af'appei shachar ('let it not see the eyelids of the dawn') — is one of the most beautiful in Hebrew poetry. The dawn has eyelids: the first rays of light are imagined as eyes opening. Job wants those eyes to stay shut. He wants permanent night, permanent pre-creation darkness, an eternal state before light existed.
2. The metaphor af'appei shachar ('eyelids of the dawn') personifies morning as a face whose eyes open to bring light. This image was famous enough to be borrowed by later poets and will be echoed in Job 41:10 [41:18 in English], where Leviathan's eyes are described with the same word.

Translator Notes

1. Job gives the reason for his curse: ki lo sagar daltei vitni ('because it did not close the doors of my womb/belly'). The 'doors of the womb' (daltei veten) are an image of birth as passage through a gate — and Job wishes that gate had remained shut. The verb sagar ('to close, to shut') is the same verb used in 1:10 for God's protective hedge and in 1:5-6 for God closing Hannah's womb in 1 Samuel. If the womb had stayed closed, Job would never have been born, and amal ('toil, suffering, misery') would have been hidden from his eyes. The word amal is one of Job's key terms for the human condition: not mere pain but laborious, grinding suffering that defines existence.

Translator Notes

1. The poem shifts from cursing the past to questioning why existence continued. The word lammah ('why?') will become Job's signature word throughout the dialogues. He asks why death did not take him immediately — merechem amut ('from the womb I should have died'). The verb eg'va ('I should have expired') from gava means to breathe one's last, to expire — a quiet, final cessation. Job is not asking for violent death but for the simplest possible non-existence: he should have stopped breathing the moment he started.

Translator Notes

1. The knees (birkayim) that received the newborn refer to the ancient practice of placing a newborn on the father's or mother's knees as an act of acceptance and legitimation (Genesis 50:23). The breasts (shadayim) that nursed him sustained his life. Job wishes both had been denied — that no one had received him at birth and no one had fed him. Every human kindness that kept him alive now feels like a cruelty because it extended an existence that has become unbearable.

Translator Notes

1. The poem pivots to a vision of death as rest. Three verbs describe the peace Job imagines: shakhavti ('I would lie down'), eshqot ('I would be quiet'), yashantti ('I would sleep'). Then the conclusion: az yanuach li ('then there would be rest for me'). The verb nuach ('to rest') is the same root from which Noah's name derives and the same verb used for God's rest on the seventh day (Genesis 2:2). Death, for Job, is the sabbath he has been denied in life.

Translator Notes

1. If Job had died at birth, he would now lie with kings and counselors — the great ones of the earth who built choravot ('ruins, desolate places'). The word choravot is ambiguous: it could mean they built monuments that are now ruins, or they built (restored) places that were already in ruins, or — most hauntingly — all human building ends in ruins. Death is the great equalizer: the builder and the stillborn lie in the same ground.

Translator Notes

1. The parallelism continues: princes (sarim) with gold and silver — the wealthiest humans imaginable — now lie in the same stillness as the stillborn child. Their treasure (zahav, 'gold'; kesef, 'silver') could not purchase exemption from death. Job, who was himself 'the greatest of all the people of the east' (1:3), recognizes that his former wealth and the wealth of kings all end in the same silent ground.

Translator Notes

1. The nefel tamun ('hidden miscarriage/stillborn') is a child that never reached life outside the womb — buried immediately, never seen, never named. Job envies this: lo ehyeh ('I would not be'). The phrase lo ra'u or ('they did not see light') returns to the poem's central image: or ('light') as the marker of existence. Those who never see light never enter the world of suffering. Light, which in Genesis is the first good gift, is here the gateway to pain.

Translator Notes

1. The word sham ('there') refers to Sheol, the realm of the dead. In death, the resha'im ('wicked') stop their rogez ('raging, turmoil, agitation') — they can no longer cause harm. And the yegi'ei khoach ('those exhausted in strength') find rest (yanuchu, from nuach). The verse presents death as pure cessation: no more violence from the wicked, no more exhaustion for the spent. Job does not describe an afterlife — he describes an end, a stopping, a silence.

Translator Notes

1. The asirim ('prisoners, those bound') find sha'anan ('ease, tranquility') in death. The qol noges ('voice of the taskmaster/oppressor') — the voice that drove them to forced labor — falls silent. The word noges is the same word used for the Egyptian taskmasters in Exodus 3:7 and 5:6. Death is liberation from every form of bondage. The social hierarchies of the living world dissolve.

Translator Notes

1. The merism qaton ve-gadol ('small and great') encompasses all of humanity — the insignificant and the powerful are the same in death. The final line — ve-eved chofshi me-adonav ('and the slave is free from his master') — is one of the most poignant in the poem. The word chofshi ('free, released') is the legal term for emancipation. Death is the manumission document that every slave eventually receives. The verse completes Job's vision of Sheol as the great equalizer: there are no classes, no hierarchies, no oppression, no masters — only rest.

Translator Notes

1. The poem shifts from longing for personal non-existence to a universal question: lammah yitten le-amel or ('why does He give light to the sufferer?'). The subject 'He' is unnamed — it can only be God. Light (or) here means existence itself, the gift of being alive. Job asks why God gives the gift of existence to those for whom existence is torment. The parallel phrase chayyim le-marei nafesh ('life to the bitter of soul') deepens the question: why does God sustain the lives of those whose innermost selves (nefesh) are saturated with bitterness?

Translator Notes

1. The image is startling: those who suffer hamechakkim lammavet ('wait eagerly for death') and dig for it (vayyachperuhu) as though it were matmonim ('hidden treasure, buried wealth'). The verb chaphar ('to dig') and the noun matmon ('treasure, something hidden in the ground') create the image of someone excavating the earth desperately searching for the most precious thing imaginable — and that thing is death. Where treasure-seekers dig for gold, Job and those like him dig for the end of consciousness.

Translator Notes

1. The hassemechim elei gil ('those rejoicing unto exultation') describes the most intense form of human happiness — and its object is the grave (qaver). The verb yasisu ('they are glad') reinforces the paradox: the discovery of death produces joy. This is not suicidal despair in the modern clinical sense — it is a theological protest. Job is describing people for whom life has become so unbearable that death is the only relief God has left them, and they greet it with the joy that should accompany a wedding or a harvest.

Translator Notes

1. This verse contains one of the book's most bitter ironies. The verb vayyasekh ('He has hedged') uses a form of sakakh ('to hedge, to fence in') — the same root the Adversary used in 1:10 when he complained that God had put a protective hedge (sakta) around Job. There, the hedge was protection; here, it is imprisonment. God's fence, which once kept harm out, now keeps Job trapped inside his suffering. The word nistorah ('hidden') means Job cannot see his own path — he is lost, and the God who hid his way is the same God who hedged him in. Protection has become confinement. Providence has become a cage.

Translator Notes

1. Job's anchati ('my sighing, my groaning') comes lifnei lachmi ('before my bread') — before he can eat, grief overtakes him. This echoes the description of Hannah in 1 Samuel 1:7, who wept and could not eat. The parallel line — vayyittekhu khammayim sha'agotai ('my roarings pour out like water') — uses the powerful word sha'agah ('roaring'), typically used for lions (Amos 3:8). Job's grief is not quiet weeping but the roar of an animal in agony, and it flows like water — unceasingly, uncontrollably.

Translator Notes

1. The cognate accusative pachad pachad'ti ('a dread I have dreaded') intensifies the fear — this is not casual worry but the deepest terror Job could imagine. The verb ye'etayeni ('it has come upon me') and yavo li ('it has come to me') describe the feared thing arriving, materializing, becoming real. This verse retroactively reveals that Job's pre-disaster piety (offering sacrifices for his children's possible sins in 1:5) was driven partly by fear. His worst nightmare has happened. The irony is that his fear of God (yirat Elohim, 1:1) coexisted with a fear that God might not protect him — and the second fear has been confirmed.

Translator Notes

1. The poem ends with three negated verbs: lo shalavti ('I have no ease'), lo shaqat'ti ('I have no quiet'), lo nach'ti ('I have no rest'). These three words — shalvah, sheqet, nuach — are precisely the three states Job longed for in death (verse 13: lie down, be quiet, rest). What the dead possess, the living Job is denied. And then the final word: vayyavo rogez ('and turmoil comes'). The word rogez ('agitation, turmoil, rage') is the same word used in verse 17 for what the wicked cease doing in Sheol. The wicked find peace in death; Job finds only rogez in life. The poem ends not with resolution but with ongoing disturbance — the silence is broken, the lament is launched, and the dialogue that will consume the next thirty-five chapters has begun.