Job 3:20

Wherefore? More simply, “Why?” This expression introduces the third stanza of Job’s lament. He has been meditating on the quiet serenity of death. Now his thoughts return to his own misery, and he repeats the age-old question, “Why?” The stanza is the picture of a man earnestly longing for death, but doomed to live on and on. The experience has its modern counterpart in the cancer sufferer who wastes away during long, agonizing, futile months before death ultimately provides release. Now, as then, the question is often asked, “Why?”

Light. See v. 16. Light seems to be used here as a figure of life.

Bitter in soul. Hebrew mare nephesh. The combination of these Hebrew words is variously translated: “angry” (Judges 18:25), “in bitterness of soul” (1 Samuel 1:10), “discontented” (1 Samuel 22:2), “soul [was] grieved” (1 Samuel 30:6), “chafed in [their] minds” (2 Samuel 17:8). The expression here is plural. Job is thinking, not alone of himself, but of other sufferers as well.