Explore the Bible Online

Job 3:3-6

King James Version (KJV)

“In our prayers we talk to God, in our Bible study God talks to us, and we had better let God do most of the talking.”
— D.L. Moody

Scripture focus

3. Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night [in which] it was said, There is a man child conceived. 4. Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it. 5. Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it. 6. [As for] that night, let darkness seize upon it; let it not be joined unto the days of the year, let it not come into the number of the months.

Job 3:3-6 — KJV

Commentary

Commentary on Job 3:3

Theological / Devotional

Let the day perish. A poetic way of saying, “I wish I had never been born.” “Day” is here personified.

The night. “Night” is also personified. A simpler rendering would be “the night which said” (see RSV).

Man child. Heb. geber, “a man,” emphasized as being strong, distinguished from women and children. It is not the ordinary word to designate the male sex, which would be zakar. Geber is here poetically employed. As the announcement of the conception is made by the personified “night,” so the individual who was conceived is considered, not in the ordinary sense of a child, but as the man Job eventually was to become. The LXX makes the night that of Job’s birth rather than that of his conception. The reason is presumably to avoid the difficulty of announcing the sex of the child on the night of conception. However, by poetic fancy such knowledge is here ascribed to the night.

By SdaBc