1 After this Job opened his mouth, and cursed his day.
2 And Job answered and said,
3 Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night which said, There is a man-child conceived.
4 Let that day be darkness. Let not God from above seek for it, nor let the light shine upon it.
5 Let darkness and the shadow of death claim it for their own. Let a cloud dwell upon it. Let blackness come upon it.
6 As 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.
7 Lo, let that night be barren. Let no joyful voice come in it.
8 Let them curse it who curse the day, who are ready to rouse up leviathan.
9 Let the stars of the twilight of it be dark. Let it look for light, but have none, nor let it behold the eyelids of the morning.
10 Because it did not shut up the doors of my [mother's] womb, nor hide trouble from my eyes.
11 Why did I not die from the womb? Why did I not give up the spirit when my mother bore me?
12 Why did the knees receive me? Or why the breast, that I should suck?
13 For now I should have lain down and been quiet. I should have slept. Then I would have been at rest
14 with kings and counselors of the earth, who built waste places for themselves,
15 or with rulers who had gold, who filled their houses with silver.
16 Or I should have been as a hidden untimely birth, as infants that never saw light.
17 There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest.
18 There the prisoners are at ease together. They do not hear the voice of the taskmaster.
19 The small and the great are there. And the servant is free from his master.
20 Why is light given to him who is in misery, and life to the bitter in soul,
21 who long for death, but it comes not, and dig for it more than for hid treasures,
22 who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they can find the grave?
23 [Why is light given] to a man whose way is hid, and whom God has hedged in?
24 For my sighing comes before I eat, and my groanings are poured out like water.
25 For the thing which I fear comes upon me, and that which I am afraid of comes to me.
26 I am not at ease, nor am I quiet, neither have I rest, but trouble comes.