Job 3
Job 3 is the third chapter of the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. The book is anonymous; most scholars believe it was written around the 6th century BCE. This chapter belongs to the Dialogue section of the book, comprising Job 3:1–31:40.
Text
The original text is written in Hebrew language. This chapter is divided into 26 verses.Textual witnesses
Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter in Hebrew are of the Masoretic Text, which includes the Aleppo Codex, and Codex Leningradensis.There is also a translation into Koine Greek known as the Septuagint, made in the last few centuries BC; some extant ancient manuscripts of this version include Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, and Codex Alexandrinus.
Analysis
The structure of the book is as follows:- The Prologue
- The Dialogue
- The Verdicts
- The Epilogue
- Job's Self-Curse and Self-Lament
- *Job's Self-Curse
- *Job's Self-Lament
- Round One
- Round Two
- Round Three
- Interlude – A Poem on Wisdom
- Job's Summing Up
Job curses his day of birth (3:1–10)
After the prose prologue in chapters 1–2, the narrator of the Book of Job fades away until reappearing in chapter 42, so there is no interpreter to explain the conversation among the individual speakers and the readers have to attentively follow the threads of the dialogue. When seven days had passed since the arrival of Job's three friends, Job finally released his 'pent-up emotions', by cursing the day of his birth, before turning to questioning in verses 11–26. In all of his words, Job did not directly curse God as the Adversary had predicted or his wife had suggested. Nothing in Job's "self-curse" or "self-imprecation" is inconsistent with his faith in God, Job's words are best understood as a bitter cry of pain or protest out of an existential dilemma, preserving faith in the midst of an experience of disorientation, rather than an incantation to destroy the creation, because of the inability of literal fulfillment.Verse 1
- "Cursed": from, '; the usual Hebrew word for "curse" here is used instead of the euphemism בָרַךְ, barak which is used when God is the object of the verb. This is the only curse that Job uttered, although throughout the book, he gets desperately close to cursing God, but until the end he never did.
- "His day": translated literally from, '; the context makes it clear that Job meant "the day of his birth". The Syriac version reads “the day on which he was born.”
Verse 4
- "Let it be darkness": translated from, ; the wording that is the exact antithesis of Genesis 1:3, when God said "let there be light" on the "first day", to describe Job's wish that "his first day" be darkness and since only God has this prerogative, Job adds that "God on high" would not regard that day.
- "Shine": translated from the Hebrew verb עָלָ֣יו, that is the Hiphil of יָפַע, yafaʿ, which means here “cause to shine”. The subject of this verb is the hapax legomenon term נְהָרָה, neharah, “light”, that is derived from the verb נָהַר, nahar, “to gleam”.
Job's Self-Lament (3:11–26)
- Job expresses the wish that he had never been born, proceeding immediately from womb to the netherworld
- Job turns to the misery of his present life
The lament complements Job's initial cry with a series of rhetorical questions: posing an argument that because he was born, the earliest chance he had of escaping this life of misery would have been to be still born, whereas in verses 13–19 Job regards death as 'falling into a peaceful sleep in a place where there is no trouble'. YHWH later poses His questions to Job that made Job realize that Job had been ignorant of the ways of the Lord.
Verse 11
The two halves of the verse use the prepositional phrases, both in the temporal sense of “on emerging from the womb."The 'twin images of death' in two halves of the verse contrast the 'two symbols of life' in verse 12.