Job Chapter 3
The question" Why do innocent people suffer?" Is addressed in this biblical story.
A Conservative Version
3 : 1 After this Job opened his mouth, and cursed his day.
3 : 2 And Job answered and said,
3 : 3 Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night which said, There is a man-child conceived.
3 : 4 Let that day be darkness. Let not God from above seek for it, nor let the light shine upon it.
3 : 5 Let darkness and the shadow of death claim it for their own. Let a cloud dwell upon it. Let blackness come upon it.
3 : 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.
3 : 7 Lo, let that night be barren. Let no joyful voice come in it.
3 : 8 Let them curse it who curse the day, who are ready to rouse up leviathan.
3 : 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.
3 : 10 Because it did not shut up the doors of my mother's womb, nor hide trouble from my eyes.
3 : 11 Why did I not die from the womb? Why did I not give up the spirit when my mother bore me?
3 : 12 Why did the knees receive me? Or why the breast, that I should suck?
3 : 13 For now I should have lain down and been quiet. I should have slept. Then I would have been at rest
3 : 14 with kings and counselors of the earth, who built waste places for themselves,
3 : 15 or with rulers who had gold, who filled their houses with silver.
3 : 16 Or I should have been as a hidden untimely birth, as infants that never saw light.
3 : 17 There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest.
3 : 18 There the prisoners are at ease together. They do not hear the voice of the taskmaster.
3 : 19 The small and the great are there. And the servant is free from his master.
3 : 20 Why is light given to him who is in misery, and life to the bitter in soul,
3 : 21 who long for death, but it comes not, and dig for it more than for hid treasures,
3 : 22 who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they can find the grave?
3 : 23 Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, and whom God has hedged in?
3 : 24 For my sighing comes before I eat, and my groanings are poured out like water.
3 : 25 For the thing which I fear comes upon me, and that which I am afraid of comes to me.
3 : 26 I am not at ease, nor am I quiet, neither have I rest, but trouble comes.