Job3chapter 3

Job does not curse God, as the accuser predicted. He curses the day of his birth — a recognised form of lament in the ancient Near East, where days and nights were spoken of as if they were living things that could be blotted from the calendar. He asks that his birthday be struck out of the year and the night of his conception be counted among no months.

One line reaches into a genuinely strange corner of that world. He calls on those 'who are ready to rouse Leviathan' — professional cursers, men paid to lay a curse on a day, believed able to stir up the sea-dragon and swallow the light. Job is not endorsing the belief; he is saying, in the strongest language available, let the experts in ruining days come and ruin this one.

The pictures of death that follow are drawn from ordinary life and death in that culture. The stillborn buried without ceremony. Kings and counsellors who built ruined monuments for themselves — the mortuary tombs and mounds a ruler raised to outlast him. Prisoners no longer hearing the taskmaster's voice. The grave described as the one place where the small and the great are alike and the slave is free from his master.

'Why is light given to a man whose way is hid' is the question the whole book will answer, or refuse to answer. Job is not asking to die by his own hand — that never comes up. He is asking why life continues when its purpose has been taken away.