Bible Commentaries
Job 3

Verses 1-26

Silent sympathy always creates an opportunity for grief to express itself. Job's outcry was undoubtedly an answer to their sympathy. So far, it was good, and they had helped him. It is always better to tell out the dark questionings of the heart than to brood over them. This lamentation of Job is of the nature of a cry for escape, rather than a description of the oppressing sorrows. In it there are three movements. The first consists of a terrible cursing of the day of his birth and the night of his conception (1-10). In it the anguish which hates the very fact of being sobs itself out in agony.

The second consists of lamentation over his preservation (11-19). In it he contemplated the blessings of death. To him in these hours of living sorrow cessation of being would be, he thought, the greatest blessing, a condition in which men escape the troubles of life.

Finally, existence is lamented in his own particular case, because characterized by such unceasing and irremedial sorrow (20-26). It is a great lamentation, pulsing with pain, expressive of the meanings of the most terrible of all sorrows, the sense of mystery, the inexplicability of it all.