SECTION II.

THE CURSE.

CHAPTER III.

THIS Chapter divides itself into three sections, three strophes, in which human life is execrated through its whole course. (1) Job asks (Verses 3-10), since life is so heavy a burden, Why was I born at all? (2) Then he demands (Verses 11-19), if I must be born, why was I not suffered to die as soon as I was born, and sink into the rest and quietness of death? (3) And, finally, if that were too great a boon, why may I not die now-now that I am sick of life and long for the tomb? (Verses 20-26.)

CHAPTER III.-At length Job opened his mouth, and cursed his day. 2. And Job answered and said:

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Perish the day wherein I was born,
And the night that said, ▲ man is conceived!
That day! Let it be darkness!
Let not God ask after it from above,
Neither let the sun shine upon it!

Let darkness and the blackness of death reclaim it !
Let a cloud sink down upon it!

Let the terrors of the day affright it!
That night! May thick darkness seize it!
Let it not rejoice among the days of the year,
Nor come into the number of the months!

Lo, that night! Let it be barren,

And let no cry of joy enter it!

Let those who ban days ban it,

Who are of skill to rouse the Dragon!
May the stars of its twilight gather darkness!
Let it long for light and see none,
Nor let it behold the eyelids of the dawn,

Because it shut not up the doors of the womb that bore me,
And hid not trouble from mine eyes!

Why was I not dead when I came from the womb?
Why did I not come forth only to expire?

Why did knees welcome me,

And why breasts that I might suck?

For then should I have been lying still and quiet ;
I had slumbered, and been at rest
With kings and councillors of the earth
Who built for themselves ruinable sepulchres,
And with princes, possessed of gold,
Who filled their palaces with silver :
Or, like a hidden abortion, I had not been,
Like babes who never see the light.
There the troublers cease from troubling,
And there the strong, worn out, find rest:
There the prisoners repose together in peace,
They hear no task-master's voice:
The small and the great are equal there,
And the slave is free from his lord.

Wherefore is light given to the afflicted,
And life to the bitter in spirit,

Who long for death, but it cometh not,
And search for it more than for hid treasure

Who would rejoice with gladness

And be blithe to find a grave,—
To a man whose path is hidden,
And whom God hath fenced in?
For my groaning cometh like my food
And my sighs gush out like the waters.
If I fear a fear, it cometh upon me,
And whatsoever I dread befalleth me.

I have no quiet, no repose, no rest,
But trouble cometh on trouble.

The three sections of this Chapter are introduced by a few historical or descriptive words (Verses 1 and 2). Job "opened his mouth"-a phrase only used on solemn occasions, and denoting the momentous character of the utterances which followed it; as, for example, when the Lord Jesus "opened his mouth" to deliver the Sermon on the Mount (St. Matt. v. 2).

66

And cursed his day." The word here used is not the dubious barak employed in Chapters i. and ii. which, besides intermediate shades of intention, might mean either to bless or to curse; but another verb, which signifies to execrate that which is base and worthless. His "day" is, of course, the day of his birth. "And Job answered and said,"-answered whom, or what? If the three Friends had as yet spoken no word to him, their manner and gestures had, nevertheless, said so much that he is sure they

Cannot but feel this wrong as 'twere their own.

They had wept, rent their mantles, cast dust on their heads, sat down with him seven days and nights, thus mutely intimating their grief and compassion. Job's words are his response, his answer, to this unspoken sympathy. Beholding their sorrow and amazement at the mere spectacle of his misery, the sense of his misery comes closer home to him; it gathers new force as he sees it reflected from their eyes and he breaks out into passionate imprecations on his day.

The First Strophe, like that which follows it, touches points on which it is difficult, almost impossible, to dilate without some offence against modesty. And, therefore, I will only give a brief summary of its contents, and a few explanatory notes.

First of all Job execrates, in general terms, the night of his conception and the day of his birth (Verse 3). Then, more particularly (Verses 4 and 5), he prays that the day of his birth may be ever dark as night, forgotten by God, unillumined by the sun, reclaimed by death as its proper possession, lost in clouds, exposed to all the terrors incident and possible to day. Then, with equal ingenuity and precision, he curses the night of his conception (Verses 6-9) May the primal darkness seize upon it and swallow it up, so that it shall be blotted from the calendar and cease to find a place in the glad procession of the year! May it be barren, giving life to nothing, hearing no cry of joy because a child is born in it! May it be accursed, so that, "ever trembling on the verge of dawn," the dawn may never break upon it! And, finally, in Verse 10, he gives us the sole reason for this tremendous imprecation on it, that it

was the night on which he entered on this life of misery and

shame.

Verse 4.-" Let not God ask after it,"-i.e. not so much as miss it when it is gone; let it be forgotten, and not only extinct.

Verse 5.-Darkness and black Death are the nearest of kin to that most dark and miserable day. Let them reclaim it, then, as, according to Arab and Hebrew law, kinsmen might redeem the inheritance which had fallen into the hands of a stranger. It was a portion of the kingdom of death which had gone astray into the light; let it be recovered, recaptured, and compelled to submit once more to the sway of " chaos and old night." "Let the terrors of the day affright it;" literally, the terrors of a day, of any day, all the terrors incident or possible to day-time. Probably the main reference is to eclipses, which were supremely terrible to the ancient world.

Verse 6. The robber Darkness-for here the figure changes -is to seize "that night" as his booty, that it may no longer rejoice amid the days of the year. In the Poet's imagination the night does not so much rejoice "on account of its own. beauty, as to form one of the joyous and triumphant choral troop of nights that come in in harmonious and glittering procession." 1 From that happy company this night is to be expelled.

Verse 8.-" Those who ban days" are those who were held to make days unlucky, dies infausti. There is a quaint legend which says that at daybreak the Ethiopians curse the sun because it has burned them so black. And some Commentators, misled by this impossible legend, have suggested that the Ethiopians are the ban-ners of days here adjured. Obviously, as the second line of the Verse shews, the allusion is to the ancient Oriental superstition which attached a supra-natural power to the incantations of the sorcerer. It was he who was able, in the popular belief, both to ban days and to "rouse the Dragon," i.e. the heavenly but hostile constellation known to antiquity by that name.

The ancient poets feigned the constellations to have life 1 Professor Davidson, in loco.

and personality, and to be variously related to each other. The fantasy of the poet became the superstition of the vulgar, and drew many legends round it. It was thought, for example, that there was a special art, a magical art, of exciting the Dragon, then held to be the enemy of light, to devour the sun and moon, and so for a time at least to pour darkness over the earth. Eclipses were his work, or the work of the magicians who controlled him by their enchantments. The Chinese still hold the superstition of the antique world, and, as an eclipse approaches, seek by wild outcries and the noise of gongs to scare away the Dragon-not with much effect, for all that I could ever hear. Similar superstitions obtain throughout the East to this day, as they did, indeed, throughout the West till a few years ago. Some traces of the belief in good and ill luck, and of the influence of the stars in their courses on the events of the earth, may even yet be detected in our language and habits, and that not only among the rustic and ignorant, but even among men of culture and refinement.

Nor is the almost universal spread of such superstitions to be attributed solely to the vivid imagination of the poets, or to the mere influence of habit and tradition. They have their origin in some of the commonest facts of experience and in some of the profoundest emotions of the heart. Every man is aware, for instance, that on certain days he rises with a temperament wholly in tune with itself and his outward conditions; "his bosom's lord sits lightly on its throne;" he is vigorous, bold, sanguine, he knows not why; and on such days as these all seems to go well with him: while on other days, and from causes equally recondite, he rises "deject and wretched," feels beforehand that nothing will prosper with him, and often finds his foreboding miserably fulfilled. Is it any wonder that on these common facts of experience some men, most men even, have built up a superstition of lucky days and unlucky?

Then, too, we are constantly compelled to feel that both in the human and in the natural worlds great forces are at work which we are powerless to withstand; and that if, at times, we are carried by them where we would be, at other times we are carried whither we would not. These forces, which the