Job 3:11-19

2. Asks why he was born (Job 3:11-19)

TEXT 3:11-19

11 Why died I not from the womb?

Why did I not give up the ghost when my mother bare me?

12 Why did the knees receive me?

Or why the breasts, that I should suck?

13 For now should I have lain down and been quiet; I should have slept; then had I been at rest,

14 With kings and counsellors of the earth, Who built up waste places for themselves;
15 Or with princes that had gold, Who filled their houses with silver:
16 Or as a hidden untimely birth I had not been, As infants that never saw light.
17 There the wicked cease from troubling; And there the weary are at rest.
18 There the prisoners are at ease together; They hear not the voice of the taskmaster.
19 The small and the great are there:

And the servant is free from his master.

COMMENT 3:11-19

Job 3:11A.V. is a literal rendering of the Hebrew and means at birth, Job 10:18-19.[56]

[56] M. Dahood, Biblica, 1963, p. 205. Job 3:11-16 present a problem of chronology. Some of the verses do not seem to follow, egs. 16 does not follow naturally from IS. See Dhorme, Job, pp. 31ff.

Job 3:12Perhaps the knees refers to the father receiving the child as his ownGenesis 50:23 and Eccl. 15:2a. But both Dhorme and Buttenwieser interpret the phrase to mean the mother's knees as receiving the child to nurse it.

Job 3:13Job is now preoccupied with death, as is contemporary man. His measure of misery is that death would be better. Since Elizabeth K. Ross published her Death and Dying, there has been an epidemic of literature on the phenomenon of death. Note that throughout this Jobian soliloquy there has been no intimation of Job taking his own life. Hebrew eschatology maintained that Sheol is not necessarily a place of victory over death. Only when Job knows that his vindicator lives does he resolve his existential crisis. His sickness is thennot unto death. For references to Sheol in Job read Job 3:19; Job 7:9; Job 10:12 ff; Job 14:10 ff; Job 14:21-22; Job 17:16.

Job 3:14Though the Hebrew could mean rebuilt ruins, (A.V. build up, i.e., rebuild), it makes little sense in this passage. Kings do not build among ruins. Efforts at repointing the text fare no better. Perhaps the meaning is that suggested by Rowley who build for themselves the ruins. Nothing lasts forever.

Job 3:15Great kings were prosperous, but they, too, died. Rich and poor alike are leveled in death. If equality is unavailable in life, it is a virtue shared by all in death.

Job 3:16Job's present misery blots out all the happy memories of the good years. We could not bear to carry every hurt (or joy) forever, so God's grace is involved in our forgetfulness.

Job 3:17In Sheol we are not troubled, or as the text says, we cease from agitating ourselves. The same word is rendered rage of horses in Job 39:24 and rumbling of thunder in Job 37:2.

Job 3:18Even slaves suffer less than does Job. Captives who are in forced labor and are brutally treated are more at ease than Job. Job in Auschwitz? The hard Egyptian taskmaster (used in Exodus 3:7; Exodus 5:6 of the Egyptian taskmasters over the Hebrew slaves) left a lasting effect on Israel's memory; as a result both Old and New Testaments employ in vital theological sections, The Exodus Motif.

Job 3:19In Sheol everyone is equal. The slave (servant) is free.[57]

[57] I. Mendelsohn, Bulletin of American Society Oriental Research, 83 (1941), 36-9, has shown that the root significance of this important wordhopsiis free proletarian or tenant farmer; and E. R. Lacheman, ibid, 86, 1942, shows that in the Nuzi tablets this word means a semi-free man.