Job 3:11

MY GOD; MY GOD; WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME?

"Why died I not from the womb?

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

Why did the knees receive me?

Or why the breasts that I should suck?

For now should I have lain down and been quiet;

I should have slept; then had I been at rest.

With kings and counselors of the earth,

Who built up waste places for themselves;

Or with princes that had gold,

Or filled their houses with silver:

Or as a hidden untimely birth I had not been,

As infants that never saw light.

There the wicked cease from troubling;

And there the weary are at rest.

There the prisoners are at ease together;

They hear not the voice of the taskmaster.

The small and the great are there:

And the servant is free from his master."

We have entitled this paragraph with the central cry of the seven words of Jesus Christ from the Cross (Matthew 27:46). There was no immediate answer for Job, the pitiful sufferer, and there was no immediate answer to that cry from the Cross; but there was an answer. For Jesus our Lord, the answer came when an angel rolled away the stone from his grave, not to let the Lord out, but to let the witnesses of his resurrection in to behold the empty tomb. For Job, the answer came from the mighty whirlwind when the voice of God healed him, confounded his foolish "comforters," blessed him twice as much as formerly, and extended his life to a full two hundred years!

Therefore when we struggle with the inexplicable sorrows and tribulations of our mortal existence; from these blessed words, we learn that for ourselves, as for Job, there is most certainly an answer.

"Why? ... Why? ... Why?... Why?" (Job 3:11-12). Where is the man who has not, in his heart if not vocally, cried these same pitiful questions when confronted with some soul-chilling sorrow? We have heard them at a thousand funerals; and always, the only recourse that men have is to, "Trust God where we cannot see"!

"Why did the knees receive me" (Job 3:12)? Franks wrote that, "This question reflects a time when the father would choose whether to bring up his child or not. If he did, he took it upon his knees as a sign of adoption (Genesis 50:23), and then handed it to the mother or to the nurse."[12] Interesting as this comment is, we cannot find any agreement with it in the text. The character of Hebrew poetry is that the same thought is often repeated in consecutive clauses; and the mention of his mother's breasts in the succeeding clause is overwhelming evidence that it is the mother's knees, not the fathers, which are mentioned in the preceding clause.

Anderson observed that, "The Book of Job knows nothing of the heaven of bliss or the hell of torment, but there is never a thought that death means extinction."[13] Note that all who ever lived, the kings and counselors, as well as the slaves and stillborn infants, do not merely cease to exist in the grave, "They are at rest."

Job 3:14-19 stress the cessation of all social distinctions in death.

"Wronged and wrong-doer alike with meekened face

And cold hands folded o'er a still heart,

Pass the green threshold of our common grave,

Whither all footsteps tend, whence none depart."

- John Greenleaf Whittier

The meaning of some of these clauses is explained by the clause following. For example, the prisoners of Job 3:18 are not those in prison, but the captives who are driven to forced labor by taskmasters.