Job 3:3

First long strophe JOB CURSES HIS EXISTENCE, Job 3:3-10.

a. He curses his birthday, Job 3:3-5.

3. Let the day perish Literally, Perish the day! I was to be born in it! Hitzig renders, אולד בו , in which I should be born. “The speaker, by a bold figure, places himself before his birth, and prays that the day which was to give him existence might be annihilated, so that he might be saved from the misery of living.” The fathers, who were disposed to palliate this entire lamentation, call attention to the thought that it is the day of his birth, and not that of his prospective death, that he execrates; which Isidorus beautifully illustrates by the tears of Christ, “who wept,” he says, “not so much that Lazarus had died, as that he must call back to waves and storms him who had reached the port, and bring again the crowned victor into the battlefield of life.”

And the night… it said Not, in which it was said, which takes away the startling abruptness of the original. Like a conscious existence, night personified has the power of speech. In the sublime conception of the poet, night makes report to the Most High of whatever takes place within its wide domain. The speculation is not unworthy of science, that all the deeds of the day are embodied in the reflected rays of light, from which they can never die out, at least so long as the light of the day continues to shine on through infinite space. In a similar manner night has a voice. Psalms 19:2. On which Stier remarks: “We are to understand not merely what we see by day and night in the heavens, but, as the expression naturally imports, (that is, if viewed without respect to the connexion,) the whole that is done by day and night under the heavens.”

A man child גבר , literally, a man. The birth of a son was one of the three great occasions of festivity among the Arabs. The two others, according to Pococke, were the birth of a foal of valued race, and the rising up of a poetical genius in any of their tribes. ( Spec. Hist. Ar., pp. 160, 367 . )