Cancel My Birthday Forever

Job 3:1

“Job is a drama of words”, writes Prof. Edward L. Greenstein in his fascinating and compelling Job: A New Translation. In the extensive and helpful introduction he points out the important role that language has throughout this book, particularly relevant as Job begins his poetic protest in today’s chapter:

“The topic of the dialogues between Job and his friends may be the question of divine justice. But the theme of the book, the one that upon reflection has been highlighted all along, is the importance of proper speech—honesty in general and truth in God-talk in particular. For one thing, the bulk of the book is and revolves around discourse—people, and then the deity, speaking.”

Chapter 3 is Job’s first foray into an expression of grief, accusation and rage.

He doesn’t blame God directly for his tragic circumstances - not yet - but he does begin to dream of death - and in his deep grief he dreams of reversing time as he wishes he was never born at all.

In response to his wife’s invocation to “blaspheme God and die” (2:9), Job let out some of his frustration and anger by cursing the fact of his existence, and imagines rewinding time to annul his own creation:

אַחֲרֵי־כֵן פָּתַח אִיּוֹב אֶת־פִּיהוּ וַיְקַלֵּל אֶת־יוֹמוֹ׃

Afterward, Job began to speak and cursed the day of his birth.

Job 3:1

This dreadful death wish has prior biblical references. The prophet Jeremiah also famously exclaimed: “Accursed be the day that I was born! Let not the day be blessed when my mother bore me” (Jeremiah 20:14).

Job’s wish is that the day of his birth be removed from the calendar. His words are poetic expressions of deep despair, described by Robert Alter as “a virtuosity that transcends all other biblical poetry.”

The entire chapter is a dark cry against the very essence of life. Keen readers will realize that there is a shift of tone that will persist through the next chapters which are the bulk of the book. Chapters 1+2, as well as 42 are considered their own original source - the prose section of Job, while all other chapters are their own poetic unit, likely much later and added to the original terse text.

Josh Blechner points out that

“The words night and darkness appear 7 times in this chapter in addition to other night/darkness words. The word light appears a few times as well…It seems as if Job's cry against his birthday actually mimics the birthday of the world, i.e., the first day of creation - when God separated light and darkness. In cursing his own genesis, he in turn attacks the Genesis of the world itself.”

The tragic death wish of Job meets us on familiar grounds of human anguish not just as war rages on but also as the winter nights, even after the longest night of the year now behind us, take their toll.

How do we rise to the challenges of deep anguish and still find ways to lift up life? To not give up on hope?

The following chapters will attempt to do so - with varying degrees of success, rooted in poetry of protest that hides much more than meets the eye.

Below the Bible Belt: 929 chapters, 42 months, daily reflections.

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