Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Job · About this commentary
Why Did I Not Die at Birth?
Job 3:11-26
11 “Why didn’t I die from the womb? Why didn’t I give up the spirit when my mother bore me? · WEB
Death is described as sleep and rest where every rank is leveled, and the question is why life is given to those who want to give it back.
The curse gives way to questions, and they arrive in a run: why did I not die, why did the knees receive me, why the breast Job 3:11–12.
What he wants instead is described in four verbs, and they are all about stopping. For now I should have lain down and been quiet. I should have slept, then I would have been at rest Job 3:13.
That is the book's first statement about the dead, and it is a picture of sleep. There is no torment in it and no reward; there is quiet. The same expectation runs through everything Job says on the subject afterward, and it is what makes his later question — whether a man who dies will live again Job 14:14 — a real question rather than a rhetorical one.
The company he expects there is described with an edge. Kings and counselors who built up waste places for themselves, princes who filled their houses with silver Job 3:14–15. The building projects and the treasure are mentioned because neither made any difference to where the builders ended up.
Then three verses that flatten every distinction human society maintains. There the wicked cease from troubling. There the weary are at rest. There the prisoners are at ease together. They don't hear the voice of the taskmaster. The small and the great are there. The servant is free from his master Job 3:17–19.
Oppressor and oppressed, great and small, master and slave — the grave is described as the one place where the arrangements do not hold. A man who has lost everything is finding comfort in the fact that the losing eventually stops for everyone.
The last section widens from himself to a class of people. Why is light given to him who is in misery, to those who long for death, but it doesn't come, and who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad, when they can find the grave Job 3:20–22?
He is no longer asking about his own case. He is asking why anybody is kept alive who has no use for the life, and the question is put as a matter of justice rather than of feeling.
One phrase in it is worth watching. He describes such a man as one whom God has hedged in Job 3:23. The accuser had used the same figure of the protection around Job's house Job 1:10. The hedge that meant safety in the council means confinement here, and Job has no idea he is using the other man's word.
The last verse refuses every consolation in advance: I am not at ease, neither am I quiet, neither do I have rest; but trouble comes Job 3:26. Three denials, and then the friends begin.
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