It was their deep, unspoken sympathy which encouraged him to vent his sorrow in a flood of unpurified emotion (chap. iii.) The very next thing recorded of Job is that he ‘opened his mouth and cursed his day’ (i.e. his birthday; see ver. 3). This may at least be the poet’s meaning, though it is also possible that the prologue and the body of the poem are not homogeneous. Not to mention other reasons at present, the tone of Job’s speech in chap. iii. (the chapter read by Swift on his birthday) is entirely different from the stedfast resignation of his reply to his wife, which, as Prof. Davidson has said, ‘reveals still greater deeps in Job’s reverent piety’ than the benediction at the end of chap. i., the latter being called forth not by the infliction of positive evil, but merely by the withdrawal of unguaranteed favours.
How strangely vivid were the sensations of the race to which the author of Job belonged! How great to him must have been the pleasures of existence, and how great the pains! Nothing to him was merely subjectively true: his feelings were infallible, and that which seemed to be was. Time, for instance, had an objective reality: the days of the year had a kind of life of their own (comp. Ps. xix. 2) and paid annually recurring visits to mankind. Hence Job, like Jeremiah (Jer. xx. 14-18), in the violence of his passion[[7]] can wish to retaliate on the instrument of his misery by ‘cursing his day.’
Perish the day wherein I was born,
and the night which said, A man has been conceived.
(iii. 3; comp. 6);
i.e. let my birthday become a blank in the calendar. Or, if this be too much and the anniversary, so sad to me, must come round, then let magicians cast their spell[[8]] upon it and make it an unlucky day (such as the Babylonians had in abundance).
Let them curse it that curse days,
that are skilful to rouse the leviathan (iii. 8);
i.e. the cloud dragon (vii. 12, xxvi. 13, Isaiah li. 9, Jer. li. 34), the enemy of the sun (an allusion to a widely spread solar myth). So fare it with the day which might, by hindering Job’s birth, have ‘hid sorrow from his eyes!’ Even if he must be born, why could he not have died at once and escaped his ill fortune in the quiet phantom world (iii. 13-19)? Alas! this melancholy dream does but aggravate Job’s mental agony. He broods on the horror of his situation, and even makes a shy allusion to God as the author of his woe—
Wherefore gives he light to the miserable,