Job 3 and book of Job

Upon turning to the poetry of Job we realize immediately we are in a much different world from Job 1-2. Those chapters were concerned with the externals of Job's life and loss, as well as his expressions of fidelity despite loss (1:21; 2:10). Beginning in Job 3, however, we meet Job in his inner world, his psychic reality. Job 3 probes the contours of his reactions to great loss. Note the flow of the whole.

3:3-10 After a verse telling us that Job will curse the day of his birth (3:1), Job launches into an eight-verse malediction. He vainly wishes to turn back the process of his own creation by invoking the return of darkness ("Let that day be darkness"--'yiyeh hoshek'--v.4, is modeled on Genesis 1:3, "Let there be light"-'yiyeh or'). Ten times in these verses Job employs words such as darkness, night, dark or gloom to express his desire, with all the insistence of a pounding jackhammer, to be utterly obliterated once and for all.

3:11-19 Job wanted the day to perish in which he was born so that it would "hide trouble from my eyes (3:10)." Once uttering this phrase, he enters into a sort of reverie of imagined existence in another realm, the realm of Sheol--where trouble indeed would be hid from his eyes. Instead of describing it as a place of pallid and nondescript shades, he sees it as a vigorous fellowship with kings, counselors and princes (3:14-15). The triads of these verses (another one is "at rest," "at east," and "cease from troubling" in vv. 17-18) help balance the utterly despairing language of darkness in 3:3-10. The great democratic realm of Sheol (v. 19) would provide Job a time for yet a third triad of activity: "quiet," "slept," and "at rest" (v. 13).

3:20-23 His entry into an imagined world leads him to pose questions about his condition and the human condition, questions that are remarkably "modern questions." 'Why', Job wants to know, 'is life granted to people who want to die,' who "dig for it more than for hid treasures (v. 21)?" As is true with any reflective sufferer, his new reality of loss forces questions upon him. Suffering has a terribly unsettling and open-ended character to it. Both the distress itself and the quest for meaning during the distress irreversibly change life. Job's former life is now just a dream to him.

3:24-26 Job's questions are the literary bridge to take him from his imagined existence in Sheol back to his life in real time. Now, in these last three verses of the chapter, the full scope of his present loss returns. He is conscious again of his sighings and groanings (v. 24). His thoughts become flinty, succinct and direct, almost as if all his pain is now being telescoped into these brief phrases. The triad of "ease," "rest," and "quiet," which Sheol would give him, is now gone. He has none of them. Only trouble comes (v. 26). Maybe, as the chapter closes, Job looks up and sees his friends fidgeting, getting ready to speak. When he says, "but trouble comes," perhaps he is thinking not only of his condition but of the friends. 'They are ready to speak. This will be trouble.' Eliphaz will be the first to speak.

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