Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Job 3:10 - 3:10
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
10 Because it did not close the doors of my mother's womb,
Nor hid sorrow from my eyes.
11 Why did I not die from the womb,
Come forth from the womb and expire?
12 Why have the knees welcomed me?
And why the breasts, that I should suck?
The whole strophe contains strong reason for his cursing the night of his conception or birth. It should rather have closed (i.e., make the womb barren, to be explained according to 1Sa 1:5; Gen 16:2) the doors of his womb (i.e., the womb that conceived concepit him), and so have withdrawn the sorrow he now experiences from his unborn eyes (on the extended force of the negative, vid., Ges. §152, 3). Then why, i.e., to what purpose worth the labour, is he then conceived and born? The four questions, Job 3:11., form a climax: he follows the course of his life from its commencement in embryo (מֵרֶהֶם, to be explained according to Jer 20:17, and Job 10:18, where, however, it is מן local, not as here, temporal) to the birth, and from the joy of his father who took the new-born child upon his knees (comp. Gen 50:23) to the first development of the infant, and he curses this growing life in its four phases (Arnh., Schlottm.). Observe the consecutio temp. The fut. אָמוּת has the signification moriebar, because taken from the thought of the first period of his conception and birth; so also וְאֶגְוַע, governed by the preceding perf., the signification et exspirabam (Ges. §127, 4, c). Just so אִינָק, but modal, ut sugerem ea.