“Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it.”
Job extends the curse to the night of conception, calling for darkness and shadow to reclaim it, suggesting a reversal of the creative word by which God separated light from darkness in Genesis. His demand that God not look upon it and that no light shine upon it represents a wish for cosmic un-creation, as if that moment could be removed from the record of being. The rhetorical intensity of the curse reveals the depth of existential despair that suffering has provoked.
Church Fathers on Job 3:4
Let that day be turned into darkness. This day shines as it were in the hearts of men, when the persuasions of his wickedness are thought to be for our good, and what they are within is never seen; but when his wickedness is seen as it is, the day of false promises is as it were dimmed by a kind of darkness spread before the eyes of our judgment, in this respect, that such as he is in intrinsic worth, such he is perceived to be in his beguilement, and so ‘the day becomes…
Nicene & Post-Nicene / Ante-Nicene Fathers translations · public domain
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