“Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it.”
Job wishes for darkness and shadow to claim the night and for a cloud to settle upon the day, extending the curse into a cosmic wish for the obscuration of the time of his birth. The piling up of images of darkness and obscurity reveals the psychological reality of depression: the wish to extinguish the painful fact of existence through the erasure of its origin. The hyperbolic language of curse becomes the only adequate vehicle for expressing such comprehensive negation.
Church Fathers on Job 3:5
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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