Change of Terms
As for that night, may darkness seize it; may it not rejoice among the days of the year; may it not come into the number of the months. Job 3:6 NASB
Darkness – Before we continue, we need to note something unusual. Job’s curse over the day of his birth keeps going. Apparently it isn’t enough to wish that day disappear or that it fall into the primordial chaos or that it die. It will take him another six verses to finish the tragic consequences of being born. Why? Because he wants to articulate all the facets of this idea. One nail in the coffin is never enough. He uses as many nails as necessary to ensure the grave stays shut.
So we come to ʾōpel, another term rendered “darkness,” but not the same as the previous ḥōšek. ʾōpel occurs only nine times in the Tanach, six of them in Job. “Job (3:6) bewails the day of his birth and the night in which he was conceived. For that night he wishes that only the deepest darkness might overtake it, so that it would not be reckoned among the months or years. He pleads for a little respite before he goes to the place where only darkness is the order of the realm (10:22). He wishes (23:17) that he could have been cut off before calamity overtook him, so that he might have been spared the agony. The prowess of man in his research into the secrets and phenomena of earth, characterized by darkness, is presented in Job 28:3, whereas in 30:26 Job laments that whenever he looked for a source of hope (light), it always turned into misfortune (darkness).”[1] A derivative of this word is used to describe the darkness of the plague that fell upon Egypt. In Proverbs a derivative describes moral collapse and punishment. In Jeremiah a similar term describes apostasy. Nothing good comes from ʾōpel.
Now notice the difference between ʾōpel and ḥōšek. The darkness preceding God’s ordering of the world is the primordial chaos– ḥōšek. Yes, it also describes the plague in Egypt, but its first occurrence is found in Genesis 1:2. It is the fundamental realm of purposelessness. ʾōpel comes later because ʾōpel is about spiritual and moral failure, the darkness that comes over Man without God. ʾōpel is the dark night of the soul. It is not the primordial, cosmological disorder. It is the collapse of the moral order, still deserving punishment because it is a rejection of God’s work of creation. For Job, this is the darkness within the created order, not prior to the created order.
Job’s first description of the curse deals with what comes before anything else, a curse in the realm of the ontological. His second term, ʾōpel, is in the realm of ordered existence. The days, the months, the temporal order—this Job also wishes to be extinguished. If his birth can’t be erased from the creation of the world, then at least let it not belong to the temporal measure of human living. This isn’t the end of Job’s plight, but it certainly tells us about the depth of his struggle. It’s not enough to simply wish his suffering had not happened. It’s much more—a wish for non-existence, that he never was. Maybe we also feel that sometimes.
Topical Index: ʾōpel, darkness, ḥōšek, non-existence, suffering, Job 3:6
[1] Feinberg, C. L. (1999). 145 אפל. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament(electronic ed., p. 64). Moody Press.
