NOTES for Job 3:2-3
Such is Job's first reaction to the disasters that have fallen on him: he curses the day of his birth. It should be said that among the Jews, at least in antiquity, it was not customary to celebrate a person's birthday. A person has only just come into the world; there is nothing remarkable in this fact by itself, and if one is to celebrate any events in a person's life, then they should be events that testify to his achievements in this world, not his very appearance in it. But of course it occurred to no one to curse the day of his own birth. Even a bad life was considered better than death, better than Sheol, which awaited everyone at the end of the path. No posthumous recompense was expected; Sheol was the same for all.
Job views life, at least his own life, precisely as evil. An evil even greater than Sheol. This was, at minimum, strange. If the speaker were, for example, a Buddhist, such speech would be quite understandable: for a Buddhist life is precisely evil, any life, even quite prosperous. Because even the most prosperous life is full of suffering and ends in a way that is not prosperous at all. But Job is not a Buddhist. And he did not hate life for general reasons. This life simply suddenly became unbearable for him. Because of illness and other misfortunes? Perhaps, of course.
But perhaps the matter is not only, or even mainly, illness and misfortune. Job himself says that what came upon him was exactly what he feared. And the matter is clearly not illness and misfortune as such. Job is not accidentally shown in the book as an ideal righteous man, the kind who, generally speaking, does not exist in life. The author needed this. Because such a righteous man, according to the generally accepted religious ideas of the author's era, should not suffer. The righteous do not suffer; sinners suffer. It would seem that in the Bible, even in the Old Testament books, more than enough is said about the suffering specifically of the righteous.
Still, here there is not the Gospel logic that describes the suffering of the righteous person as the inevitable consequence of the incompatibility of righteousness and the world lying in evil. Here the suffering of the righteous person is still an anomaly, even if it occurs too often and often lasts too long. And now the perfect righteous man finally, for the first time in the history of the people of God, puts the question sharply: why should I, a righteous man, suffer? And if the righteous suffer, can life be considered a good? Perhaps it is not a gift from God at all, but a punishment from Him?