Job 3:8

8. That curse the day Cursers of the day. Pliny says of the Atlantes, (Herodotus calls them Atarantes,) that as they look upon the rising and the setting sun they give utterance to direful imprecations against it as being deadly to themselves and their lands. ( Nat. Hist., book v, chap. 8.) Job does not refer to such, but to professional cursers, who imprecate evil on particular days. Superstition in the earliest times had its sorcerers, who were believed to possess the power, through incantations, of working injury to others. Balaam was summoned from his distant home to curse the people of Israel. Job invites those skilled in the art of cursing to join him in cursing that night.

Raise up their mourning Our version yields no intelligible meaning. The Septuagint renders the passage, “he that is ready to attack the great whale,” (or monster,) which is quite as meaningless.

The original reads, skilled to rouse up the dragon, (Leviathan.) This word, לויתן , has been a stumbling-block to all translators. The Complutensian editors (of the first polyglott, 1517) left it without attempting to translate it. Our own version, “their mourning,” together with that of Piscator and Tyndal, probably followed the Chaldee paraphrase, which may have been suggested by the ancient association of the profession of sorcery with professional mourning. They inferred that as the first clause of the verse meant sorcery, the second must mean “mourning.” 1. Furst, in common with modern lexicographers, gives the ground-form of the word as that which wreathes, or gathers itself into folds. Hence one meaning of the word is serpent, since it moves itself forward by folds. Umbreit and Vaihinger understand by the word a very large serpent. The art of charming serpents is common through the East. The serpent, too, fills a large place in all mythologies. In the last Indian Avatar, as well as in the Eddas, the world is to be destroyed by a serpent vomiting flames. 2.

According to Bochartus, Clericus, Carey, etc., the word should be rendered crocodile. This animal was regarded by the ancient Egyptians as the emblem of Typhon, the dark genius of their mythology. As it was in the shape of a crocodile that Typhon eluded the pursuit of Horus, they set apart a particular day for the hunt of this animal. They killed as many of them as they could, and afterwards threw their dead bodies before the temple of their god. The following translation of a papyrus found at Thebes gives us a form of the invocation of Typhon: “I invoke thee who livest in empty space: wind, or terrible invisible, all powerful, god of gods: maker of destruction: and maker of desolation: thou who hatest a flourishing family, since thou hast been expelled from Egypt and out of foreign countries.

Thou hast been named the all destroyer, and the invincible. I invoke thee Typhon Set: I perform thy magical rites. Because I invoke thee by thy genuine name, by virtue of which thou canst not refuse to hear… come to me entire, and walk, and throw down that man or that woman by cold and heat. He has wronged me,” etc. Herodotus (ii, 32, 33) relates of the travels of the Nasamonians in Africa, that they came to a great river which flowed by a town of dwarfs, and which abounded in crocodiles. In this connexion he strangely informs us that they were a nation of sorcerers. 3 . Others, (Hirtzel, Furst, Schlottmann, Ewald, etc.,) who cite Van Bohlen, think that the expression refers to the dragon in the heavens, a constellation which, according to eastern mythology, followed the sun and moon like a relentless enemy, sometimes surrounding them with his mighty folds, and so bringing on darkness. Throughout the East the ancients believed that their magicians could work upon this monster. A similar belief with respect to a monster called Rahu prevails among the Hindus to the present time. In times of eclipse the natives (as do the Chinese) raise a great din to compel the dragon to release his prey. Job’s wish, according to this view, was, that these day-cursers might rouse up this dragon, and thus effect a complete obscuration of the night. 4. The fathers looked upon the passage from a spiritual standpoint, and regarded it as referring to a spiritual encounter with Leviathan. They saw in it a prophecy of the incarnated One who should overcome the great serpent, which is hostile not only to the light, but to the God of light. (See extended citations in Wordsworth, who favours this view.) Such an interpretation, however, is unnatural and forced.