Here are the commentaries I promised to post - they all make a significant contribution in discovering Job 3:8. Be blessed...
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Barnes: Job 3:8 - Let them curse it who curse the day - This entire verse is exceedingly difficult, and many different expositions have been given of it. It seems evident that it refers to some well-known class of persons, who were accustomed to utter imprecations (Curses), and were supposed to have the power to render a day propitious or unpropitious - persons who had the power of divination or enchantment. A belief in such a power existed early in the world, and has prevailed in all savage and semi-barbarous nations, and even in nations considerably advanced in civilization. The origin of this was a desire to look into futurity; and in order to accomplish this, a league was supposed to be made with the spirits of the dead, who were acquainted with the events of the invisible world, and who could be prevailed on to impart their knowledge to favored mortals. It was supposed, also, that by such union there might be a power exerted which would appear to be miraculous.
Such persons also claimed to be the favorites of heaven, and to be endowed with control over the elements, and over the destiny of men; to have the power to bless and to curse, to render propitious or calamitous. Balsaam was believed to be
endowed with this power, and hence, he was sent for by Balak, king of Moab, to curse the Israelites; Num_22:5-6; see
the notes at Isa_8:19. The practice of cursing the day, or cursing the sun, is said by Herodotus to have prevailed among a people of Africa, whom he calls the Atlantes, living in the vicinity of Mount Atlas. “Of all mankind,” says he, “of whom we have any knowledge, the Atlantes alone have no distinction of names; the body of the people are termed Atlantes, but their individuals have no appropriate appellation. When the sun is at the highest they heap on it reproaches and execrations, because their country and themselves are parched by its rays; book iv. 184. The same account of them is found in Pliny, Nat. His. v. 8: Solem orientem occidentemque dira imprecatione contuentur, ut exitialem ipsis agrisque. See also Strabo, Lib. xvii. p. 780. Some have supposed, also, that there may be an allusion here to a custom which seems early to have prevailed of hiring people to mourn for the dead, and who probably in their official lamentation bewailed or cursed the day of their calamity; compare Jer_9:17; 2Ch_35:25. But the correct interpretation is doubtless that which refers it to pretended prophets, priests, or diviners - who were supposed to have power to render a day one of ill omen. Such a power Job wished exerted over that unhappy night when he was born. He desired that the curses of those who had power to render a day unpropitious or unlucky,
should rest upon it.
Who are ready to raise up their mourning - This is not very intelligible, and it is evident that our translators were embarrassed
by the passage. They seem to have supposed that there was an allusion here to the practice of employing professional mourners, and that the idea is, that Job wished that they might be employed to howl over the day as inauspicious, or as a day of ill omen. The margin is, as in the Hebrew, “a leviathan.” The word rendered “ready” עתידים ‛âthı̂ydı̂ym, means properly ready, prepared; and then practiced or skillful. This is the idea here, that they were practiced or skillful in calling up the “leviathan;” see Schultens “in loc.” The word rendered in the text “mourning,” and in the margin “leviathan” לויתן lı̂vyâthân, in all other parts of the sacred Scriptures denotes an animal; see it explained in the notes at Isa_27:1, and more fully in the notes at Job 41: It usually denotes the crocodile, or some huge sea monster.
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Clarke: Job 3:8 - Let them curse it that curse the day - This translation is scarcely intelligible. I have waded through a multitude of interpretations, without being able to collect from them such a notion of the verse as could appear to me probable. Schultens, Rosenmüller, and after them Mr. Good, have labored much to make it plain. They think the custom of sorcerers who had execrations for peoples, places, things, days, etc., is here referred to; such as Balaam, Elymas, and many others were: but I cannot think that a man who knew the Divine Being and his sole government of the world so well as Job did, would make such an allusion, who must have known that such persons and their pretensions were impostors and execrable vanities. I shall give as near a translation as I can of the words, and subjoin a short paraphrase: יקבהו אררי יום העתידימערר לויתן yikkebuhu orerey yom haathidim orer livyathan; “Let them curse it who detest the day; them who are ready to raise up the leviathan.” That is, Let them curse my birthday who hate daylight, such as adulterers, murderers, thieves, and banditti, for whose practices the night is more convenient; and let them curse it who, being like me weary of life, are desperate enough to provoke the leviathan, the crocodile, to tear them to pieces. This version is nearly the same as that given by
Coverdale. Let them that curse the daye give it their curse also, then those that be ready to rayse up leviathan. By leviathan some understand the greatest and most imminent dangers; and others, the devil, whom the enchanters are desperate
enough to attempt to raise by their incantations. Calmet understands the whole to be spoken of the Atlantes, a people of Ethiopia, who curse the sun because it parches their fields and their bodies; and who fearlessly attack, kill, and eat the crocodile. This seems a good sense.
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JFB: Job 3:8 - them ...curse the day — If “mourning” be the right rendering in the latter clause of this verse, these words refer to the hired mourners of the dead (Jer_9:17). But the Hebrew for “mourning” elsewhere always denotes an animal, whether it be the crocodile or some huge serpent (Isa_27:1), such as is meant by “leviathan.” Therefore, the expression, “cursers of day,” refers to magicians, who were believed to be able by charms to make a day one of evil omen. (So Balaam, Num_22:5). This accords with Umbreit’s view (Job_3:7); or to the Ethiopians and Atlantes, who “used to curse the sun at his rising for burning up them and their country” [Herodotus]. Necromancers claimed power to control or rouse wild beasts at will, as do the Indian serpent-charmers of our day (Psa_58:5). Job does not say they had the power they claimed; but, supposing they had, may they curse the day. Schuttens renders it by supplying words as follows: - Let those that are ready for anything, call it (the day) the raiser up of leviathan, that is, of a host of evils.
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Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament: Job 3:6-9 - “Those who curse days” are magicians who know how to change days into dies infausti by their incantations. According to vulgar superstition, from which the imagery of Job_3:8 is borrowed, there was a special art of exciting the dragon, which is the enemy of sun and moon, against them both, so that, by its devouring them, total darkness prevails. The dragon is called in Hindu râhu; the Chinese, and also the natives of Algeria,
even at the present day make a wild tumult with drums and copper vessels when an eclipse of the sun or moon occurs, until the dragon will release his prey.
(Note: On the dragon râhu, that swallows up sun and moon, vid., Pott, in the Hallische Lit. Zeitschr. 1849, No. 199; on the custom of the Chinese, Käuffer, Das chinesische Volk, S. 123. A similar custom among the natives of Algeria I have read of in a newspaper (1856). Moreover, the clouds which conceal the sky the Indians represent as a serpent. It is ahi, the cloud-serpent, which Indra chases away when he divides the clouds with his lightning. Vid., Westergaard in Weber's Indischer Zeitschr. 1855, S. 417.)
Job wishes that this monster may swallow up the sun of his birth-day. If the night in which he was conceived or born is to become day, then let the stars of its twilight (i.e., the stars which, as messengers of the morning, twinkle through the twilight of dawn) become dark. It is to remain for ever dark, never behold with delight the eyelids of the dawn. בְּ רָאָה, to regale one's self with the sight of anything, refresh one's self. When the first rays of morning shoot up in the eastern sky, then the dawn raises its eyelids; they are in Sophocles's Antigone, 103, χρυσέης ἡμέρας βλέφαρον, the eyelid of the golden day, and therefore of the sun, the great eye.
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Word Biblical Commentary, Volume 17: Job 1-20 - After discussion of an alternative rendition the WBC continues as follows…It is preferable, then, to retain the Masoretic reading, even if it is “flatter” (Rowley), and see those who curse a day as “enchanters or magicians reputed to have the power to make days unlucky” (Driver), perhaps specifically by producing eclipses, which is what is referred to in the second colon. They can hardly be simply those who, like Job, curse the day of their birth (Dhorme), for such curses—being ex eventu—are by definition ineffectual. In wishing that the “cursers [ארר] of days had laid a spell [קבב]” on that night Job perhaps uses milder words (ארר “enchant, lay a magic spell on” [E. A. Speiser, “An Angelic ‘Curse’: Exodus 14:20,” JAOS 80 (1960) 198–200] and קבב “revile” [J. Scharbert, TDOT 1:415; Brichto, The Problem of “Curse,” 200–202]) than we might have supposed; in that case the meaning of קבב is like its sense at 5:3 “despise as something cursed.” Job wishes that the night of his conception had been ugly and ill-omened. It is no difficulty that it is “cursers of days” who are spoken of, for nights are parts of days; and they do not curse a particular day, but “certain days” (njb).
Leviathan usually figures in the OT as a violent sea-monster subdued by God in primeval times (Ps 74:14; Isa 27:1), but here it is plain that by incantations known to those “skilled” (עתיד) in magic the normally dormant monster is still regarded as
capable of being roused to activity (see C. H. Gordon, “Leviathan, Symbol of Evil,” P. W. Lown Institute Studies 3 [1966] 1–9). The particular activity, though not explicit, may well be the swallowing up of the sun or moon, i.e., the causing of eclipses; see T. H. Gaster, Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament (New York: Harper and Row, 1969) 787–88, for evidence of
such a belief from several cultures (and J. Day [God’s Conflict, 45] for a Ugaritic text [CTA 6.6.44–52; Gibson, 81] showing the sun and the sea-dragon to be enemies). Gaster discriminates between the popular belief in the dragon that swallows the sun and the literary mythology of the primeval monster who threatens order again in eschatological times (cf. Isa 27:1; Rev 20:1–3); it may be rather that the two ideas coalesce here (cf. further M. Fishbane, VT 21 [1971] 158–60). Leviathan is a monster that has only to be awoken from sleep or stirred into activity (עור can mean either, but not “control” [gnb] or “tame” [neb]) for its destructive power to be felt; the same verb is used in 41:2 [10] of the danger of “stirring up” Leviathan, where it is the crocodile that is depicted in mythological terms rather than the mythological creature itself. Any magician who can summon up the superhuman power of this unamiable being is a true professional. He would surely have the power to curse a day. But of course the day that Job wants to be cursed is long past, and his wish for professional assistance is entirely futile.
It is a mistake to see here Job invoking forces of chaos to destroy the created order (Habel) or articulating an “absolute and
unrestrained death wish for himself and the entire creation” (Fishbane, VT 21 [1971] 153; similarly Cox, The Triumph of Impotence, 43). As J. Léveêque puts it, “Job makes no appeal to nothingness, to primordial chaos, in order to give himself the Promethean satisfaction of seeing the whole world perish along with himself; rather he appeals to those who could, if required (העתידים), conjure up these forces from the depths. At no time does Job claim to deregulate the creation or reduce the cosmos to the same state of night as his soul experiences at this moment; it should be stressed that his malediction relates only to one particular day and one particular night” (Job et son Dieu [Paris: Gabalda, 1970] 1:336).
It might be, of course, that the skill to rouse Leviathan is only a certificate of competence Job would require of any sorcerer
he would engage to lay spells on a night. But it is perhaps more probable that rousing Leviathan is a second skill that Job would have wished employed on his behalf against the night of his conception. For if the dragon had swallowed up the moon, the night would have belonged unequivocally to the realm of the underworld and conception of a life would have been either impossible or ill-omened.[1]
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My apologies the footnote numbers didn't copy over - a questions of further information please e-mail me at a.beltlines@gmail.com
References:
Rowley Rowley, H. H., Job (NCB; Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1970)
Driver Driver, S. R. Notes on the Hebrew Text and the Topography of the Books of Samuel.*
Dhorme Dhorme, E. Le livre de Job (Paris: Gabalda, 1926), tr. H. Knight, A Commentary on the Book of Job (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1967)
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
TDOT Theological Handwörterbuch zum Alten Testament, ed. E. Jenni and C. Westermann or G. Botterweck adn H. Ringgren (eds.),
Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974.)
njb New Jerusalem Bible (1985)
i.e. id est, that is
CTA A. Herdner, Corpus des tablettes en cunéiformes alphabétiques
Gibson Gibson, J. C. L., Canannite Myths and Legends (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1978)
VT Vetus Testamentum
gnb Good News Bible = Today’s English Version
neb The New English Bible
Cox Cox, D., The Triumph of Impotence: Job and the Tradition of the Absurd (Analecta Gregoriana 212; Rome: Università Gregoriana Editrice, 1978)
[1]Clines, D. J. A. (2002). Vol. 17: Word Biblical Commentary : Job 1-20. Word Biblical Commentary (86). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.
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