Bible Strands
Job 3:11
Why did I not perish at birth; why did I not die as I came from the womb?
Berean Standard Bible
Follow its threads on the canvas →
Study note
Setting — Job speaks these words in a solitary lament, addressing no human audience but voicing his despair immediately after cursing the night of his conception.
The words — The Hebrew לָמָּה (lammah) poses the question "why?" while אָמוּת ('amut) means "did I die," structuring the verse as a rhetorical inquiry into premature death.
The thread — This wish to have perished at birth reappears in Job 10:18, and the motif of exiting the womb anchors the psalmist’s recollection of divine care in Psalms 22:9.
Why it lands — The verse demands the reader confront the unvarnished text of a man wishing he had never lived, stripping away comfort to examine how profound suffering can invert the value of life itself.
Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.
The Hebrew words
King James Version
Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?
Cross-references
- Job 10:18 Why then did You bring me from the womb? Oh, that I had died, and no eye had seen me!
- Isaiah 46:3 “Listen to Me, O house of Jacob, all the remnant of the house of Israel, who have been sustained from the womb, carried along since birth.
- Psalms 22:9 Yet You brought me forth from the womb; You made me secure at my mother’s breast.
- Psalms 58:8 Like a slug that dissolves in its slime, like a woman’s stillborn child, may they never see the sun.
- Psalms 71:6 I have leaned on You since birth; You pulled me from my mother’s womb. My praise is always for You.
- Psalms 139:13 For You formed my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother’s womb.
- Jeremiah 15:10 Woe to me, my mother, that you have borne me, a man of strife and conflict in all the land. I have neither lent nor borrowed, yet everyone curses me.
- Hosea 9:14 Give them, O LORD—what will You give? Give them wombs that miscarry and breasts that dry up!