Because it shut not up the doors of my [mother's] womb, nor hid sorrow from mine eyes.
Ver. 10. Because it shut not up the doors of my mother's womb] Lest this curse should seem causeless, and he mad without reason, he telleth you here why he thus poureth out his passion; and complaineth so heavily against the day of his birth and night of his conception, which yet were harmless, and had not deserved to be thus charged, cursed. "Because it shut not up," &c. But how could the night do that? Is it not of God alone to shut or open the womb? Genesis 20:18; Genesis 29:31. And was it not he that took David thence? Psalms 18:23. This Job could tell well enough at another time, but now he is quite out of all reason; beating himself with his passions, as the lion doth with his own tail; yea, like some sullen bird in a cage, he could almost find in his heart to beat himself to death. We use to say, - Res est ingeniosa dolor, Grief is an ingenious thing; yet it maketh a man foolish (the excess of it), as it did Job here; yea, it maketh a wise man mad, as Solomon saith of oppression, Ecclesiastes 7:7, and we see it exemplified in Job, especially if the words be thus read, as they may, Because he (that is, God) shut not up the doors, &c.
Nor hid sorrow from mine eyes] In Scripture, to see good or evil is to feel it, Psalms 34:12 Jer 17:6 Isa 65:16 Job 33:17. He meaneth, that he had missed those evils which now he met with since his coming into the world, if those doors, being shut, had shut him out of the world. Man is no sooner born than born to trouble, Job 5:7, yea, man that is born (or conceived) of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble, Job 14:1. Miserable he is even as soon as he is warm in the womb, as David phraseth it, Psalms 51:5. If he live to see the light, he comes crying into the world, and an untimely birth may be better than he, Ecclesiastes 5:3. The Hebrews call him Enosh, that is, sorry man; or doleful, miserable, and desperately diseased man, whose living is but to lie a dying. The Greeks, when they would set forth one extremely wretched, they call him πρισανθρωπον, thrice a man, that is, thrice miserable. And, What is man? saith Seneca (Ad Mar. cap. 11). He answereth, Morbidum, putre, cassum, a fletu vitam auspicatum; a diseased, rotten, empty thing, beginning his life with tears, as if he wept to think upon what a shore of trouble he is landed; or rather, into what a sea of sorrows he is launching; not unlike the Straits of Magellan, a sea of that nature, say geographers, that which way soever a man bend his course, he shall be sure to have the wind against him.