Jeremiah 20:14
13 Sing to the Lord! Praise the Lord! For he rescues the oppressed from the clutches of evildoers. 14 Cursed be the day I was born! May that day not be blessed when my mother gave birth to me. 15 Cursed be the man who made my father very glad when he brought him the news that a baby boy had been born to him! 16 May that man be like the cities that the Lord destroyed without showing any mercy. May he hear a cry of distress in the morning and a battle cry at noon. 17 For he did not kill me before I came from the womb, making my pregnant mother’s womb my grave forever.
Job 3:1
1 After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day he was born. 2 Job spoke up and said: 3 “Let the day on which I was born perish, and the night that said, ‘A man has been conceived!’ 4 That day—let it be darkness; let not God on high regard it, nor let light shine on it! 5 Let darkness and the deepest shadow claim it; let a cloud settle on it; let whatever blackens the day terrify it.
Notes and References
"... the author of Job transforms the Jeremiah material into sentiments that go even beyond the radical towards the surreal or absurd. The confessions of Jeremiah provide the best starting point for this discussion and it is perhaps most instructive to start with the most widely noted and closest parallel, that of Jeremiah 20:14–18 (the last confession) with Job 3:1–12 ... The clear parallel here is in the cursing of the day of birth - Job 3:1 is a third-person description, but then 3:3a is Job’s own complaint. In 3:4a the “darkness” of the day forms a parallel to the day not being blessed in Jeremiah 20:14. Job 3:8a uses two words for “curse” ..."
Dell, Katharine "'Cursed be the Day I was Born!': Job and Jeremiah Revisited" in Dell, Katharine Julia, and Will Kynes (eds.) Reading Job Intertextually (pp. 106-117) Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013