What Does Job 3:10 Mean in the King James?
Because it shut not up the doors of my mother’s womb, nor hid sorrow from mine eyes.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
Here, birth is not the opening that saves a life; it is the door left open to sorrow.
THE MEANING
This verse gives voice to the wish that the night had sealed the womb and kept the speaker from entering a life where sorrow is visible. The closed door would have been a boundary against anguish, but it never closed.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that birth itself guarantees protection from suffering; being alive does not mean sorrow has been kept outside.
THE ROOT
סָגַר
sāgar
GROWS FROM
סגר
To close, shut, or enclose.
“shut” in this verse is sāgar. The verb for shutting the womb’s doors belongs to a root that can also describe enclosing someone within a boundary. The word itself does not say whether that boundary prevents entry or holds someone inside; what is enclosed gives the closure its force.
ALSO GROWS
shut: Close or shut.
This is the verb used for the womb’s doors: they do not close to prevent birth.
vayyisgor: Enclose someone within a boundary.
The same root describes the LORD shutting Noah inside the ark, where closure holds a life within.
עָמָל
ʿāmāl
GROWS FROM
עמל
Toil or labor; by extension, trouble and hardship.
The word translated “sorrow” also carries the sense of grinding toil and trouble. It presents anguish as lived hardship, not only a feeling inside the speaker.
ALSO GROWS
toil: Labor or strenuous effort.
This sense brings the weight of ongoing hardship into the verse’s sorrow.
trouble: Difficulty, misery, or distress.
This is the root’s sense in the verse: the trouble the speaker cannot keep from sight.
וַיַּסְתֵּר
vayyastēr
GROWS FROM
סתר
To hide or conceal, to keep out of sight.
“hid” in this verse is vayyastēr. The verb imagines sorrow as something that might have been concealed from the eyes. The verse’s grief is sharpened by the failure of that concealment: the speaker sees the hardship that the womb’s closed door might have kept beyond reach.
ALSO GROWS
conceal: Hide or keep something from view.
This is the action the verse says did not occur: sorrow was not hidden from the speaker’s eyes.
hiding place: A concealed place or refuge.
The branch makes concealment concrete as shelter from exposure, a shelter this verse says did not hold.
THE PATTERN
Birth begins life without guaranteeing shelter from suffering.
And when the LORD saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb: but Rachel was barren.Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world.THE THREAD
And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the LORD shut him in.The same root, סגר (sāgar, shut or enclose), describes the LORD shutting Noah inside the ark. Here, the womb’s doors do not close to prevent birth; in Genesis, closure holds a life within. The shared word makes the force of a boundary visible through what it keeps in or keeps out.
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