# Job's wish for nonexistence becomes gratitude for birth

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH04.P032](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH04.P032/#char=1179,1258): "as a hidden untimely birth he had not been, as infants that never see the light"

The language adapts Job 3:16. The King James Version reads: 'Or as an hidden untimely birth I had not been; as infants which never saw light.' Chesterton changes Job's first person into the third person, and changes the final clause's tense and wording. This is a recognizable scriptural adaptation rather than a verbatim quotation. [Job 3:16, KJV](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10).

Its force depends on reversing the original lament. Job curses the day of his birth (3:1–3), asks why he did not die at birth (3:11), and imagines the rest he would then have shared with the dead (3:13–19). Chesterton takes that image of an existence never lived and makes it the counterfactual against which ordinary existence becomes astonishing. Job wishes he had escaped life; Chesterton pictures every living person as having escaped nonexistence. That reversal prepares the distinction between disappointed greatness and the more fundamental possibility of never having been.

The wording points particularly toward the English KJV tradition. The inspected Douay-Rheims witness instead has 'I should not be' and describes those conceived who have not seen the light. This comparison establishes verbal proximity, not the physical Bible Chesterton used. [Job 3:16, Douay-Rheims](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8300).

## Sources

- [The King James Version of the Bible](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10), Job 3:1–23, especially 3:16; Gutenberg #10 electronic witness, updated October 29, 2024; KJV translation first published 1611, subsequent textual form not established here.
- [The Bible, Douay-Rheims Version](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8300), Job 3:11–20, especially 3:16; Gutenberg #8300 electronic witness of the revised Douay-Rheims tradition, not a transcription established here as the original 1609–1610 Old Testament edition.

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