¹⁸ “‘Why, then, did you deliver me from my mother’s womb?
    Why didn’t you let me die at birth?

¹⁴ Yet I curse the day I was born!
    May no one celebrate the day of my birth.
¹⁵ I curse the messenger who told my father,
    “Good news—you have a son!”
¹⁶ Let him be destroyed like the cities of old
    that the Lord overthrew without mercy.
Terrify him all day long with battle shouts,
¹⁷     because he did not kill me at birth.
Oh, that I had died in my mother’s womb,
    that her body had been my grave!
¹⁸ Why was I ever born?
    My entire life has been filled
    with trouble, sorrow, and shame.

“What sorrow is mine, my mother.
    Oh, that I had died at birth!
    I am hated everywhere I go.
I am neither a lender who threatens to foreclose
    nor a borrower who refuses to pay—
    yet they all curse me.”

¹⁰ “But when people die, their strength is gone.
    They breathe their last, and then where are they?

²⁰ But the wicked will be blinded.
    They will have no escape.
    Their only hope is death.”

¹⁰ Curse that day for failing to shut my mother’s womb,
    for letting me be born to see all this trouble.

¹¹ “Why wasn’t I born dead?
    Why didn’t I die as I came from the womb?