"There The Wicked Cease From Troubling"

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Context: Job, in the land of Uz, a good man in the eyes of the Lord, is blessed with seven sons and three daughters and much wealth. Satan, in a challenge to the Creator, declares that Job will curse God if he experiences adversity. God, taking up the challenge, grants Satan permission to test the righteous man. When Job loses his wealth and children but does not curse God, Satan is allowed to inflict him with boils. In agony and with his wife urging him to curse God and die and his friends weeping for his condition, Job raises not a word against the Almighty. Instead, he laments the day of his birth and ponders the state of death:

Why died I not from the womb? . . .
For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest,
With kings and counselors of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves; . . .
Or as a hidden untimely birth I had not been; as infants which never saw light.
There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest.

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