blackness that blots out the day: a dread darkness so total it swallows daylight (a word of genuinely uncertain meaning)
This word appears only once in the entire Hebrew Bible, in the poem where Job curses the day he was born. He calls on every kind of darkness to reclaim that day: he wants it swallowed by darkness (חֹשֶׁךְ) and deep gloom (צַלְמָוֶת), buried under cloud, and finally overwhelmed by this word. Whatever it means, its job in the line is to blot out the light of a single day.
Most modern Bibles render it "blackness of the day" or "what blackens the day," and that is the safe, responsible choice: it fits the piled-up darkness around it and the whole thrust of Job's curse. But it rests on thin ground. There is no other Hebrew word quite like this one, and the sense of "blackness" is borrowed from a similar word in a neighboring language rather than proven from Hebrew itself.
Three readings genuinely compete, and the ancient translators already disagreed:
- Blackness or darkening of the day, the modern default, picturing an eclipse or a storm that turns daytime dark.
- Bitterness of the day, taking the first letter as a small word meaning "like" and the rest from the word for "be bitter" (מָרַר), giving "like the most bitter of days." This is how the oldest translations, the Latin, the Syriac, and the Aramaic paraphrases, understood it.
- Day-demons, malevolent powers that strike in daylight, a reading from the medieval Jewish scholars Rashi and Ibn Ezra and revived by some modern scholars, who tie it to a dreaded destroyer named elsewhere (קֶטֶב).
The honest bottom line is that no one can be certain. The word was already obscure by the time of the earliest translations, and its meaning cannot be recovered with confidence. Reading it as darkness works well enough for the flow of the poem, but the exact sense should be held loosely.
What כִּמְרִירֵי יוֹם means in Job 3:5 is unresolved, and the disagreement runs all the way down to how the word is formed. The question is whether the first letter belongs to the word itself, giving a noun from a proposed root כמר "be dark" (hence "blackness/darkening of the day"), or is the separate comparative particle כְּ "like" prefixed to a noun from מרר "be bitter" (hence "like the bitter things of the day"). A third line reads the phrase as personified "day-demons." The Old Greek does not render the word at all, so it was already obscure in antiquity; there is a modern translational default but no etymological consensus. The demonic reading in particular hinges on taking מְרִירִי in Deuteronomy 32:24 (קֶטֶב מְרִירִי) as a demon name parallel to Resheph, which van der Toorn judges "without solid foundation."
- majorityBlackness or darkening of the day. A noun from a proposed Hebrew root כמר "be dark," inferred chiefly from the Syriac cognate "be black"; this is the standard modern rendering (NRSV, ESV, NJPS "what blackens the day") and fits the surrounding darkness imagery, though it would be the only occurrence of that supposed root.; BDB, s.v. כמר; Norman C. Habel, The Book of Job (Old Testament Library, 1985); David J. A. Clines, Job 1-20 (Word Biblical Commentary 17, 1989), 71 and Notes at 3:5
- minorityBitternesses of the day. Reading the first letter as the comparative particle "like/as" and the remainder from מרר "be bitter," giving "like the most bitter of days"; this is the reading of the Vulgate, Peshitta, and Targum of Job, and has the best claim to the earliest attested understanding.; Vulgate (Jerome), Peshitta, and the Targum of Job on 3:5; Marvin H. Pope, Job (Anchor Bible 15, 1973), 29
- minorityDay-demons, malevolent powers that strike by day. Proposed by the medieval commentators Rashi and Ibn Ezra and argued fully from Mesopotamian and Mandaic "demons of time"; it depends on reading מְרִירִי in Deuteronomy 32:24 as a demon's name, which remains contested.; Scott B. Noegel, Job iii 5 in the Light of Mesopotamian Demons of Time, Vetus Testamentum 57 (2007): 556-562; Robert Gordis, The Asseverative Kaph in Ugaritic and Hebrew, Journal of the American Oriental Society 63 (1943): 176-178