a stillborn child: a baby lost through miscarriage or stillbirth, pictured as one that falls from the womb before its time
Nephel comes from the ordinary Hebrew verb meaning "to fall," and it names what falls from the womb too soon: a baby lost through miscarriage or stillbirth. It is a rare word, appearing only three times, and in every case it points to the same thing, a child that dies before or at birth and never draws a breath of open air. Hebrew had a separate word for the parent's side of that loss, the verb שָׁכֹל, "to be bereaved of children"; nephel names the child itself rather than the grief.
What startles a modern reader is how the writers use it. In all three places the stillborn child is imagined as better off than the living. Job, cursing the day he was born, wishes he had been a hidden stillbirth instead (Job 3:16). Ecclesiastes says such a child is better off than a man who has wealth, a hundred children, and long years but no joy in them and no honorable burial (Ecclesiastes 6:3). In Psalm 58:8 it becomes a curse flung at corrupt judges, that they would melt away like a stillborn baby that never sees the sun. The line "never saw the sun" or "never saw the light" runs through all three.
The logic behind this rests on an old and bleak strand of wisdom: a child who never lived also never suffered, and so escaped the misery the living sufferer cannot. It is close kin to Jeremiah cursing the day of his own birth. The point is the weight of living, not a low view of the child, who is still spoken of tenderly as resting, and even as having a name, though it is "covered in darkness."
When Greek-speaking Jews translated these verses they reached for ἔκτρωμα, "an untimely birth," the very word Paul later applied to himself in 1 Corinthians 15:8.