This reads like total cynicism and complete despair. Like a treatise on the hopelessness of being a human being. One could almost imagine this as a pre-suicide note in a television police drama. And it is Job who is talking: Job, our biblical hero.

What does it mean to be a human being? A birth, a troubled and short life, and a death. A temporary pain to oneself and to others. “Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” wrote Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century. And this chapter seems to echo those sentiments.