Job continues his bitter lament by wishing for the complete erasure of the night he was conceived. He hopes that specific night will be swallowed by an absolute and endless darkness, without a single spark of light to break the gloom or signal the arrival of morning.
He begins by asking for the stars that appear during the twilight hours, whether at the very beginning and end of the night [אבן עזרא, מצודת ציון] or during the deep darkness of the night itself [רש״י, ביאור שטיינזלץ], to go dark. The primary approach among commentators is that Job is cursing the large, bright stars that normally twinkle during this time, demanding their light be put out. Building on this, [תקות אנוש] notes that this curse also includes the moon, aiming for a darkness so total that travelers would be completely unable to find their way. Taking it a step further, [אלשיך] explains that Job wants to entirely erase this night from existence. By preventing it from connecting to the following day, the night would be completely removed from the normal cycle of time.
The imagery then shifts to a desperate, unfulfilled waiting for light. The night itself is pictured as a living entity, hoping and waiting for the morning sun to finally arrive and bring its darkness to a close, but the sun simply will not rise [מצודת דוד, מלבי״ם, ביאור שטיינזלץ]. Offering a different perspective, [תקות אנוש] suggests that it is not the night doing the waiting, but rather a person waking from sleep. This person expects the daylight to appear as usual, only to discover that the heavy darkness has not lifted.
The thought concludes with a striking poetic picture of the eastern sky just before sunrise. The primary approach among commentators is that the breaking of dawn is compared to an opening eye, with the very first rays of morning light acting as eyelids opening to the day [אבן עזרא, מצודת ציון]. Going deeper into this metaphor, [מלבי״ם] and [ביאור שטיינזלץ] describe the night as a blind creature. Every morning, this blind night is granted a brief moment of sight through the borrowed eyelids of the dawn. Job curses that specific night to remain trapped in its blindness, never allowing its closed eyes to be opened by the morning light. While [רש״י] simply understands this imagery as basic rays of light, [תקות אנוש] disagrees with the idea of giving human features to the dawn. Instead, he argues that the eyelids belong to an actual person opening their eyes in the morning. According to this view, Job is wishing that human eyes will never again wake up to see the morning light of that day.