Job 24:17
For the morning is to them even as the shadow of death: if one know them, they are in the terrors of the shadow of death. For the morning is to them even as the shadow of death: if one know them, they are in the terrors of the shadow of death.
The verse belongs to the debate between Job and his three friends about his afflictions, forming part of Job's own argument about human suffering. It stands in Job 22-24 within Job 8-27, where his friends have ceased troubling him with constant accusations and Job speaks his last reply. Unable to find God to plead with face to face, Job in chapter 24 pleads his cause before his friends. In the chapter he describes wicked men who remove landmarks, violently take away flocks, drive away the ass of the fatherless, take the widow's ox for a pledge, and turn the needy out of the way, setting their lives against his own life of upright dealing with others.
The chapter is his complete justification of himself and vindication of his own self-righteousness. The claims of Job's friends elsewhere in the book are often true in general but are wrongly applied to his affliction. The verse describes the darkness and terror surrounding those who commit evil under cover of night, for whom daylight is as frightening as the shadow of death and being recognized brings them into terror. For people who rebel against the light, morning is like the shadow of death because their resistance to truth makes light unwelcome and fearful to them.