Job
10 “My soul certainly feels a loathing toward my life.+
I will give vent to my concern about myself.*
I will speak in the bitterness of my soul!
2 I shall say to God,* ‘Do not pronounce me wicked.
Cause me to know why it is that you are contending with me.
3 Is it good for you that you should do wrong,+
That you should reject [the product of] the hard work of your hands,*+
And that upon the counsel of wicked ones you should actually beam?
5 Are your days like the days of mortal man,+
Or your years just like the days of an able-bodied man,
6 That you should try to find my error
And for my sin you should keep looking?+
7 This in spite of your own knowledge that I am not in the wrong,+
And there is no one delivering out of your own hand?+
8 Your own hands have shaped me so that they made me+
In entirety round about, and yet you would swallow me up.
13 And these things you have concealed in your heart.
I well know that these things are with you.
14 If I have sinned+ and you have kept watching me
And of my error you do not hold me innocent;+
15 If I am actually in the wrong, too bad for me!+
And [if] I am actually in the right, I may not raise my head,+
Glutted with dishonor and saturated with affliction.+
16 And [if] it acts haughtily,+ like a young lion you will hunt for me,+
And you will again show yourself marvelous in my case.
17 You will bring forth new witnesses* of yours in front of me,
And you will make your vexation with me greater;
Hardship after hardship is with me.*
18 So why from a womb did you bring me out?+
Could I have expired,* that not even an eye could see me,
19 There as though I had not come to be I should have become;
From the belly to the burial place I should have been brought.’
20 Are not my days few?+ Let him leave off,
Let him turn his gaze from me, that I may brighten up+ a little
21 Before I go away—and I shall not come back+—
To the land of darkness and deep shadow,*+
22 To the land of obscurity like gloom, of deep shadow
And disorder, where it beams no more than gloom does.”