Job
19 But Job answered
2 “How long will you make my soul miserable
and beat me down with phrases?
3 This is ten times you have been humiliating me,
you are not embarrassed to keep saying spiteful things about me.
4 But even take it that I really have made a misstep:
it is with me my misstep is lodged.
5 If you are really taking high ground with me
and proving my ignominy against me,
6 Know that it is God has done the unfair thing by me
and set his toils round me.
7 Suppose I cry murder, I am not answered;
I shout an appeal and there is no administration of justice.
8 He has walled off my road and I cannot pass;
he has spread darkness over my paths.
9 He has stripped my honor off me
and taken away the crown from my head.
10 He tears down every side of me, and I am gone,
and he has cleared away my hope like a piece of timber.
11 He is angry with me
and thinks of me as he does of his foes.
13* He has set my brothers to standing aloof from me,
and my acquaintances are altogether estranged from me.
15 And my serving-maids think me a stranger,
I seem to them a foreigner.
16 I have called my slave and he does not answer—
I beg him for favors with my own mouth.
17 My breath is hateful to my wife
and I smell foul to the sons of my body.
18 Even children think nothing of me;
let me stand up, they talk at me.
19 All my bosom friends abhor me,
and whom I loved have turned on me.
21 Be kind to me, be kind to me, you friends of mine,
because God’s hand has touched me.
22 Why is it you chase me down as Deity does
and can never get enough of my flesh?
23 O that what I have to say were written down,
were registered in a document,
24 With iron pen and lead,
carved in rock forevermore!
26 And behind my skin, which has borne this,
out of my flesh I shall behold God,
27 Whom I shall behold for myself;
it will be my eyes that saw, and not a stranger—
my heart is spent in my bosom!
28 When you think ‘What of his shall we chase down
and find ground for a case in him?’