| 1 | Then Job answered: |
| 2 | “How long will you torment me, and break me in pieces with words? |
| 3 | These ten times you have cast reproach upon me; are you not ashamed to wrong me? |
| 4 | And even if it is true that I have erred, my error remains with me. |
| 5 | If indeed you magnify yourselves against me, and make my humiliation an argument against me, |
| 6 | know then that God has put me in the wrong, and closed his net around me. |
| 7 | Even when I cry out, ‘Violence!’ I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice. |
| 8 | He has walled up my way so that I cannot pass, and he has set darkness upon my paths. |
| 9 | He has stripped my glory from me, and taken the crown from my head. |
| 10 | He breaks me down on every side, and I am gone, he has uprooted my hope like a tree. |
| 11 | He has kindled his wrath against me, and counts me as his adversary. |
| 12 | His troops come on together; they have thrown up siegeworks against me, and encamp around my tent. |
| 13 | “He has put my family far from me, and my acquaintances are wholly estranged from me. |
| 14 | My relatives and my close friends have failed me; |
| 15 | the guests in my house have forgotten me; my serving girls count me as a stranger; I have become an alien in their eyes. |
| 16 | I call to my servant, but he gives me no answer; I must myself plead with him. |
| 17 | My breath is repulsive to my wife; I am loathsome to my own family. |
| 18 | Even young children despise me; when I rise, they talk against me. |
| 19 | All my intimate friends abhor me, and those whom I loved have turned against me. |
| 20 | My bones cling to my skin and to my flesh, and I have escaped by the skin of my teeth. |
| 21 | Have pity on me, have pity on me, O you my friends, for the hand of God has touched me! |
| 22 | Why do you, like God, pursue me, never satisfied with my flesh? |
| 23 | “O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book! |
| 24 | O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever! |
| 25 | For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; |
| 26 | and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, |
| 27 | whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me! |
| 28 | If you say, ‘How we will persecute him!’ and, ‘The root of the matter is found in him’; |
| 29 | be afraid of the sword, for wrath brings the punishment of the sword, so that you may know there is a judgment.” |