Job 19

Job Replies: My Redeemer Lives

¹Then Job answered and said:

²“How long will you torment me

and break me in pieces with words?

³These ten times you have cast reproach upon me;

are you not ashamed to wrong me?

⁴And even if it be true that I have erred,

my error remains with myself.

⁵If indeed you magnify yourselves against me

and make my disgrace an argument against me,

⁶know then that God has put me in the wrong

and closed his net about me.

⁷Behold, I cry out, ‘Violence!’ but I am not answered;

I call for help, but there is no justice.

⁸He has walled up my way, so that I cannot pass,

and he has set darkness upon my paths.

⁹He has stripped from me my glory

and taken the crown from my head.

¹⁰He breaks me down on every side, and I am gone,

and my hope has he pulled up like a tree.

¹¹He has kindled his wrath against me

and counts me as his adversary.

¹²His troops come on together;

they have cast up their siege ramp against me

and encamp around my tent.

¹³“He has put my brothers far from me,

and those who knew me are wholly estranged from me.

¹⁴My relatives have failed me,

my close friends have forgotten me.

¹⁵The guests in my house and my maidservants count me as a stranger;

I have become a foreigner in their eyes.

¹⁶I call to my servant, but he gives me no answer;

I must plead with him with my mouth for mercy.

¹⁷My breath is strange to my wife,

and I am a stench to the children of my own mother.

¹⁸Even young children despise me;

when I rise they talk against me.

¹⁹All my intimate friends abhor me,

and those whom I loved have turned against me.

²⁰My bones stick to my skin and to my flesh,

and I have escaped by the skin of my teeth.

²¹Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, O you my friends,

for the hand of God has touched me!

²²Why do you, like God, pursue me?

Why are you not satisfied with my flesh?

²³“Oh that my words were written!

Oh that they were inscribed in a book!

²⁴Oh that with an iron pen and lead

they were engraved in the rock forever!

²⁵For I know that my Redeemer lives,

and at the last he will stand upon the earth.

²⁶And after my skin has been thus destroyed,

yet in my flesh I shall see God,

²⁷whom I shall see for myself,

and my eyes shall behold, and not another.

My heart faints within me!

²⁸If you say, ‘How we will pursue him!’

and, ‘The root of the matter is found in him,’

²⁹be afraid of the sword,

for wrath brings the punishment of the sword,

that you may know there is a judgment.”