Job 7

¹“Do not human beings have a hard service on earth,

and are not their days like the days of a laborer?

²Like a slave who longs for the shadow,

and like laborers who look for their wages,

³so I am allotted months of emptiness,

and nights of misery are apportioned to me.

⁴When I lie down I say, ‘When shall I rise?’

But the night is long,

and I am full of tossing until dawn.

⁵My flesh is clothed with worms and dirt;

my skin hardens, then breaks out again.

⁶My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,

and come to their end without hope.

⁷“Remember that my life is a breath;

my eye will never again see good.

⁸The eye that beholds me will see me no more;

while your eyes are upon me, I shall be gone.

⁹As the cloud fades and vanishes,

so those who go down to Sheol do not come up;

¹⁰they return no more to their houses,

nor do their places know them any more.

¹¹“Therefore I will not restrain my mouth;

I will speak in the anguish of my spirit;

I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.

¹²Am I the Sea, or the Dragon,

that you set a guard over me?

¹³When I say, ‘My bed will comfort me,

my couch will ease my complaint,’

¹⁴then you scare me with dreams

and terrify me with visions,

¹⁵so that I would choose strangling

and death rather than this body.

¹⁶I loathe my life; I would not live forever.

Let me alone, for my days are a breath.

¹⁷What are human beings, that you make so much of them,

that you set your mind on them,

¹⁸visit them every morning,

test them every moment?

¹⁹Will you not look away from me for a while,

let me alone until I swallow my spittle?

²⁰If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of humanity?

Why have you made me your target?

Why have I become a burden to you?

²¹Why do you not pardon my transgression

and take away my iniquity?

For now I shall lie in the earth;

you will seek me, but I shall not be.”