Job 19

¹Then Job answered:

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 humiliation 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 aloud, 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 siegeworks against me,

and encamp round about my tent.

¹³“He has put my brethren far from me,

and my acquaintances are wholly estranged from me.

¹⁴My kinsfolk and my close friends have failed me;

¹⁵the guests in my house have forgotten me;

my maidservants count me as a stranger;

I have become an alien in their eyes.

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

I must beseech him with my mouth.

¹⁷I am repulsive to my wife,

loathsome to the sons 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 cleave to my skin and to my flesh,

and I have escaped by the skin of my teeth.

²¹Have pity on me, have pity 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 graven in the rock for ever!

²⁵For I know that my Redeemer lives,

and at last he will stand upon the earth;

²⁶and after my skin has been thus destroyed,

then from my flesh I shall see God,

²⁷whom I shall see on my side,

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.”