1Then Job answered and said,
2"How long will you torment me, and break me in pieces with words?"
3"Ten times now you have insulted me. You are not ashamed to treat me as a stranger."
4"And if it is true that I have gone wrong, my mistake is my own concern."
5"If you really will make yourselves great against me, and use my disgrace as an argument against me,"
6"then know this: it is God who has thrown me down, and it is he who has closed his net around me."
7"Look, I cry out that I am wronged, but no one hears me. I call aloud, but there is no justice."
8"He has walled up my road so that I cannot get through. He has put darkness on my paths."
9"He has stripped my glory from me, and taken the crown off my head."
10"He has broken me down on every side, and I am gone. He has pulled up my hope like a tree."
11"He has also set his anger burning against me, and he counts me as one of his enemies."
12"His troops come together. They build a road up against me, and camp all around my tent."
13"He has put my brothers far away from me. The people I knew have truly become strangers to me."
14"My relatives have failed me, and my close friends have forgotten me."
15"Those who live in my house, and my servant girls, treat me as a stranger. In their eyes I am a foreigner."
16"I called my servant, and he gave me no answer. I had to beg him with my own mouth."
17"My breath is strange to my wife, though I begged for the sake of my own children."
18"Even young children despised me. When I stood up, they spoke against me."
19"All my closest friends hated me, and those I loved have turned against me."
20"My bones stick to my skin and to my flesh, and I have escaped with the skin of my teeth."
21"Have pity on me, have pity on me, my friends, for the hand of God has touched me."
22"Why do you hunt me down as God does? Why are you not satisfied with my flesh?"
23"Oh, that my words were written down. Oh, that they were set down in a book,"
24"cut with an iron pen and filled with lead in the rock for ever."
25"For I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the last day he will stand upon the earth."
26"And though worms destroy this body after my skin is gone, yet in my flesh I will see God."
27"I myself will see him. My own eyes will look at him, and not another's. Though my inward parts are worn away within me,"
28"you should say, 'Why do we hunt him down, since the root of the matter is found in me?'"
29"Be afraid of the sword, for anger brings the punishments of the sword, so that you may know there is a judgment."