Job 10

¹ Since I have lost all taste for life, I will give free rein to my complaints; I shall let my embittered soul speak out.

² I shall say to God, ‘Do not condemn me, but tell me the reason for your assault.

³ Is it right for you to injure me, cheapening the work of your own hands and abetting the schemes of the wicked?

⁴ Have you got human eyes, do you see as mankind sees?

⁵ Is your life mortal like man’s, do your years pass as men’s days pass?

⁶ You, who inquire into my fault, and investigate my sins,

⁷ you know very well that I am innocent, and that no one can rescue me from your hand.

⁸ Your own hands shaped me, modelled me; and would you now have second thoughts and destroy me?

⁹ You modelled me remember, as clay is modelled, and would you reduce me now to dust?

¹⁰ Did you not pour me out like milk, and curdle me then like cheese;[*a]

¹¹ clothe me with skin and flesh, and weave me of bone and sinew?

¹² And then you endowed me with life, watched each breath of mine with tender care.

¹³ Yet, after all, you were dissembling; biding your time, I know,

¹⁴ to mark if I should sin and to let no fault of mine go uncensured.

¹⁵ Woe to me, if I am guilty if I am innocent, I dare not lift my head, so wholly abject, so drunk with pain am I.

¹⁶ And if I make a stand, like a lion you hunt me down, adding to the tale of your triumphs.

¹⁷ You attack, and attack me again, with stroke on stroke of your fury, relentlessly your fresh troops assail me.

¹⁸ ‘Why did you bring me out of the womb? I should have perished then, unseen by any eye,

¹⁹ a being that had never been, to be carried from womb to grave.

²⁰ The days of my life are few enough: turn your eyes away, leave me a little joy,

²¹ before I go to the place of no return, the land of murk and deep shadow,

²² where dimness and disorder hold sway, and light itself is like the dead of night.’