Job 10

¹ I loathe my life. I will give myself up to complaint; I will speak from the bitterness of my soul.

² I will say to God: Do not put me in the wrong! Let me know why you oppose me.

³ Is it a pleasure for you to oppress, to spurn the work of your hands, and smile on the plan of the wicked?

⁴ Have you eyes of flesh? Do you see as man sees?

⁵ Are your days as the days of a mortal, and are your years as a man's lifetime,

⁶ That you seek for guilt in me and search after my sins,

⁷ Even though you know that I am not wicked, and that none can deliver me out of your hand?

⁸ Your hands have formed me and fashioned me; will you then turn and destroy me?

⁹ Oh, remember that you fashioned me from clay! Will you then bring me down to dust again?

¹⁰ Did you not pour me out as milk, and thicken me like cheese?

¹¹ With skin and flesh you clothed me, with bones and sinews knit me together.

¹² Grace and favor you granted me, and your providence has preserved my spirit.

¹³ Yet these things you have hidden in your heart; I know that they are your purpose:

¹⁴ If I should sin, you would keep a watch against me, and from my guilt you would not absolve me.

¹⁵ If I should be wicked, alas for me! if righteous, I dare not hold up my head, filled with ignominy and sodden with affliction!

¹⁶ Should it lift up, you hunt me like a lion: repeatedly you show your wondrous power against me,

¹⁷ You renew your attack upon me and multiply your harassment of me; in waves your troops come against me.

¹⁸ Why then did you bring me forth from the womb? I should have died and no eye have seen me.

¹⁹ I should be as though I had never lived; I should have been taken from the womb to the grave.

²⁰ Are not the days of my life few? Let me alone, that I may recover a little

²¹ Before I go whence I shall not return, to the land of darkness and of gloom,

²² The black, disordered land where darkness is the only light.