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Job Replies: My Complaint Is Just

6Then Job answered:

Job: My Suffering Is without End

7‘Do not human beings have a hard service on earth,
   and are not their days like the days of a labourer?
² Like a slave who longs for the shadow,
   and like labourers who look for their wages,
³ so I am allotted months of emptiness,
   and nights of misery are apportioned to me.
⁴ When I lie down I say, “When shall I rise?”
   But the night is long,
   and I am full of tossing until dawn.
⁵ My flesh is clothed with worms and dirt;
   my skin hardens, then breaks out again.
⁶ My 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.
⁸ The eye that beholds me will see me no more;
   while your eyes are upon me, I shall be gone.
⁹ As the cloud fades and vanishes,
   so those who go down to Sheol do not come up;
¹⁰ they 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.
¹² Am I the Sea, or the Dragon,
   that you set a guard over me?
¹³ When I say, “My bed will comfort me,
   my couch will ease my complaint”,
¹⁴ then you scare me with dreams
   and terrify me with visions,
¹⁵ so that I would choose strangling
   and death rather than this body.
¹⁶ I loathe my life; I would not live for ever.
   Let me alone, for my days are a breath.
¹⁷ What are human beings, that you make so much of them,
   that you set your mind on them,
¹⁸ visit them every morning,
   test them every moment?
¹⁹ Will you not look away from me for a while,
   let me alone until I swallow my spittle?
²⁰ If 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?
²¹ Why 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.’