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19Then 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 is true that I have erred, my error remains with me. 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 around me. ⁷Even when I cry out, ‘Violence!’ 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 my glory from me, and taken the crown from my head. ¹⁰He breaks me down on every side, and I am gone, he has uprooted my hope like a tree. ¹¹He has kindled his wrath against me, and counts me as his adversary. ¹²His troops come on together; they have thrown up siegeworks against me, and encamp around my tent. ¹³“He has put my family far from me, and my acquaintances are wholly estranged from me. ¹⁴My relatives and my close friends have failed me; ¹⁵the guests in my house have forgotten me; my serving girls 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 myself plead with him. ¹⁷My breath is repulsive to my wife; I am loathsome to my own family. 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 cling 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, never satisfied with my flesh?