Job’s Plea to God

1My soul is weary of my life. I will release my words against myself. I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.

2I will say to God: Do not be willing to condemn me. Reveal to me why you judge me this way.

3Does it seem good to you, if you find fault with me and oppress me, the work of your own hands, and assist the counsel of the impious?

4Do you have bodily eyes? Or, just as man sees, will you see?

5Are your days just like the days of man, and are your years as the times of humans,

6so that you would inquire about my iniquity and examine my sin?

7And you know that I have done nothing impious, yet there is no one who can deliver from your hand.

8Your hands have made me and formed me all around, and, in this way, do you suddenly throw me away?

9Remember, I ask you, that you have fashioned me like clay, and you will reduce me to dust.

10Have you not extracted me like milk and curdled me like cheese?

11You have clothed me with skin and flesh. You have put me together with bones and nerves.

12You have assigned to me life and mercy, and your visitation has preserved my spirit.

13Though you may conceal this in your heart, yet I know that you remember everything.

14If I have sinned, and you have spared me for an hour, why do you not endure me to be clean from my iniquity?

15And if I should be impious, woe to me, and if I should be just, I will not lift up my head, being drenched with affliction and misery.

16And because of pride, you will seize me like a lioness, and having returned, you torment me to an extraordinary degree.

17You renew your testimony against me, and you multiply your wrath against me, and these punishments make war within me.

18Why did you lead me out of the womb? If only I had been consumed, so that no eye would ever see me!

19I should have been as if I had not been: transferred from the womb to the tomb.

20Will not my few days be completed soon? Release me, therefore, so that I may lament my sorrows a little,

21before I depart and return no more to a land that is dark and covered with the fog of death,

22a land of misery and darkness, where the shadow of death, and nothing else but everlasting horror, dwells.