Zophar: Destruction Awaits the Wicked

1Then Zophar the Naamathite answered by saying:

2In response, various thoughts succeed one another in me, and my mind moves quickly through different ideas.

3The teaching you use to admonish me, I will hear, and the spirit of my understanding will respond for me.

4This, I know, is from the beginning, from the time that man was set over the earth:

5that the praise of the impious shall be short, and the joy of the hypocrite lasts only a moment.

6If his pride ascends even towards the heavens, and his head touches the clouds,

7in the end, he will be destroyed like a trash heap, and those who had seen him will say: “Where is he?”

8Like a dream that flies away, he will not be found; he will pass away like a nightmare.

9The eyes that had seen him, will not see him; no longer will his own place admire him.

10His sons will be worn away by poverty, and his own hands will deliver his grief to him.

11His bones will be filled with the vices of his youth, and they will sleep with him in the dust.

12For, when evil will be sweet in his mouth, he will hide it under his tongue.

13He will permit it, and not abandon it, and he will conceal it in his throat.

14His bread in his belly will be turned into the venom of snakes within him.

15The riches that he devours, he will vomit up, and from his stomach God will draw them out.

16He will suck the head of snakes, and the tongue of the viper will kill him.

17(May he never see the streams of the river, the torrents of honey and butter.)

18He will be repaid for all he has done, yet he will not be consumed; according to the multitude of his schemes, so also will he suffer.

19For, having broken in, he stripped the poor. He has quickly stolen away a house he did not build.

20And yet his stomach will not be satisfied, and when he has the things he desires, he will not be able to possess them.

21Nothing remained of his portion, and, because of this, nothing will continue of his kind.

22When he will be satisfied, he will be constrained; he will seethe, and all anguish will fall upon him.

23May his stomach be filled, so that God may send forth the fury of his wrath to him and may rain down his battle upon him.

24He will flee from weapons of iron, and he will fall in an arc of brass,

25which had been drawn and had issued forth from its sheath, glittering in its bitterness: the horrible ones will go forth and approach over him.

26All darkness has been hidden in his secrecy. A fire that has not been set will devour him; he will be thrown down and forsaken in his tabernacle.

27The heavens will reveal his sinfulness, and the earth will rise up against him.

28The offspring of his house will be exposed; he will be pulled down in the day of God’s wrath.

29This is the portion of a wicked man from God, and the inheritance of his words from the Lord.