¹Then Job answered, and he said:

²I have heard many things like these; all of you are comforters who bring trouble.

³Is there an end to words of wind? Or what sickens you, that you answer?

⁴I also could speak like you, if only your being were in place of my being; I could join words against you and shake my head at you.

⁵I would strengthen you with my mouth, and the quivering of my lips would ease.

⁶If I speak, my grief is not restrained, and if I cease, what goes from me?

⁷Yet now he has wearied me; you have desolated all my company.

⁸You have seized me, and it has become a witness; my leanness has risen up against me and testifies to my face.

⁹His anger tore me and bore a grudge against me; he gnashed his teeth at me; my opponent sharpens his eyes on me.

¹⁰They gape at me with their mouths; in scorn they strike my cheeks; together against me they mass themselves.

¹¹God hands me over to the unjust one, and into the hands of the wicked he hurls me.

¹²I was at ease, and he broke me; he took hold of me by the back of my neck and scattered me; he raised me up for himself as a target.

¹³His archers surround me; he splits open my kidneys and does not spare; he pours out my gall onto the land.

¹⁴He bursts through me, breach upon breach; he runs at me like a mighty man.

¹⁵I have sewed sackcloth over my skin, and worked my horn thoroughly into the dust.

¹⁶My face is red from weeping, and on my eyelids is deep shadow.

¹⁷although there is no violence in my palms, and my prayer is pure.

¹⁸O land, do not cover my blood, and let there be no place for my cry.

¹⁹Also now, behold, my witness is in the heavens, and my witness is in the heights.

²⁰My friends scoff at me; to God my eye drips.

²¹May he argue for a man with God, as a son of man would with his neighbor.

²²For when the numbered years have come, I will go the way from which I will not return.