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 siegeworksa 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 female servants 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 love 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?*

23“O that my words were written down!

O that they were inscribed in a book!*

24O that with an iron pen and with lead

they were engraved on a rock forever!*

25For I know that my vindicatorb lives

and that in the end he will stand upon the earth;*

26and after my skin has been destroyed,

then in my flesh I shall see God,*

27whom I shall see on my side,

and my eyes shall behold, and not another.

My heart faints within me!*

28If you say, ‘How we will persecute him!’

and, ‘The root of the matter is found in him,’*

29be afraid of the sword,

for wrath brings the punishment of the sword,

so that you may know there is a judgment.”*