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Job 19

¹Then 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 be true that I have erred, my error remains with myself.

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 about me.

⁷Behold, I cry out, `hold, I cry out, "Violence!' but 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 from me my glory, and taken the crown from my head.

¹⁰He breaks me down on every side, and I am gone, and my hope has he pulled up like a tree.

¹¹He has kindled his wrath against me, and counts me as his adversary.

¹²His troops come on together; they have cast up siegeworks against me, and encamp round about my tent.

¹³"He has put my brethren far from me, and my acquaintances are wholly estranged from me.

¹⁴My kinsfolk and my close friends have failed me;

¹⁵the guests in my house have forgotten me; my maidservants 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 beseech him with my mouth.

¹⁷I am repulsive to my wife, loathsome to the sons of my own mother.

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 cleave 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? Why are you not satisfied with my flesh?

²³"Oh that my words were written! Oh that they were inscribed in a book!

²⁴Oh that with an iron pen and lead they were graven in the rock for ever!

²⁵For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth;

²⁶and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then from 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, `e him!' and, `s found in him';

²⁹be afraid of the sword, for wrath brings the punishment of the sword, that you may know there is a judgment."

Job 19 (RSV)

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Job

Chapter 19

19 of 42