¹Then Job answered,

• ²“Truly I know that it is so,
• but how can man be just with God?

• ³If he is pleased to contend with him,
• he can’t answer him one time in a thousand.

• ⁴God who is wise in heart, and mighty in strength:
• who has hardened himself against him, and prospered?

• ⁵He removes the mountains, and they don’t know it,
• when he overturns them in his anger.

• ⁶He shakes the earth out of its place.
• Its pillars tremble.

• ⁷He commands the sun, and it doesn’t rise,
• and seals up the stars.

• ⁸He alone stretches out the heavens,
• and treads on the waves of the sea.

• ⁹He makes the Bear, Orion, and the Pleiades,
• and the rooms of the south.

• ¹⁰He does great things past finding out;
• yes, marvelous things without number.

• ¹¹Behold, he goes by me, and I don’t see him.
• He passes on also, but I don’t perceive him.

• ¹²Behold, he snatches away.
• Who can hinder him?
• Who will ask him, ‘What are you doing?’

• ¹³“God will not withdraw his anger.
• The helpers of Rahab stoop under him.

• ¹⁴How much less shall I answer him,
• And choose my words to argue with him?

• ¹⁵Though I were righteous, yet I wouldn’t answer him.
• I would make supplication to my judge.

• ¹⁶If I had called, and he had answered me,
• yet I wouldn’t believe that he listened to my voice.

• ¹⁷For he breaks me with a storm,
• and multiplies my wounds without cause.

• ¹⁸He will not allow me to catch my breath,
• but fills me with bitterness.

• ¹⁹If it is a matter of strength, behold, he is mighty!
• If of justice, ‘Who,’ says he, ‘will summon me?’

• ²⁰Though I am righteous, my own mouth shall condemn me.
• Though I am blameless, it shall prove me perverse.

• ²¹I am blameless.
• I don’t respect myself.
• I despise my life.

• ²²“It is all the same.
• Therefore I say he destroys the blameless and the wicked.

• ²³If the scourge kills suddenly,
• he will mock at the trial of the innocent.

• ²⁴The earth is given into the hand of the wicked.
• He covers the faces of its judges.
• If not he, then who is it?

• ²⁵“Now my days are swifter than a runner.
• They flee away, they see no good,

• ²⁶They have passed away as the swift ships,
• as the eagle that swoops on the prey.

• ²⁷If I say, ‘I will forget my complaint,
• I will put off my sad face, and cheer up;’

• ²⁸I am afraid of all my sorrows,
• I know that you will not hold me innocent.

• ²⁹I shall be condemned.
• Why then do I labor in vain?

• ³⁰If I wash myself with snow,
• and cleanse my hands with lye,

• ³¹yet you will plunge me in the ditch.
• My own clothes shall abhor me.

• ³²For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him,
• that we should come together in judgment.

• ³³There is no umpire between us,
• that might lay his hand on us both.

• ³⁴Let him take his rod away from me.
• Let his terror not make me afraid;

• ³⁵then I would speak, and not fear him,
• for I am not so in myself.