​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 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 siegeworks 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 serving girls 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 loved 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?