Old Testament · Poetry and wisdom

Job chapter 10

I am sick of my own life. So I will . I will speak out of the bitterness inside me.I will say to God: don’t just condemn me. Tell me .Does it do you any good to grind me down, to throw away the work of your own hands while you the schemes of the guilty?Do you have eyes made of flesh? Do you see the way a person sees?Are your days like a mortal’s days, your years like the years of a man,that you have to go hunting for my guilt and digging for —when you already know I am not guilty, and nobody can pull anything out of your hand?Your hands and made me — every part of me, all of it together — and now you swallow me whole.Remember, you molded me like . Are you going to grind me back into dust?Didn’t you ?You dressed me in skin and muscle, wove me together out of bone and tendon.You gave me life, you , and your watching over me guarded every breath I took.But this is what you were hiding in your heart. I know now this was what you had in mind all along.If I failed, you were watching, and you would never let the guilt go.If I am guilty — then I am finished. And if I am in the right, I still cannot lift my head, stuffed full of shame and soaked in my own misery.And if I did lift it, you would hunt me down like a lion and turn your terrible wonders on me all over again.You bring in against me, you build your anger up against me — wave after wave, a new army every time.So why did you pull me out of the womb? I should have died before a single eye ever saw me.I would have been as if I never existed, carried straight from my mother’s body to the grave.Aren’t my days nearly gone? Then leave me alone — let me smile for a momentbefore I go where I will never come back from, to the land of darkness and ,a land as black as midnight — all shadow, nothing in order, where even the light is like the dark.