Job 19 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.

Then Job answered:

How long will you keep tormenting me, crushing me to pieces with words?

Ten times now you have shamed me. You wrong me and feel nothing about it.

And if it's true that I've gone wrong, my mistake sleeps in my own house, not yours.

But if you're going to make yourselves tall over me and use my disgrace as your evidence,

then know this — God is the one who has bent my case out of shape, and it is his net that has closed around me.

Look — I scream "Violence!" and nobody answers. I shout for help and there is no justice.

He has walled off my road so I can't get through; he has laid darkness across my paths.

He has stripped the weight of honor off me and lifted the crown from my head.

He tears me down on every side until I'm gone; he pulls up my hope by the roots like a tree.

His anger burns hot against me; he counts me as one of his enemies.

His troops come on together. They throw up a siege ramp against me and pitch their camp all around my tent.

He has driven my brothers away from me. The people who knew me are strangers now.

My relatives have quit on me. My closest friends have forgotten me.

The guests in my house and the women who work for me count me as an outsider. In their eyes I'm a foreigner.

I call my servant and he doesn't answer. I have to beg him with my own mouth.

My breath is foul to my wife. I turn the stomachs of my own brothers, the sons my mother carried.

Even the small boys have no use for me. When I stand up, they mock me.

Every man I trusted with my secrets can't stand the sight of me. The ones I loved have turned on me.

My bones stick to my skin and my flesh. I have gotten out with the skin of my teeth.

Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, you are supposed to be my friends — the hand of God has come down on me.

Why do you hunt me down the way God does? Why can't you get your fill of my flesh?

I wish someone would write my words down. I wish they were carved into a scroll —

cut with an iron chisel, filled in with lead, sunk into rock for good.

But I know that the one who buys me back is alive, and at the end he will stand up on the dust.

And after my skin has been peeled off me, even out of my own flesh I will see God.

I will see him for myself. My own eyes will see him — not a stranger's. Everything inside me is worn out with waiting for it.

If you're saying, "Look how we'll run him down — the root of the trouble is in him,"

then you had better be afraid of the sword yourselves. Rage like that is what the sword is sent to punish. Then you'll know there is a verdict coming.