Job 20 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.

Then Zophar from Naamah answered:

That is why my thoughts come racing back at me with an answer. That is why I cannot sit still.

I have to sit here and take a correction that shames me, and a wind out of my own understanding answers back for me.

You know this. You have known it as long as there has been anything to know — since the day a human being was set down on the earth —

the cheering of the wicked is short, and the joy of a man with no God in him lasts one blink.

Though his pride climbs all the way to the sky and his head knocks against the clouds,

he is gone forever, like his own dung. The people who used to see him will say, "Where did he go?"

He flies off like a dream and nobody finds him. He is chased away like something you thought you saw at night.

The eye that used to catch sight of him will not catch him again. His own place will never look at him anymore.

His children will have to buy off the poor, and his own hands will give back everything he took.

His bones were packed full of his young strength, and it lies down with him in the dust.

Evil tastes sweet in his mouth. He tucks it away under his tongue.

He goes easy on it, he will not let it go, he holds it there against the roof of his mouth —

and in his stomach the food turns. Inside him it is cobra venom.

He swallowed a fortune, and he brings it back up. God empties it out of his belly.

He is down there sucking cobra venom. The viper's tongue is what kills him.

He will never look at the streams, the rivers running with honey and cream.

He hands back what he worked for and never gets to swallow it. He made his profit, and he gets no joy out of it.

Because he crushed the poor and walked off and left them. He seized a house he did not build.

Because his gut was never once at rest, he will not carry off one thing he wanted.

Nothing was left when he finished eating. That is why nothing good of his will last.

At the full stretch of his plenty he will be squeezed. Every hand that ever wore itself out for him will come down on him.

Let him fill his belly, then. God will turn his burning anger loose on him and rain it down on him for food.

He runs from the iron weapon, and the bronze bow drives clean through him.

He pulls it out and it comes clear of his back, the bright point out of his gall. Terrors walk all over him.

Total dark is stored up for his treasure. A fire nobody lit will eat him. Whatever is left under his tent, it will go badly for that too.

The sky will uncover his guilt. The earth will stand up against him.

The harvest of his house gets hauled away, dragged off on the day God's anger comes.

This is what a wicked man gets from God — the inheritance God's own word has set aside for him.