Job 27 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.

Job picked up his argument again and said:

As surely as God lives — the God who has taken my case away from me, the Almighty, who has left my life tasting of nothing but bitterness —

as long as there is any breath left in me, as long as God's own breath is still in my nose,

my lips will not say one crooked thing, and my tongue will not mutter a lie.

I will never say the three of you are in the right. Until I stop breathing I will not let go of my integrity.

I have hold of being in the right and I am not letting go. My heart does not accuse me for a single day I have lived.

Let my enemy end up the guilty one, and whoever stands against me, the one in the wrong.

What hope has a man with something to hide, when God cuts him off and pulls his life out of him?

Will God sit and listen to him screaming when the trouble finally comes down on him?

Will he find any delight in the Almighty? Will he call on God whenever he feels like it?

I will teach the three of you about the hand of God. What the Almighty is up to, I am not going to hide from you.

Look — every one of you has seen all this for yourselves. So why do you keep breathing out this nothing?

So here is what a guilty man gets from God, the inheritance the ruthless collect from the Almighty:

If his children multiply, it is for the sword. His descendants will never have enough bread.

Plague will bury whatever is left of him, and his widows will not cry.

Let him pile silver up like dirt and stack clothing in heaps like wet clay —

he stacks it, and a just man ends up wearing it. The innocent split the silver between them.

He built his house the way a moth builds. He built it like the lean-to a watchman throws up for one season.

He lies down rich, and that is the last time. He opens his eyes, and none of it is there.

Terror catches up with him like floodwater. In the night a storm carries him off.

The east wind lifts him and he is gone. It sweeps him clean out of his own place.

It throws itself at him and spares him nothing. He runs headlong to get out from under its hand.

It claps its hands at him. It hisses him out of the place where he used to stand.