Job 19

Job Replies: I Know That My Vindicator Lives

¹⁹Then 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^a 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 female servants 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 love 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?^*

²³“O that my words were written down!

O that they were inscribed in a book!^*

²⁴O that with an iron pen and with lead

they were engraved on a rock forever!^*

²⁵For I know that my vindicator^b lives

and that in the end he will stand upon the earth;^*

²⁶and after my skin has been destroyed,

then in my flesh I shall see God,^*

²⁷whom I shall see on my side,

and my eyes shall behold, and not another.

My heart faints within me!^*

²⁸If you say, ‘How we will persecute him!’

and, ‘The root of the matter is found in him,’^*

²⁹be afraid of the sword,

for wrath brings the punishment of the sword,

so that you may know there is a judgment.”^*