Job: My Suffering Is without End

7 “Do not human beings have a hard service on earth,

and are not their days like the days of a laborer?*

2 Like a slave who longs for the shadow,

and like laborers who look for their wages,*

3 so I am allotted months of emptiness,

and nights of misery are apportioned to me.*

4 When I lie down I say, ‘When shall I rise?’

But the night is long,

and I am full of tossing until dawn.*

5 My flesh is clothed with worms and dirt;

my skin hardens, then breaks out again.

6 My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle

and come to their end without hope.i,*

7 “Remember that my life is a breath;

my eye will never again see good.*

8 The eye that beholds me will see me no more;

while your eyes are upon me, I shall be gone.*

9 As the cloud fades and vanishes,

so those who go down to Sheol do not come up;*

10 they return no more to their houses,

nor do their places know them any more.*

11 “Therefore I will not restrain my mouth;

I will speak in the anguish of my spirit;

I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.*

12 Am I the Sea or the Dragon

that you set a guard over me?*

13 When I say, ‘My bed will comfort me,

my couch will ease my complaint,’

14 then you scare me with dreams

and terrify me with visions,*

15 so that I would choose strangling

and death rather than this body.

16 I loathe my life; I would not live forever.

Let me alone, for my days are a breath.*

17 What are humans, that you make so much of them,

that you set your mind on them,*

18 visit them every morning,

test them every moment?

19 Will you not look away from me for a while,

let me alone until I swallow my spittle?

20 If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of humanity?

Why have you made me your target?

Why have I become a burden to you?*

21 Why do you not pardon my transgression

and take away my iniquity?

For now I shall lie in the earth;

you will seek me, but I shall not be.”*