✧1Then Job answered, ✧2“Listen diligently to my speech. Let this be your consolation. ✧3Allow me, and I also will speak. After I have spoken, mock on. ✧4As for me, is my complaint to man? Why shouldn’t I be impatient? ✧5Look at me, and be astonished. Lay your hand on your mouth. ✧6When I remember, I am troubled. Horror takes hold of my flesh. ✧7“Why do the wicked live, become old, yes, and grow mighty in power? ✧8Their child is established with them in their sight, their offspring before their eyes. ✧9Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them. ✧10Their bulls breed without fail. Their cows calve, and don’t miscarry.
World English Bible (WEB). World English Bible (Protestant edition). Public domain.
✧11They send out their little ones like a flock. Their children dance.
✧12They sing to the tambourine and harp, and rejoice at the sound of the pipe.
✧13They spend their days in prosperity. In an instant they go down to Sheol.
✧14They tell God, ‘Depart from us, for we don’t want to know about your ways.
✧15What is the Almighty, that we should serve him? What profit should we have, if we pray to him?’
✧16Behold, their prosperity is not in their hand. The counsel of the wicked is far from me.
✧17“How often is it that the lamp of the wicked is put out, that their calamity comes on them, that God distributes sorrows in his anger?
✧18How often is it that they are as stubble before the wind, as chaff that the storm carries away?
✧19You say, ‘God lays up his iniquity for his children.’ Let him recompense it to himself, that he may know it.
✧20Let his own eyes see his destruction. Let him drink of the wrath of the Almighty.
✧21For what does he care for his house after him, when the number of his months is cut off?
✧22“Shall any teach God knowledge, since he judges those who are high?
✧23One dies in his full strength, being wholly at ease and quiet.
✧24His pails are full of milk. The marrow of his bones is moistened.
✧25Another dies in bitterness of soul, and never tastes of good.
✧26They lie down alike in the dust. The worm covers them.
✧27“Behold, I know your thoughts, the plans with which you would wrong me.
✧28For you say, ‘Where is the house of the prince? Where is the tent in which the wicked lived?’
✧29Haven’t you asked wayfaring men? Don’t you know their evidences,
✧30that the evil man is reserved to the day of calamity, that they are led out to the day of wrath?
✧31Who will declare his way to his face? Who will repay him what he has done?
✧32Yet he will be borne to the grave. Men will keep watch over the tomb.
✧33The clods of the valley will be sweet to him. All men will draw after him, as there were innumerable before him.
✧34So how can you comfort me with nonsense, because in your answers there remains only falsehood?”