Job

2 “Shall we try a word to you? you will be impatient,

but who can keep in words?

3 Here you have been schooling many

and nerving slack hands;

4 Your words set a stumbling man on his feet

and you braced failing knees;

5 Now that it comes to you you are impatient;

it touches you and you are disconcerted.

6 Is not your piety your reliance

and your conscientious life your hope?

7 Remember: what innocent man has perished,

where were upright men annihilated?

8* As I see it, those who plow villainy

and sow trouble reap it;

9 They perish by God’s breath,

are made an end of by the air from his nostrils.

10 The lion’s roar, the voice of the king of beasts,

and the two-year-old lion’s teeth, are broken,

11 The great lion perishes for lack of prey,

and the lioness’s cubs lose touch with each other.

12* “And a word once stole upon me,

my ear took in a whisper of it,

13 In thoughts brought by night visions

when trances fall on men.

14* A terror beset me, and a quaking,

and terrified every bone in me,

15 And a breeze ran over my face,

made the hair on my flesh prickle up:

16** It stood there, but I could not make out what it looked like;

There was a form before my eyes,

I heard a hushed voice:

17 ‘Is a human being to be more in the right than God,

a man to be cleaner than his Maker?

18* Why, he does not trust his own servants

and charges his angels with frailties;

19 How much more those who inhabit houses of clay!

such as have their foundations on the earth

and are beaten down before a moth,

20 Between morning and evening they are shattered,

are lost for all time without anyone’s noticing it.

21 A fiber pulls out within them

and they die unaccountably.’