10 “I am just worn out.

“By my life [I swear],
I will never abandon my complaint;
I will speak out in my soul’s bitterness.
² I will say to God, ‘Don’t condemn me!
Tell me why you are contending with me.
³ Do you gain some advantage from oppressing,
from spurning what your own hands made,
from shining on the schemes of the wicked?
⁴ Do you have eyes of flesh?
Do you see as humans see?
⁵ Are your days like the days of mortals?
Are your years like human years,
⁶ that you have to seek my guilt
and search out my sin?
⁷ You know that I won’t be condemned,
yet no one can rescue me from your power.
⁸ Your own hands shaped me, they made me;
so why do you turn and destroy me?
⁹ Please remember that you made me, like clay;
will you return me to dust?
¹⁰ Didn’t you pour me out like milk,
then let me thicken like cheese?
¹¹ You clothed me with skin and flesh
you knit me together with bones and sinews.
¹² You granted me life and grace;
your careful attention preserved my spirit.

¹³ “‘Yet you hid these things in your heart;
I know what your secret purpose was —
¹⁴ to watch until I would sin
and then not absolve me of my guilt.
¹⁵ If I am wicked, woe to me! —
but if righteous, I still don’t dare raise my head,
because I am so filled with shame,
so soaked in my misery.
¹⁶ You rise up to hunt me like a lion,
and you keep treating me in such peculiar ways.
¹⁷ You keep producing fresh witnesses against me,
your anger against me keeps growing,
your troops assail me, wave after wave.

¹⁸ “‘Why did you bring me out of the womb?
I wish I had died there where no eye could see me.
¹⁹ I would have been as if I had never existed,
I would have been carried from womb to grave.
²⁰ Aren’t my days few? So stop!
Leave me alone, so I can cheer up a little
²¹ before I go to the place of no return,
to the land of darkness and death-dark gloom,
²² a land of gloom like darkness itself,
of dense darkness and utter disorder,
where even the light is dark.’”