17 “My spirit is broken, my days are quenched,
I am marked for the grave.
² Mockers are all around me;
my eye meets only their hostility.
³ Be my guarantor, yourself!
Who else will put up a pledge for me?
⁴ For you have shut their minds to common sense;
therefore you will not let them triumph.
⁵ Should people share with their friends
when their own children’s eyes are so sad?

⁶ “He has made me a byword among the peoples,
a creature in whose face they spit.
⁷ I am nearly blind with grief,
my limbs reduced to a shadow.
⁸ The upright are perplexed at this,
the innocent aroused against the hypocrites.
⁹ Yet the righteous hold on to their way,
and those with clean hands grow stronger and stronger.

¹⁰ “But as for you all, turn around! Come back! —
yet I won’t find a wise man among you.
¹¹ My days are over, my plans cut off,
which I had cherished so;
¹² but they [try to] turn [my] night into day,
[saying,] ‘Light is near!’ — in the face of darkness.

¹³ “If I hope for Sh’ol to be my house;
if I spread my couch in the dark;
¹⁴ if I say to the pit, ‘You are my father,’
and to worms, ‘You are my mother and sister,’
¹⁵ then where is my hope?
And that hope of mine, who will see it?
¹⁶ Only those who go down with me
to the bars of Sh’ol,
when we rest together in the dust.”