Job 29:21-30:15

New Revised Standard Version, Anglicised Catholic Edition

²¹ ‘They listened to me, and waited,
    and kept silence for my counsel.
²² After I spoke they did not speak again,
    and my word dropped upon them like dew.^[a]
23 They waited for me as for the rain;
    they opened their mouths as for the spring rain.
²⁴ I smiled on them when they had no confidence;
    and the light of my countenance they did not extinguish.^[b]
25 I chose their way, and sat as chief,
    and I lived like a king among his troops,
    like one who comforts mourners.

30 ‘But now they make sport of me,
    those who are younger than I,
whose fathers I would have disdained
    to set with the dogs of my flock.
² What could I gain from the strength of their hands?
    All their vigour is gone.
³ Through want and hard hunger
    they gnaw the dry and desolate ground,
⁴ they pick mallow and the leaves of bushes,
    and to warm themselves the roots of broom.
⁵ They are driven out from society;
    people shout after them as after a thief.
⁶ In the gullies of wadis they must live,
    in holes in the ground, and in the rocks.
⁷ Among the bushes they bray;
    under the nettles they huddle together.
⁸ A senseless, disreputable brood,
    they have been whipped out of the land.

⁹ ‘And now they mock me in song;
    I am a byword to them.
¹⁰ They abhor me, they keep aloof from me;
    they do not hesitate to spit at the sight of me.
¹¹ Because God has loosed my bowstring and humbled me,
    they have cast off restraint in my presence.
¹² On my right hand the rabble rise up;
    they send me sprawling,
    and build roads for my ruin.
¹³ They break up my path,
    they promote my calamity;
    no one restrains^[c] them.
¹⁴ As through a wide breach they come;
    amid the crash they roll on.
¹⁵ Terrors are turned upon me;
    my honour is pursued as by the wind,
    and my prosperity has passed away like a cloud.