Job 30:1-15

The Voice

30 Job: But now they mock me,
        these young men whose fathers I hold in such contempt.
    I wouldn’t trust them with my herds
        as I do my dogs.
²     What good does their strength do me?
        Their potency has wilted.
³     Gaunt from starvation, haggard from hunger that drives them to gnaw the ground in the night,
        a ground all wasted and hollowed-out,
⁴     They are left with the desperate foods of the famished—
        plucking mallow from the bushes by the salt marshes,
        and making the ashy broom tree root their staple.
⁵     The people from the town chase each one out of his neighborhood;
        they howl at all of them as if they were common thieves,
⁶     And push them out to live in the deep valleys of the wadis—
        those desert streams that come and go—
    So these outcasts seek shelter in the overhangs and crumbling caves
        that line the banks of no-man’s-land.
⁷     Braying like donkeys from the bushes,
        huddled together in the prickly undergrowth are
⁸     Fools and sons of no-names,
        driven by lashes out from the bosom of the land.

⁹     And now they sing of me in taunt and parody,
        and make my name a byword among them.
¹⁰     They abhor me, keep their distance,
        and feel free to spit in my face.
¹¹     Because God has unstrung His bowstring and stricken me with suffering,
        they are no longer restrained toward me.
¹²     To my right, the horde^[a] arises.
        They seek to knock me off my feet,
        piling their disastrous ways against me.
¹³     They lay waste to my path
        and benefit from my destruction,
        and no one is there to stop them.
¹⁴     As through a wall breached, they advance easily.
        Their thunderstorm of wheels rolled across my ruins.
¹⁵     Alas! A storm of terrors has turned toward me and is upon me;
        my dignity is blown away as by the wind;
        my prosperity vanishes like a wispy cloud.