Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

¹² Come, children, hearken to me: I will teach you the fear of the Lord.

¹³ Who is the man that desireth life: who loveth to see good days?

¹⁴ Keep thy tongue from evil, and thy lips from speaking guile.

¹⁵ Turn away from evil and do good: seek after peace and pursue it.

¹⁶ The eyes of the Lord are upon the just: and his ears unto their prayers.

¹⁷ But the countenance of the Lord is against them that do evil things: to cut off the remembrance of them from the earth.

¹⁸ The just cried, and the Lord heard them: and delivered them out of all their troubles.

¹⁹ The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a contrite heart: and he will save the humble of spirit.

²⁰ Many are the afflictions of the just; but out of them all will the Lord deliver them.

²¹ The Lord keepeth all their bones, not one of them shall be broken.

²² The death of the wicked is very evil: and they that hate the just shall be guilty.

6 There is also another evil, which I have seen under the sun, and that frequent among men:

² A man to whom God hath given riches, and substance, and honour, and his soul wanteth nothing of all that he desireth: yet God doth not give him power to eat thereof, but a stranger shall eat it up. This is vanity and a great misery.

³ If a man beget a hundred children, and live many years, and attain to a great age, and his soul make no use of the goods of his substance, and he be without burial: of this man I pronounce, that the untimely born is better than he.

⁴ For he came in vain, and goeth to darkness, and his name shall be wholly forgotten.

⁵ He hath not seen the sun, nor known the distance of good and evil:

⁶ Although he lived two thousand years, and hath not enjoyed good things: do not all make haste to one place?

7 Then the high priest said: Are these things so?

² Who said: Ye men, brethren, and fathers, hear. The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Charan.

³ And said to him: Go forth out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and come into the land which I shall shew thee.

⁴ Then he went out of the land of the Chaldeans, and dwelt in Charan. And from thence, after his father was dead, he removed him into this land, wherein you now dwell.

⁵ And he gave him no inheritance in it; no, not the pace of a foot: but he promised to give it him in possession, and to his seed after him, when as yet he had no child.

⁶ And God said to him: That his seed should sojourn in a strange country, and that they should bring them under bondage, and treat them evil four hundred years.

⁷ And the nation which they shall serve will I judge, said the Lord; and after these things they shall go out, and shall serve me in this place.

⁸ And he gave him the covenant of circumcision, and so he begot Isaac, and circumcised him the eighth day; and Isaac begot Jacob; and Jacob the twelve patriarchs.