whose trust is in something futile, whose security is a spider’s web.

he who crushes me with a tempest, and multiplies my wounds for no reason.

what wise men declare, hiding nothing, from the tradition of their ancestors,

You, whose garments are hot when the earth is still because of the south wind,

to whom I appointed the steppe for its home, the salt wastes as its dwelling place?

Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden, and whom God has hedged in?

For the very thing I dreaded has happened to me, and what I feared has come upon me.

Even as I have seen, those who plow iniquity and those who sow trouble reap the same.

He who removes mountains suddenly, who overturns them in his anger;

Although I am innocent, I could not answer him; I could only plead with my judge for mercy.

I should have been as though I had never existed; I should have been carried right from the womb to the grave!

Will you keep to the old path that evil men have walked –

men who were carried off before their time, when the flood was poured out on their foundations?

just as I was in my most productive time, when God’s intimate friendship was experienced in my tent,

Remember to extol his work, which people have praised in song.

which the clouds pour down and shower on humankind abundantly.

which I reserve for the time of trouble, for the day of war and battle?

And its young ones devour the blood, and where the dead carcasses are, there it is.”

how much more to those who live in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, who are crushed like a moth?

The hungry eat up his harvest, and take it even from behind the thorns, and the thirsty swallow up their fortune.