For you have said, ‘My teaching is flawless, and I am pure in your sight.’

I was eyes for the blind and feet for the lame;

“And now I have become their taunt song; I have become a byword among them.

I have become a brother to jackals and a companion of ostriches.

Many are appalled when they see me, but you are my secure shelter.

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

My guests and my servant girls consider me a stranger; I am a foreigner in their eyes.

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

I am forgotten, like a dead man no one thinks about; I am regarded as worthless, like a broken jar.

My own brothers treat me like a stranger; they act as if I were a foreigner.

I was ignorant and lacked insight; I was as senseless as an animal before you.

I am like an owl in the wilderness; I am like a screech owl among the ruins.

I am disdained by them. When they see me, they shake their heads.

For I am like a wineskin dried up in smoke. I do not forget your statutes.

When I was a son to my father, a tender only child before my mother,

I almost came to complete ruin in the midst of the whole congregation!”

I, the Teacher, have been king over Israel in Jerusalem.

I have become the laughingstock of all people, their mocking song all day long.

I was consumed by scorching heat during the day and by piercing cold at night, and I went without sleep.

When she bore a son, Moses named him Gershom, for he said, “I have become a resident foreigner in a foreign land.”