1"I am just worn out. "By my life [I swear], I will never abandon my complaint; I will speak out in my soul's bitterness.
2I will say to God, 'Don't condemn me! Tell me why you are contending with me.
3Do you gain some advantage from oppressing, from spurning what your own hands made, from shining on the schemes of the wicked?
4Do you have eyes of flesh? Do you see as humans see?
5Are your days like the days of mortals? Are your years like human years,
6that you have to seek my guilt and search out my sin?
7You know that I won't be condemned, yet no one can rescue me from your power.
8Your own hands shaped me, they made me; so why do you turn and destroy me?
9Please remember that you made me, like clay; will you return me to dust?
10Didn't you pour me out like milk, then let me thicken like cheese?
11You clothed me with skin and flesh you knit me together with bones and sinews.
12You granted me life and grace; your careful attention preserved my spirit.
13"'Yet you hid these things in your heart; I know what your secret purpose was -
14to watch until I would sin and then not absolve me of my guilt.
15If I am wicked, woe to me! -but if righteous, I still don't dare raise my head, because I am so filled with shame, so soaked in my misery.
16You rise up to hunt me like a lion, and you keep treating me in such peculiar ways.
17You keep producing fresh witnesses against me, your anger against me keeps growing, your troops assail me, wave after wave.
18"'Why did you bring me out of the womb? I wish I had died there where no eye could see me.
19I would have been as if I had never existed, I would have been carried from womb to grave.
20Aren't my days few? So stop! Leave me alone, so I can cheer up a little
21before I go to the place of no return, to the land of darkness and death-dark gloom,
22a land of gloom like darkness itself, of dense darkness and utter disorder, where even the light is dark.'"