¹ Since I have lost all taste for life, I shall give free rein to my complaining; I shall let my embittered soul speak out.

² I shall say to God, 'Do not condemn me, tell me what your case is against me.

³ Is it right for you to attack me, in contempt for what you yourself have made, thus abetting the schemes of the wicked?

⁴ Are your eyes mere human eyes, do you see as human beings see?

⁵ Are you mortal like human beings? do your years pass as human days pass?

⁶ You, who enquire into my faults and investigate my sins,

⁷ you know very well that I am innocent, and that no one can rescue me from your grasp.

⁸ Your hands having shaped and created me, now you change your mind and mean to destroy me!

⁹ Having made me, remember, as though of clay, now you mean to turn me back into dust!

¹⁰ Did you not pour me out like milk, and then let me thicken like curds,

¹¹ clothe me with skin and flesh, and weave me of bone and sinew?

¹² In your love you gave me life, and in your care watched over my every breath.

¹³ Yet, all the while, you had a secret plan: I know that you were biding your time

¹⁴ to see if I should sin and then not acquit me of my faults.

¹⁵ Woe to me, if I am guilty; even if I am upright, I dare not lift my head, so overwhelmed with shame and drunk with pain am I!

¹⁶ Proud as a lion, you hunt me down, multiplying your exploits at my expense,

¹⁷ attacking me again and again, your fury against me ever increasing, your troops assailing me, wave after wave.

¹⁸ Why did you bring me out of the womb? I should have perished then, unseen by any eye,

¹⁹ a being that had never been, to be carried from womb to grave.

²⁰ The days of my life are few enough: turn your eyes away, leave me a little joy,

²¹ before I go to the place of no return, to the land of darkness and shadow dark as death,

²² where dimness and disorder hold sway, and light itself is like dead of night.