1 “My spirit is broken, my days are quenched,
I am marked for the grave.
2 Mockers are all around me;
my eye meets only their hostility.
3 Be my guarantor, yourself!
Who else will put up a pledge for me?
4 For you have shut their minds to common sense;
therefore you will not let them triumph.
5 Should people share with their friends
when their own children’s eyes are so sad?
6 “He has made me a byword among the peoples,
a creature in whose face they spit.
7 I am nearly blind with grief,
my limbs reduced to a shadow.
8 The upright are perplexed at this,
the innocent aroused against the hypocrites.
9 Yet the righteous hold on to their way,
and those with clean hands grow stronger and stronger.
10 “But as for you all, turn around! Come back! —
yet I won’t find a wise man among you.
11 My days are over, my plans cut off,
which I had cherished so;
12 but they [try to] turn [my] night into day,
[saying,] ‘Light is near!’ — in the face of darkness.
13 “If I hope for Sh’ol to be my house;
if I spread my couch in the dark;
14 if I say to the pit, ‘You are my father,’
and to worms, ‘You are my mother and sister,’
15 then where is my hope?
And that hope of mine, who will see it?
16 Only those who go down with me
to the bars of Sh’ol,
when we rest together in the dust.”