Job 30:28–31

⁶I am troubled; I am bowed down greatly; I go mourning all the day long.

⁹I will say unto God my rock, Why hast thou forgotten me? why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?

²For thou art the God of my strength: why dost thou cast me off? why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?

³He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

⁴¶ Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

⁷Behold, I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard: I cry aloud, but there is no judgment.

¹I AM the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath.

²He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light.

³Surely against me is he turned; he turneth his hand against me all the day.

⁸Therefore I will wail and howl, I will go stripped and naked: I will make a wailing like the dragons, and mourning as the owls.

⁶I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.

¹⁴I have said to corruption, Thou art my father: to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister.

³And I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness.

¹⁹Though thou hast sore broken us in the place of dragons, and covered us with the shadow of death.

²¹But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there.

²²And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged.

¹⁴Like a crane or a swallow, so did I chatter: I did mourn as a dove: mine eyes fail with looking upward: O Lord, I am oppressed; undertake for me.

⁸Their visage is blacker than a coal; they are not known in the streets: their skin cleaveth to their bones; it is withered, it is become like a stick.

³For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth.

⁸³For I am become like a bottle in the smoke; yet do I not forget thy statutes.

⁴My flesh and my skin hath he made old; he hath broken my bones.

¹⁰Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine.

¹⁵The joy of our heart is ceased; our dance is turned into mourning.

⁴My heart panted, fearfulness affrighted me: the night of my pleasure hath he turned into fear unto me.

¹⁸¶ Then the king went to his palace, and passed the night fasting: neither were instruments of musick brought before him: and his sleep went from him.

⁴A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

¹²And in that day did the Lord God of hosts call to weeping, and to mourning, and to baldness, and to girding with sackcloth:

⁷The new wine mourneth, the vine languisheth, all the merryhearted do sigh.

⁸The mirth of tabrets ceaseth, the noise of them that rejoice endeth, the joy of the harp ceaseth.

⁹They shall not drink wine with a song; strong drink shall be bitter to them that drink it.

¹BY the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

²We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

³For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

⁴How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?