1 "My soul is sick of my life; I will let my complaint run free; I will speak in my soul's bitterness.
2 I will say to God, 'Do not count me guilty; tell me why you bring a charge against me.
3 Is it good to you that you should oppress, that you should spurn the labor of your hands and favor the scheme of the wicked?
4 Are your eyes eyes of flesh? Do you see the way a man sees?
5 Are your days as a mortal's days, or your years like a man's years,
6 that you go looking for my iniquity and hunt for my sin,
7 when you know I am not guilty, and no one can rescue from your hand?
8 Your hands fashioned and formed me, wholly, all around, and yet you swallow me up.
9 Remember, please, that you shaped me like clay; and will you return me to dust?
10 Did you not pour me out as milk, and curdle me as cheese?
11 With skin and flesh you dressed me, and with bones and sinews you knit me together.
12 Life and steadfast love you have given me, and your care has kept my spirit.
13 Yet these things you stored away in your heart; I know that this was with you.
14 If I sinned, you would keep watch over me and would not clear me of my iniquity.
15 If I am wicked, woe to me! And if I am in the right, I cannot raise my head, sated with shame and seeing my misery.
16 Should it rise up, you hunt me as a lion would, and again you work wonders against me.
17 You renew your witnesses against me and heap up your anger toward me; wave after wave of hosts is with me.
18 Why then did you bring me out from the womb? I should have perished with no eye to see me,
19 and been as if I had never existed, carried off from the womb to the grave.
20 Are my days not few? Then stop, and turn from me, so that I may brighten a little
21 before I go, and do not come back, to a land of darkness and deep darkness,
22 a land of gloom like blackness itself, of deep darkness and no order, where the light is as blackness.'"