Job 24

 

Job 24

1 “Why does the Almighty not set times for judgment?
Why must those who know him look in vain for such days?

² There are those who move boundary stones; they pasture flocks they have stolen.

³ They drive away the orphan’s donkey and take the widow’s ox in pledge.

⁴ They thrust the needy from the path and force all the poor of the land into hiding.

⁵ Like wild donkeys in the desert, the poor go about their labor of foraging food; the wasteland provides food for their children.

⁶ They gather fodder in the fields and glean in the vineyards of the wicked.

⁷ Lacking clothes, they spend the night naked; they have nothing to cover themselves in the cold.

⁸ They are drenched by mountain rains and hug the rocks for lack of shelter.

⁹ The fatherless child is snatched from the breast; the infant of the poor is seized for a debt.

¹⁰ Lacking clothes, they go about naked; they carry the sheaves, but still go hungry.

¹¹ They crush olives among the terraces; they tread the winepresses, yet suffer thirst.

¹² The groans of the dying rise from the city, and the souls of the wounded cry out for help. But God charges no one with wrongdoing.

¹³ “There are those who rebel against the light, who do not know its ways or stay in its paths.

¹⁴ When daylight is gone, the murderer rises up, kills the poor and needy, and in the night steals forth like a thief.

¹⁵ The eye of the adulterer watches for dusk; he thinks, ‘No eye will see me,’ and he keeps his face concealed.

¹⁶ In the dark, thieves break into houses, but by day they shut themselves in; they want nothing to do with the light.

¹⁷ For all of them, midnight is their morning; they make friends with the terrors of darkness.

¹⁸ “Yet they are foam on the surface of the water; their portion of the land is cursed, so that no one goes to the vineyards.

¹⁹ As heat and drought snatch away the melted snow,
so the grave snatches away those who have sinned.

²⁰ The womb forgets them, the worm feasts on them;
the wicked are no longer remembered but are broken like a tree.

²¹ They prey on the barren and childless woman, and to the widow they show no kindness.

²² But God drags away the mighty by his power; though they become established, they have no assurance of life.

²³ He may let them rest in a feeling of security, but his eyes are on their ways.

²⁴ For a little while they are exalted, and then they are gone; they are brought low and gathered up like all others; they are cut off like heads of grain.

²⁵ “If this is not so, who can prove me false and reduce my words to nothing?”