¹ Eliphaz of Teman spoke next. He said:

² If we say something to you, will you bear with us? Who in any case could refrain from speaking now?

³ You have schooled many others, giving strength to feeble hands;

⁴ your words supported any who wavered and strengthened every failing knee.

⁵ And now your turn has come, and you lose patience, at the first touch on yourself you are overwhelmed!

⁶ Does not your piety give you confidence, and your integrity of life give you hope?

⁷ Can you recall anyone guiltless that perished? Where then have the honest been wiped out?

⁸ I speak from experience: those who plough iniquity and sow disaster, reap just that.

⁹ Under the breath of God, they perish: a blast of his anger, and they are destroyed;

¹⁰ the lion's roars, his savage growls, like the fangs of a lion cub, are broken off.

¹¹ The lion dies for lack of prey and the lioness's whelps are dispersed.

¹² I have received a secret revelation, a whisper has come to my ears;

¹³ by night when dreams confuse the mind and slumber lies heavy on everyone,

¹⁴ a shiver of horror ran through me and filled all my bones with fright.

¹⁵ A breath slid over my face, the hairs of my body bristled.

¹⁶ Someone stood there -- I did not know his face, but the form stayed there before my eyes. Silence -- then I heard a voice,

¹⁷ 'Can a mortal seem upright to God, would anybody seem pure in the presence of his Maker?

¹⁸ God cannot rely even on his own servants, even with his angels he finds fault.

¹⁹ What then of those who live in houses of clay, who are founded on dust?

²⁰ They are crushed as easily as a moth, between morning and evening they are ground to powder. They vanish for ever, with no one to bring them back.

²¹ Their tent-peg is snatched from them, and they die devoid of wisdom.'

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The New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) is a Catholic translation of the Bible published in 1985. The New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) has become the most widely used Roman Catholic Bible outside of the United States. It has the imprimatur of Cardinal George Basil Hume.

Like its predecessor, the Jerusalem Bible, the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) version is translated "directly from the Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic." The 1973 French translation, the Bible de Jerusalem, is followed only "where the text admits to more than one interpretation." Introductions and notes, with some modifications, are taken from the Bible de Jerusalem.

Source: The Very Reverend Dom (Joseph) Henry Wansbrough, OSB, MA (Oxon), STL (Fribourg), LSS (Rome), a monk of Ampleforth Abbey and a biblical scholar. He was General Editor of the New Jerusalem Bible. "New Jerusalem Bible, Regular Edition", pg. v.

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