Chapter X.
My soul is weary of my life: I will give free course to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul. I will say unto God, Do not condemn me; shew me wherefore thou contendest with me. Is it good unto thee that thou shouldest oppress, that thou shouldest despise the work of thine hands, and shine upon the counsel of the wicked? Hast thou eyes of flesh? or seest thou as man seeth? Are thy days as the days of man? are thy years as man's days, That thou inquirest after mine iniquity, and searchest after my sin? And you should know that I have done no wickedness, for there is no one who can deliver me from your hand. Your hands, Lord, have made me and fashioned me completely, and yet suddenly you cast me aside? Remember, I pray, that you made me like clay and will turn me into dust. Did you not curdle me like cheese and clot me like milk? You covered me with skin and flesh, and bound me with bones and sinews. And as for what he says about being formed completely, he is speaking against the heretics who say that the soul is made by one God and the body by another.
You have given me life and mercy, and your visitation has guarded my spirit. Although you conceal these things in your heart, I know that you remember all things. If I have sinned and you have allowed it for a time, why do you not allow me to be free from my iniquity? And if I am wicked, woe to me, and if I am just. The soul itself is called life here, not the life of the soul: because actions of the soul can also be called life.
I will not lift my head, weighed down by affliction and misery. And because of pride. That is, bound by the pain and torment of the inner organs: I cannot elevate my head from the lowest point, filled with confusion and sorrow.
You will take me like a lioness. To this beast, says Job, you liken me, a humble and despised man.
And I was miraculously tormented upon my return. He said that God was returning to himself, when he felt both ancient and recent punishments miraculously in his own body.
You are setting your tests against me. This he says, because our corrections and punishments are witnesses of divine justice. Whether tortures, I consider them called witnesses, because while he was howling and roaring, the torments were like a testimony to God.
And you have multiplied your anger against me, and punishment wages war against me. Why did you bring me forth from the womb, that I might have perished before any eye saw me? I should have been as though I had not been, carried from the womb to the grave. Will not the fewness of my days come to an end soon? The wrath of God can be understood as the devil, by whose ministry Job suffered bitter pains. But punishment wages war within itself: because by following a certain order of evils, they exercise the duty of the cruelty committed to them.
Therefore, forgive me, so that I may lament my pain for a little while. That is, grant me respite from these torments, so that I may mourn the slight amount of pain that I endure in my body, or that I dread to experience in hell.
Before I go, and do not return to the dark land, and covered with the gloom of death: the land of misery and darkness: where the shadow of death and no order, but eternal horror dwells. There is no doubt that he described the land of the underworld; there is no order of life there: it is dark, as I said, undoubtedly like a prison, into which sinners and the wicked who hated the light, like sons of darkness, are cast. Which land is covered with the darkness of death: so that those who are shut in eternal night may never see the light of penance. Where is the shadow of death for the wretched, which is in this place of punishment: for just as shadows of bodies are not far from the bodies that cast them: so too, punishments are not far from death, which inflict death. I will not return to this mortality, where I suffer such great evils. The divine spirit, which is in my nostrils, urged him with the strength of consolation, as he gasped in the distress of pain. Who will grant me that you protect me in hell and hide me until your wrath passes, and establish a time for me when you will remember me? The fury of God's wrath has passed over, which Adam deserved by sinning, when the coming of Christ erased the handwriting of the death of his children. Therefore, it should not seem strange to anyone among the saints who are freed from hell by the coming of the Lord, and who, by the example of Christ's resurrection, are established in the hope of their blessed resurrection.