Chapter 20

Then Zophar the Naamathite answered by saying:

In response, various thoughts succeed one another in me, and my mind moves quickly through different ideas.

The teaching you use to admonish me, I will hear, and the spirit of my understanding will respond for me.

This, I know, is from the beginning, from the time that man was set over the earth:

that the praise of the impious shall be short, and the joy of the hypocrite lasts only a moment.

If his pride ascends even towards the heavens, and his head touches the clouds,

in the end, he will be destroyed like a trash heap, and those who had seen him will say: “Where is he?”

Like a dream that flies away, he will not be found; he will pass away like a nightmare.

The eyes that had seen him, will not see him; no longer will his own place admire him.

His sons will be worn away by poverty, and his own hands will deliver his grief to him.

His bones will be filled with the vices of his youth, and they will sleep with him in the dust.

For, when evil will be sweet in his mouth, he will hide it under his tongue.

He will permit it, and not abandon it, and he will conceal it in his throat.

His bread in his belly will be turned into the venom of snakes within him.

The riches that he devours, he will vomit up, and from his stomach God will draw them out.

He will suck the head of snakes, and the tongue of the viper will kill him.

(May he never see the streams of the river, the torrents of honey and butter.)

He will be repaid for all he has done, yet he will not be consumed; according to the multitude of his schemes, so also will he suffer.

For, having broken in, he stripped the poor. He has quickly stolen away a house he did not build.

And yet his stomach will not be satisfied, and when he has the things he desires, he will not be able to possess them.

Nothing remained of his portion, and, because of this, nothing will continue of his kind.

When he will be satisfied, he will be constrained; he will seethe, and all anguish will fall upon him.

May his stomach be filled, so that God may send forth the fury of his wrath to him and may rain down his battle upon him.

He will flee from weapons of iron, and he will fall in an arc of brass,

which had been drawn and had issued forth from its sheath, glittering in its bitterness: the horrible ones will go forth and approach over him.

All darkness has been hidden in his secrecy. A fire that has not been set will devour him; he will be thrown down and forsaken in his tabernacle.

The heavens will reveal his sinfulness, and the earth will rise up against him.

The offspring of his house will be exposed; he will be pulled down in the day of God’s wrath.

This is the portion of a wicked man from God, and the inheritance of his words from the Lord.