3. Should he reason with unprofitable talk? Or with speeches with which he can do no good?
4. Indeed, you are doing away with [reverential] fear, and you are hindering and diminishing meditation and devotion before God.
5. For your iniquity teaches your mouth, and you choose the tongue of the crafty.
6. Your own mouth condemns you, and not I; yes, your own lips testify against you.
7. Are you the first man that was born [the original wise man]? Or were you created before the hills?
8. Were you present to hear the secret counsel of God? And do you limit [the possession of] wisdom to yourself?
9. What do you know that we know not? What do you understand that is not equally clear to us?
10. Among us are both the gray-haired and the aged, older than your father by far.
11. Are God's consolations [as we have interpreted them to you] too trivial for you? Is there any secret thing (any bosom sin) which you have not given up? [Or] were we too gentle [in our first speech] toward you to be effective?
12. Why does your heart carry you away [why allow yourself to be controlled by feeling]? And why do your eyes flash [in anger or contempt],
13. That you turn your spirit against God and let [such] words [as you have spoken] go out of your mouth?
14. What is man, that he could be pure and clean? And he who is born of a woman, that he could be right and just?
15. Behold, [God] puts no trust in His holy ones [the angels]; indeed, the heavens are not clean in His sight–
16. How much less that which is abominable and corrupt, a man who drinks iniquity like water?
17. I will show you, hear me; and that which I have seen I will relate,
18. What wise men have not hid but have freely communicated; it was told to them by their fathers,
19. Unto whom alone the land was given, and no stranger intruded or passed among them [corrupting the truth].