New International Version

Job 24:5-18 New International Version (NIV)

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.