Anonymous (Septuagint) · a new plain-English translation from the original language
1| Great are your judgments, Lord, and hard to put into words; that is why undisciplined souls went astray.
2| Lawless men who imagined they could tyrannize a holy nation lay instead as fugitives from eternal providence, prisoners of darkness, shackled by a long night, shut in beneath their own roofs.
3| Thinking to escape notice in their secret sins beneath a dark veil of forgetfulness, they were scattered abroad, terrified beyond measure and shaken by apparitions.
4| For not even the hidden recess that held them kept them free of fear; sounds crashed around them and terrified them, and grim phantoms appeared with unsmiling faces.
5| No force of fire had power to give light, nor could the bright flames of the stars bear to illumine that hateful night.
6| Only a self-kindled fire, full of dread, flickered before them, and, terrified by that sight they could not clearly see, they judged what lay before them worse than what they beheld.
7| The mockeries of the magician's art lay powerless, and the boast of their vaunted wisdom stood shamefully refuted.
8| For those who promised to drive off the terrors and disturbances of a sick soul were themselves sick with a laughable cowardice.
9| For even when nothing frightening alarmed them, startled by the passing of vermin and the hissing of serpents,
10| they perished in trembling, refusing even to look upon the air, from which there was no escape anywhere.
11| For wickedness, condemned by its own testimony, is a cowardly thing, and, hard-pressed by conscience, always adds to itself grim expectations.
12| For fear is nothing other than the surrender of the help that reason offers;
13| and the less this inner expectation, the more it reckons the ignorance of the cause that brings the torment.
14| And they, sleeping that same sleep through that truly powerless night which came upon them from the powerless recesses of Hades,
15| were now driven by monstrous phantoms, now unstrung in soul by their own surrender; for sudden and unexpected fear came upon them.
16| And so, whoever among them happened to fall there was kept confined, shut up in that prison without iron bars.
17| For whether he was a farmer, or a shepherd, or a laborer toiling in the wilderness, once overtaken he endured the inescapable constraint;
18| for all were bound with a single chain of darkness. Whether it was a whistling wind, or the tuneful sound of birds among spreading branches, or the rushing rhythm of water flowing violently,
19| or the harsh crash of falling rocks, or the unseen running of leaping animals, or the voice of roaring, fiercest beasts, or an echo reverberating from the hollows of the mountains — it unstrung them, striking them with terror.
20| For the whole world was lit with brilliant light and carried on its labors unhindered,
21| but over those men alone stretched a heavy night, an image of the darkness destined to receive them afterward; yet to themselves they were heavier still than the darkness.