tongue and lips, which have uttered and spoken vanity, reproach, falsehood, folly, ridicule, fiction, craft, and hypocrisy! Woe to my eyes, which have looked upon offence! Woe to my ears, which have taken pleasure in the talk of calumniators! Woe to my hands, which have seized what did not lawfully pertain to them! Woe to my stomach, which has longed for food which it was forbidden it to eat! Woe to my throat, which, like a fire, consumed all things, whatever it took hold of? Woe to my feet, which have too often walked in ways displeasing to God! Woe to my body, and woe to my unhappy soul, which is now averse from God its maker! What shall I do when I come to the place where I must stand before the most just Judge, and he shall rebuke me for the works which I have multiplied in my youth? Woe to every man who dieth in his sins! Certainly that same terrible hour which overtook my father Jacob when his soul took flight from his body, behold to me is now imminent. O, how miserable I am to-day, and worthy of lamentation! But God alone is the director of my soul and body; he also will do with them according to his pleasure.[1]
CHAPTER XVII.
This is what Joseph, that just old man, said. Now
- ↑ The lamentation and confession of Joseph finds its counterpart in a Jewish confession quoted by Thilo from Buxtorf's Synodus Judaica.
