One of the persons is suffering, and the poem shows him revealing the acts of evil done by people in the society around him, while the other person is shown attempting to add perspective on these acts of dubious morality, by him stating the nature of the occurrence of justice within the order of everything that exists (in the universe), an order that exists because it was made by a divinity.
[5] The first line reads:[4] O sage...come let me speak to you...let me recount to you...and the speaker proceeds to recount first hand experiences and his grief, referred to as lumnu libbi which means, in literal translation, evil of the heart, but which in everyday lexicon might be called anguish or heartache, which is to say, a kind of emotional and psychological suffering.
The sufferer hopes to gain a cathartic release purely by the act of anothers listening to his recounting of his tale of woe, if it is his companion might be amiable and therefore might provide of a form of compassion, the sufferer states, in the last stanza [4] (the translation made by Professor W.G.Lambert [3][4]): ....behold my grief-help me, look on my distress; know it.and the last part of the last line reads:[1] May the god who has thrown me off give help, may the goddess who has [abandoned me] show mercy, for the shepherd Šamaš guides the peoples like a god.The "Babylonian Theodicy" is, with regards to its dialogic nature of a sufferer and friend(s), formally very similar to the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible.
[3][4][6] The poem is acrostic, which means that the first syllabic sign of each line form words when read downwards, and the poem, in terms of its structure, is made up of twenty seven stanzas (or verses in other words) with each stanza consisting of eleven lines.
[5][7] The words constructed in the acrostic of the poem read:[5] I, Saggil-kīnam-ubbib, the incantation priest, am adorant of the god and kinga-na-ku sa-ag-gi-il-ki-[i-na-am-u]b-bi-ib ma-áš-ma-šu ka-ri-bu ša i-li ú šar-riAccording to one source, the earliest manuscripts showing this poem date from the Ashurbanipal library, another source states the Theodicy originates slightly after the Kassite period, circa 1500-1100 B.C., more exactly, written apparently at about 1000 B.C.