Why do you insist on being battered? Why do you continue to rebel? Your head has a massive wound, your whole body is weak.

For though your people, Israel, are as numerous as the sand on the seashore, only a remnant will come back. Destruction has been decreed; just punishment is about to engulf you.

When the Moabites plead with all their might at their high places, and enter their temples to pray, their prayers will be ineffective!

The fishermen will mourn and lament, all those who cast a fishhook into the river, and those who spread out a net on the water’s surface will grieve.

All your leaders ran away together – they fled to a distant place; all your refugees were captured together – they were captured without a single arrow being shot.

Tremble, you complacent ones! Shake with fear, you carefree ones! Strip off your clothes and expose yourselves – put sackcloth on your waist!

What can I say? He has decreed and acted. I will walk slowly all my years because I am overcome with grief.

“I announced events beforehand, I issued the decrees and made the predictions; suddenly I acted and they came to pass.

Shout for joy, O sky! Rejoice, O earth! Let the mountains give a joyful shout! For the Lord consoles his people and shows compassion to the oppressed.

Look, my servants will shout for joy as happiness fills their hearts! But you will cry out as sorrow fills your hearts; you will wail because your spirits will be crushed.

The Lord answered, “This has happened because these people have rejected my laws which I gave them. They have not obeyed me or followed those laws.

For I solemnly warned your ancestors to obey me. I warned them again and again, ever since I delivered them out of Egypt until this very day.

Not one of them will survive. I will bring disaster on those men from Anathoth who threatened you. A day of reckoning is coming for them.”

But they just keep saying, ‘We do not care what you say! We will do whatever we want to do! We will continue to behave wickedly and stubbornly!’”

Lord, you coerced me into being a prophet, and I allowed you to do it. You overcame my resistance and prevailed over me. Now I have become a constant laughingstock. Everyone ridicules me.

Yes, a time is coming when watchmen will call out on the mountains of Ephraim, “Come! Let us go to Zion to worship the Lord our God!”’”

“I, Lord, make the following promise: ‘I have made a covenant with the day and with the night that they will always come at their proper times. Only if you people could break that covenant

There at Riblah the king of Babylon had Zedekiah’s sons put to death while Zedekiah was forced to watch. The king of Babylon also had all the nobles of Judah put to death.

‘You have said, “I feel so hopeless! For the Lord has added sorrow to my suffering. I am worn out from groaning. I can’t find any rest.”’”

“Destructive forces will come against the Babylonians,” says the Lord. “They will come against the people who inhabit Babylonia, against her leaders and her men of wisdom.