Look up at the sky! Look at the earth below! For the sky will dissipate ¹  like smoke, and the earth will wear out like clothes; its residents will die like gnats. But the deliverance I give ²  is permanent; the vindication I provide ³  will not disappear. ⁴ 

Like a swallow or a thrush I chirp, I coo ¹  like a dove; my eyes grow tired from looking up to the sky. ²  O sovereign master, ³  I am oppressed; help me! ⁴ 

The Lord will continually lead you; he will feed you even in parched regions. ¹  He will give you renewed strength, ²  and you will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring that continually produces water.

The powerful will be like ¹  a thread of yarn, their deeds like a spark; both will burn together, and no one will put out the fire.

Their roar is like a lion’s; they roar like young lions. They growl and seize their prey; they drag it away and no one can come to the rescue.

Daughter Zion ¹  is left isolated, like a hut in a vineyard, or a shelter in a cucumber field; she is a besieged city. ² 

For this is what the Lord has told me: “I will wait ¹  and watch from my place, like scorching heat produced by the sunlight, ²  like a cloud of mist ³  in the heat ⁴  of harvest.” ⁵ 

For a moth will eat away at them like clothes; a clothes moth will devour them like wool. But the vindication I provide ¹  will be permanent; the deliverance I give will last.”

I will climb up to the tops ¹  of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High!” ² 

All the stars in the sky will fade away, ¹  the sky will roll up like a scroll; all its stars will wither, like a leaf withers and falls from a vine or a fig withers and falls from a tree. ² 

Your plunder ¹  disappears as if locusts were eating it; ²  they swarm over it like locusts! ³ 

“Indeed, the Lord will call you back like a wife who has been abandoned and suffers from depression, ¹  like a young wife when she has been rejected,” says your God.

Why are your clothes red? Why do you look like someone who has stomped on grapes in a vat? ¹ 

He sprouted up like a twig before God, ¹  like a root out of parched soil; ²  he had no stately form or majesty that might catch our attention, ³  no special appearance that we should want to follow him. ⁴ 

A voice says, “Cry out!” Another asks, ¹  “What should I cry out?” The first voice responds: ²  “All people are like grass, ³  and all their promises ⁴  are like the flowers in the field.

Though these people make an uproar as loud as the roaring of powerful waves, ¹  when he shouts at ²  them, they will flee to a distant land, driven before the wind like dead weeds on the hills, or like dead thistles ³  before a strong gale.

So my heart constantly sighs for Moab, like the strumming of a harp, ¹  my inner being sighs ²  for Kir Hareseth. ³ 

who led them through the deep water? Like a horse running on flat land ¹  they did not stumble.

Your descendants would have been as numerous as sand, ¹  and your children ²  like its granules. Their name would not have been cut off and eliminated from my presence. ³ 

He wears his desire for justice ¹  like body armor, ²  and his desire to deliver is like a helmet on his head. ³  He puts on the garments of vengeance ⁴  and wears zeal like a robe.