For your waste and desolate places and your land marked by ruins will now be indeed too small for the inhabitants, and those who swallowed you up will be far away.
I will bring them back from the land of Egypt and gather them from Assyria. I will bring them to the land of Gilead and to Lebanon, but it will not be enough for them.
For the Lord will comfort Zion; he will comfort all her waste places, and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord. Joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and melodious song.
‘Many nations will join themselves to the Lord on that day and become my people. I will dwell among you, and you will know that the Lord of Armies has sent me to you.
therefore, prophesy and say, “This is what the Lord God says: Because they have made you desolate and have trampled you from every side, so that you became a possession for the rest of the nations and an object of people’s gossip and slander,
For this is what the Lord of Armies, the God of Israel, says: Daughter Babylon is like a threshing-floor at the time it is trampled. In just a little while her harvest time will come.
Nevertheless, all who devoured you will be devoured, and all your adversaries #– #all of them – will go off into exile. Those who plunder you will be plundered, and all who raid you will be raided.
This is what the Lord says: I will answer you in a time of favour, and I will help you in the day of salvation. I will keep you, and I will appoint you to be a covenant for the people, to restore the land, to make them possess the desolate inheritances,
I will make it a wasteland. It will not be pruned or weeded; thorns and briars will grow up. I will also give orders to the clouds that rain should not fall on it.
Your land is desolate, your cities burned down; foreigners devour your fields right in front of you – a desolation, like a place demolished by foreigners.
For the Lord of Armies says this: ‘In pursuit of his glory, he sent me against the nations plundering you, for whoever touches you touches the pupil of my eye.