Remember your Creator when someone is afraid of heights and of dangers along the road, the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along, ⌞and⌟ the caper bush has ⌞no⌟ fruit. Mortals go to their eternal rest, and mourners go out in the streets.
⌞The Lord said,⌟ “Say to them, ‘This is what the Lord of Armies, the God of Israel, says: Drink, get drunk, vomit, fall down, and don’t get up because of the wars that I’m going to send you.’
The Lord of Armies says: I’m going to send them wars, famines, and plagues. These people are like rotten figs to me, figs that are so bad that they can’t be eaten.
I am going to watch over them. I am going to watch over them to bring disasters, not blessings. In Egypt the people from Judah will die in wars and famines until everyone is gone.
“Cut off your hair and throw it away. Sing a song of mourning on the bare hills, because in his anger the Lord has rejected and abandoned the people of this generation.
The cry from my dear people comes from a distant land: “Isn’t the Lord in Zion? Isn’t Zion’s king still there?” They make me furious with their idols, with their foreign gods.
“So tell them, ‘This is what the Almighty Lord says: I will bring them together from the nations and gather them from the countries where I’ve scattered them. I will give them the land of Israel.
“Suppose I bring a war against that country by saying, ‘I will let a war go throughout this country.’ Suppose I destroy the people and the animals in it.
One-third of you will die in plagues and be devoured in famines. Another third will die in battles against those around you. I will scatter the remaining third to the wind, and I will pursue them with a sword.
When the blockade is over, burn one-third of your hair in a fire in the middle of the city. Take another third, and cut it up with a blade around the city. Then scatter the remaining third to the wind, and I will draw a sword and go after it.
This is what the Lord, the Almighty God of Armies, says: There will be loud crying in every city square, and people will say in every street, “Oh, no!” They will call on farmers to mourn and on professional mourners to cry loudly.
When that day comes, people will make fun of you. They will sing this sad song about you: “We are completely ruined. The Lord gives our people’s possessions ⌞to others⌟. He takes them from us. He divides our fields among our captors.”
I used a windstorm to scatter them among all the nations, nations they hadn’t even heard of. They left behind a land so ruined that no one is able to travel through it. They have turned a pleasant land into a wasteland.”
The Lord will let your enemies defeat you. You will attack them from one direction but run away from them in seven directions. You will become a thing of horror to all the kingdoms in the world.
Then the Lord will scatter you among all the people of the world, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will serve gods made of wood and stone that neither you nor your ancestors ever knew.