and they shall be afraid. Pangs and sorrows shall take hold of them; they shall be in pain as a woman who travails; they shall be amazed one at another; their faces shall be as flames.
Therefore, my loins are filled with pain; pangs have taken hold of me as the pangs of a woman who travails. I am so perplexed at the hearing of it; I am so dismayed at the seeing of it.
Like a woman with child, who is in pain and cries out in her pangs when she draws near the time of her delivery, so have we been in Your sight, O Lord.
Therefore do not fear, O My servant Jacob, says the Lord, nor be dismayed, O Israel; for behold, I will save you from afar, and your seed from the land of their captivity. And Jacob shall return and shall be in rest and be quiet, and no one shall make him afraid.
For I have heard a voice as of a woman in labor, and the anguish as of her who brings forth her first child, the voice of the daughter of Zion, that bewails herself, that spreads her hands, saying, “Ah, woe is me, for my soul is wearied because of murderers.”
Kerioth has been captured, and the strongholds have been seized, and the mighty men’s hearts in Moab in that day will be as the heart of a woman in her pangs.
Behold, the cry of the daughter of my people from a far country: “Is not the Lord in Zion? Is not her king in her?” “Why have they provoked Me to anger with their graven images, with foreign vanities?”
The breath of our life, the anointed king of the Lord, was captured in their traps, of whom we said, “Under his shadow we shall live among the nations.”
For the Israelites will remain many days without a king and without a prince, without a sacrifice and without a standing stone, and without an ephod and teraphim.
When a woman is giving birth, she has pain, because her hour has come. But as soon as she delivers the child, she no longer remembers the anguish for joy that a child is born into the world.