Because of the Lord’s wrath it shall be uninhabited, become an utter wasteland; Everyone who passes by Babylon will be appalled and hiss at all its wounds.
but when the seventy years have elapsed, I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation and the land of the Chaldeans for their guilt—oracle of the Lord. Their land I will turn into everlasting waste.
I am giving the command—oracle of the Lord—to bring them back to this city. They shall attack and capture it, and burn it with fire; the cities of Judah I will turn into a waste, where no one dwells.
and then say: Lord, you yourself spoke against this place in order to cut it down so that nothing, human being or beast, could live in it, because it is to remain a wasteland forever.
Is this the exultant city that dwelt secure, That told itself, “I and there is no one else”? How it has become a waste, a lair for wild animals! Those who pass by it hiss, and shake their fists!
all its soil burned out by sulphur and salt, unsown and unfruitful, without a blade of grass, like the catastrophe of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the Lord overthrew in his furious wrath—