I will stretch over Jerusalem the measuring line for Samaria and the plummet for the house of Ahab; I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down.
Therefore I will make the heavens tremble, and the earth will be shaken out of its place at the wrath of the Lord of hosts in the day of his fierce anger.
Enter the caves of the rocks and the holes of the ground, from the terror of the Lord and from the glory of his majesty, when he rises to terrify the earth.
For the fortified city is solitary, a habitation deserted and forsaken, like the wilderness; the calves graze there; there they lie down and strip its branches.
You turn things upside down! Shall the potter be regarded as the clay? Shall the thing made say of its maker, “He did not make me,” or the thing formed say of the one who formed it, “He has no understanding”?
And every stroke of the staff of punishment that the Lord lays upon him will be to the sound of timbrels and lyres with dancing; with brandished arm he will fight with him.
Night and day it shall not be quenched; its smoke shall go up forever. From generation to generation it shall lie waste; no one shall pass through it forever and ever.
I will make it a wasteland; it shall not be pruned or hoed, and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns; I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it.
A lion has gone up from its thicket; a destroyer of nations has set out; he has gone out from his place to make your land a waste; your cities will be ruins without inhabitant.
Then Johanan son of Kareah spoke secretly to Gedaliah at Mizpah, “Please let me go and kill Ishmael son of Nethaniah, and no one else will know. Why should he take your life, so that all the Judeans who are gathered around you would be scattered and the remnant of Judah would perish?”
Israel is a hunted sheep driven away by lions. First the king of Assyria devoured it, and now at the end King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon has gnawed its bones.
“King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon has devoured me; he has crushed me; he has made me an empty vessel; he has swallowed me like a monster; he has filled his belly with my delicacies; he has spewed me out.
One third of the hair you shall burn in the fire inside the city when the days of the siege are completed; one third you shall take and strike with the sword all around the city; and one third you shall scatter to the wind, and I will unsheathe the sword after them.
I will stretch out my hand against them and make the land desolate and waste, throughout all their settlements, from the wilderness to Riblah. Then they shall know that I am the Lord.
Wherever you live, your towns shall be waste and your high places ruined, so that your altars will be waste and ruined, your idols broken and destroyed, your incense stands cut down, and your works wiped out.
they will fall by the edge of the sword and be taken away as captives among all nations, and Jerusalem will be trampled on by the nations, until the times of the nations are fulfilled.
When they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some brothers and sisters before the city authorities, shouting, “These people who have been turning the world upside down have come here also,
The Lord will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other, and there you shall serve other gods, of wood and stone, which neither you nor your ancestors have known.