“Thus said יהוה of hosts, ‘The fast of the fourth, and the fast of the fifth, and the fast of the seventh, and the fast of the tenth months, are to be joy and gladness, and pleasant appointed times for the house of Yehuḏ
Then the city wall was breached, and all the men of battle fled and went out of the city at night by way of the gate between the two walls, which was by the sovereign’s garden, while the Chaldeans were near the city all around. And they went by way of the desert plain.
‘See the siege mounds! They have come to the city to take it. And the city has been given into the hand of the Chaldeans who fight against it, because of the sword and the scarcity of food and the pestilence. And what You have spoken has come about, and look, You see it!
“In his right hand shall be the divination for Yerushalayim: to set up battering rams, to call for a slaughter, to lift the voice with shouting, to set battering rams against the gates, to heap up a siege mound, to build a wall.
‘And I shall bring against you a sword executing the vengeance of My covenant, and you shall gather together in your cities, and I shall send pestilence among you, and you shall be given into the hand of the enemy.
‘With the sword he shall slay your daughter villages in the fields. And he shall heap up a siege mound against you, and shall build a wall against you, and shall raise a large shield against you,
And it came to be in the twelfth year of our exile, in the tenth month, on the fifth of the month, that one who had escaped from Yerushalayim came to me and said, “The city has been smitten!”
In the twenty-fifth year of our exile, at the beginning of the year, on the tenth of the month, in the fourteenth year after the city was smitten, on that same day the hand of יהוה came upon me and He brought me there.