So now, I will make known to you what I will do to my vineyard: I will take away the hedge, and it will be eaten up. I will break down the fence, and it will be trodden down.
Then they said, “Come! Let’s build ourselves a city, with a tower whose top reaches into heaven. So let’s make a name for ourselves, or else we will be scattered over the face of the whole land.”
but I said to the king, “May the king live forever! Why should my face not be sad, when the city where my ancestors are buried lies in ruins and its gates have been destroyed by fire?”
I am sending it against an ungodly nation, and against the people of My fury I am commissioning it, to take spoil and plunder, to trample them down like mud in the streets.
Your covenant with death is annulled, and your pact with Sheol will not stand. An overflowing scourge will pass through and you will be its trampling place.
So now, speak to the people of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, saying, thus says Adonai: “I am about to bring calamity against you, and devise disaster against you. Turn back now—everyone from his evil way—and amend your ways and your doings.
thus says Adonai, the God of Israel: ‘I will soon turn back the weapons of war that are in your hands, which you use to fight against the king of Babylon and against the Chaldeans, who are besieging you outside the walls—I will assemble them in the center of this city.
The prophets who have been before me and before you of ancient times prophesied against many countries and against great kingdoms—of war, catastrophe and plague.
The Lord has rejected all the mighty ones in my midst. He has summoned an assembly against me to crush my young men. In a winepress the Lord has trampled the virgin daughter of Judah.
Like the garden He laid waste His dwelling, destroyed His appointed meeting place. Adonai has caused moed and Shabbat to be forgotten in Zion. In the indignation of His anger He spurned king and kohen.
“Then I heard a holy one speaking and another holy one said to the one who was speaking, ‘How long will the vision last, the daily sacrifice be forsaken because of rebellion, the sanctuary be surrendered and the host be trampled?’
I will also devastate her vines and her fig trees, of which she said: ‘These are my payment that my lovers have given to me.’ But I will turn them into a thicket and beasts of the field will devour them.
They will fall by the edge of the sword and be led away captive into all the nations. Jerusalem will be trampled by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.
But do not measure the court outside the Temple—leave it out, because it has been given to the nations, and they shall trample the holy city for forty-two months.