In the day of your planting, you hedge it in. In the morning, you make your seed blossom, but the harvest flees away in the day of grief and of desperate sorrow.
Cut off the sower from Babylon, and him who handles the sickle in the time of harvest. For fear of the oppressing sword, they will each return to their own people, and they will each flee to their own land.
Who is wise enough to understand this? Who is he to whom the mouth of the LORD has spoken, that he may declare it? Why has the land perished and burnt up like a wilderness, so that no one passes through?
Therefore the LORD, the God of Hosts, the Lord, says: “Wailing will be in all the wide ways. They will say in all the streets, ‘Alas! Alas!’ They will call the farmer to mourning, and those who are skilful in lamentation to wailing.