Before you were formed in the body of your mother I had knowledge of you, and before your birth I made you holy; I have given you the work of being a prophet to the nations.

We were looking for peace, but no good came; and for a time of well-being, but there is only a great fear.

And the Lord said, Because they have given up my law which I put before them, giving no attention to my voice and not being guided by it;

They have made it waste; it is weeping to me, being wasted; all the land is made waste, because no man takes it to heart.

Have you completely given up Judah? is your soul turned in disgust from Zion? why have you given us blows from which there is no one to make us well? we were looking for peace, but no good came; and for a time of well-being, but there was only a great fear.

Why is my pain unending and my wound without hope of being made well? Sorrow is mine, for you are to me as a stream offering false hope and as waters which are not certain.

My word came to you in the time of your well-being; but you said, I will not give ear. This has been your way from your earliest years, you did not give attention to my voice.

Have you taken note of what these people have said, The two families, which the Lord took for himself, he has given up? This they say, looking down on my people as being, in their eyes, no longer a nation.

Then the rulers said to the king, Let this man be put to death, because he is putting fear into the hearts of the men of war who are still in the town, and into the hearts of the people, by saying such things to them: this man is not working for the well-being of the people, but for their damage.

Now it came to the ears of Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, an unsexed servant in the king's house, that they had put Jeremiah into the water-hole; the king at that time being seated in the doorway of Benjamin:

Such will be the fate of all the men whose minds are fixed on going into Egypt and stopping there; they will come to their end by the sword, by being short of food, and by disease: not one of them will keep his life or get away from the evil which I will send on them.

And now be certain that you will come to your end by the sword and by being short of food and by disease, in the place to which you are pleased to go for a living-place.

And I will take the last of Judah, whose minds are fixed on going into the land of Egypt and stopping there, and they will all come to their end, falling in the land of Egypt by the sword and by being short of food and by disease; death will overtake them, from the least to the greatest, death by the sword and by need of food: they will become an oath and a cause of wonder and a curse and a name of shame.