“The young lions have roared at him,
They have roared loudly.
And they have made his land a waste;
His cities have been destroyed, without inhabitant.

“How can you say, ‘I am not defiled,
I have not gone after the Baals’?
Look at your way in the valley!
Know what you have done!
You are a swift young camel entangling her ways,

But I am full of the wrath of the Lord;
I am weary with holding it in.
“Pour it out on the children in the street
And on the gathering of young men together;
For both husband and wife shall be taken,
The aged and the very old.

For death has come up through our windows;
It has entered our palaces
To cut off the children from the streets,
The young men from the town squares.

therefore, thus says the Lord of hosts, “Behold, I am about to punish them! The young men will die by the sword, their sons and daughters will die by famine;

“For even the doe in the field has given birth only to abandon her young,
Because there is no grass.

“Their widows will be more numerous before Me
Than the sand of the seas;
I will bring against them, against the mother of a young man,
A destroyer at noonday;
I will suddenly bring down on her
Anguish and dismay.

Therefore, give their children over to famine
And deliver them up to the power of the sword;
And let their wives become childless and widowed.
Let their men also be smitten to death,
Their young men struck down by the sword in battle.

“They will come and shout for joy on the height of Zion,
And they will be radiant over the bounty of the Lord—
Over the grain and the new wine and the oil,
And over the young of the flock and the herd;
And their life will be like a watered garden,
And they will never languish again.

“Then the virgin will rejoice in the dance,
And the young men and the old, together,
For I will turn their mourning into joy
And will comfort them and give them joy for their sorrow.

Then Baruch said to them, “He dictated all these words to me, and I wrote them with ink on the book.”

But Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, a eunuch, while he was in the king’s palace, heard that they had put Jeremiah into the cistern. Now the king was sitting in the Gate of Benjamin;

“Moab has been destroyed and men have gone up to his cities;
His choicest young men have also gone down to the slaughter,”
Declares the King, whose name is the Lord of hosts.

“If grape gatherers came to you,
Would they not leave gleanings?
If thieves came by night,
They would destroy only until they had enough.

“Therefore, her young men will fall in her streets,
And all the men of war will be silenced in that day,” declares the Lord of hosts.

“Chaldea will become plunder;
All who plunder her will have enough,” declares the Lord.

Put all her young bulls to the sword;
Let them go down to the slaughter!
Woe be upon them, for their day has come,
The time of their punishment.

“Therefore her young men will fall in her streets,
And all her men of war will be silenced in that day,” declares the Lord.

“Let not him who bends his bow bend it,
Nor let him rise up in his scale-armor;
So do not spare her young men;
Devote all her army to destruction.

And with you I shatter man and woman,
And with you I shatter old man and youth,
And with you I shatter young man and virgin,

“They will roar together like young lions,
They will growl like lions’ cubs.