Go and say in the ears of Jerusalem, The Lord says, I still keep the memory of your kind heart when you were young, and your love when you became my bride; how you went after me in the waste of sand, in an unplanted land.

And they never said, Where is the Lord, who took us up out of the land of Egypt; who was our guide through the waste of sand, through an unplanted land full of deep holes, through a dry land of deep shade, which no one went through and where no man was living?

Do you not revere me?" {declares} Yahweh, "Do you not tremble {before me}? For I have placed [the] sand [as] a boundary for the sea, {as an everlasting limit}, and it cannot pass over it, and they rise and fall loudly, but they cannot prevail, and its waves roar, but they cannot pass over it.

Their widows will be more numerous before me than [the] sand of [the] seas. I have brought to them, against [the] mothers of young men, a destroyer at noon. I will suddenly drop on her anguish and horror.

As the host of heaven cannot be counted, and the sand of the sea cannot be measured, so I will make numerous the offspring of David my servant and the Levites [who] minister [to] me.'"

So they took Jeremiah and threw him into the pit [of] Malchiah, the son of the king, which [was] in the courtyard of the guard. And they let Jeremiah down by ropes. Now in the pit there was no water, {but only} mud, and Jeremiah sank in the mud.

‘All the women who remain in the palace of Judah’s king will be brought out to the officials of the king of Babylon and will say:

Your trusted friends misled you
and overcame you.
Your feet sank into the mire,
and they deserted you.

Her voice shall go as the serpent; for with an army in the sand they shall go, and with axes they came to her, as they hewing wood.