"When you have completed these days, then lie down a second time, but on your right side, and bear the iniquity of the house of Judah 40 days -- I have assigned one day for each year.

Doom is coming upon you who live in the land! The time is coming, the day is near. There are sounds of tumult, not shouts of joy, on the mountains.

"Look, the day! Look, it is coming! Doom has gone out! The staff has budded, pride has blossomed!

The time has come; the day has struck! The customer should not rejoice, nor the seller mourn; for divine wrath comes against their whole crowd.

They say, 'The time is not near to build houses; the city is a cooking pot and we are the meat in it.'

Have you not copied their behavior and practiced their abominable deeds? In a short time you became even more depraved in all your conduct than they were!

"'As for you, profane and wicked prince of Israel, whose day has come, the time of final punishment,

while seeing false visions for you and reading lying omens for you -- to place that sword on the necks of the profane wicked, whose day has come, the time of final punishment.

Then say, 'This is what the sovereign Lord says: O city, who spills blood within herself (which brings on her doom), and who makes herself idols (which results in impurity),

you are guilty because of the blood you shed and defiled by the idols you made. You have hastened the day of your doom; the end of your years has come. Therefore I will make you an object of scorn to the nations, an object to be mocked by all lands.

For the day is near, the day of the Lord is near; it will be a day of storm clouds, it will be a time of judgment for the nations.

On that day messengers will go out from me in ships to frighten overly confident Ethiopia; panic will overtake them on the day of Egypt's doom; for beware -- it is coming!

Now the hand of the Lord had been on me the evening before the refugee reached me, but the Lord opened my mouth by the time the refugee arrived in the morning; he opened my mouth and I was no longer unable to speak.

"'You have shown unrelenting hostility and poured the people of Israel onto the blades of a sword at the time of their calamity, at the time of their final punishment.