Why do you cause me to see evil [while] you look at trouble? Destruction and violence happen before me; contention and strife arise.

"Look among the nations and see; be astonished and astounded. For a work [is about to] be done in your days that you will not believe if it is told.

For look! I am raising up the Chaldeans, the bitter and impetuous nation, the one who walks through the spacious places of earth to take possession of dwellings not belonging to it.

Their horses [are] more swift than leopards; they are more menacing than wolves [at] dusk. Their horsemen gallop; their horsemen come from afar; they fly like an eagle [that is] swift to devour.

All of them come for violence, their faces pressing forward. They gather captives like the sand.

Then they sweep [like the] wind and pass on; they become guilty, whose might [is] their god!"

Your eyes [are] too pure to see evil, and you are not able to look at wrongdoing. Why do you look at the treacherous? [Why] are you silent when the wicked swallows up [someone] more righteous than him?

You make humankind like fish of the sea, like crawling creatures that have no ruler among them.

Look! His spirit within him is puffed up; it is not upright. But the righteous shall live by his faithfulness.

{How much less} the defiant; [the] arrogant, treacherous man? He who broadens his throat like Sheol, and who, like death, is not satisfied, and who gathers to himself all the nations, and harvested for himself all the peoples, will not succeed.

Look! [Is it] not from Yahweh of hosts that people labor for mere fire, and nations exhaust themselves for mere vanity?

For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of Yahweh, like the waters covering the sea.

Woe to [him who] says to the wood, 'Wake up!' [And] to a lifeless stone, 'Arise!' Can he teach? Look, it is covered [with] gold and silver, and there is no breath within it.

And his brightness was like [the] light; flashing rays [came] from his hand for him; And there [is] the covering of his strength.

You pierced the head of his warriors with his own arrows; they came like a whirlwind to scatter me, their exultation like [one who] devours the afflicted in ambush.

Yahweh, my Lord, [is] my strength; he makes my feet like the deer; he causes me to walk on my high places. To the choirmaster with stringed instruments.