In the streets they cry for wine.
All joy grows dark;
earth’s rejoicing goes into exile.

For this is how it will be on earth
among the nations:
like a harvested olive tree,
like a gleaning after a grape harvest.

Whoever flees at the sound of panic
will fall into a pit,
and whoever escapes from the pit
will be caught in a trap.
For the windows are opened from heaven,
and the foundations of the earth are shaken.

Yahweh, You are my God;
I will exalt You. I will praise Your name,
for You have accomplished wonders,
plans formed long ago, with perfect faithfulness.

For You have turned the city into a pile of rocks,
a fortified city, into ruins;
the fortress of barbarians is no longer a city;
it will never be rebuilt.

Therefore, a strong people will honor You.
The cities of violent nations will fear You.

For You have been a stronghold for the poor,
a stronghold for the needy person in his distress,
a refuge from the rain, a shade from the heat.
When the breath of the violent
is like rain against a wall,

The Lord of Hosts will prepare a feast
for all the peoples on this mountain—
a feast of aged wine, choice meat, finely aged wine.

He will destroy death forever.
The Lord God will wipe away the tears
from every face
and remove His people’s disgrace
from the whole earth,
for the Lord has spoken.

On that day it will be said,
“Look, this is our God;
we have waited for Him, and He has saved us.
This is the Lord; we have waited for Him.
Let us rejoice and be glad in His salvation.”

For the Lord’s power will rest on this mountain.

But Moab will be trampled in his place
as straw is trampled in a dung pile.

You will keep the mind that is dependent on You
in perfect peace,
for it is trusting in You.

For He has humbled those who live in lofty places—
an inaccessible city.
He brings it down; He brings it down to the ground;
He throws it to the dust.

The path of the righteous is level;
You clear a straight path for the righteous.

Yes, Yahweh, we wait for You
in the path of Your judgments.
Our desire is for Your name and renown.

I long for You in the night;
yes, my spirit within me diligently seeks You,
for when Your judgments are in the land,
the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.

Lord, Your hand is lifted up to take action,
but they do not see it.
They will see Your zeal for Your people,
and they will be put to shame.
The fire for Your adversaries will consume them!

Lord, You will establish peace for us,
for You have also done all our work for us.

Your dead will live; their bodies will rise.
Awake and sing, you who dwell in the dust!
For you will be covered with the morning dew,
and the earth will bring out the departed spirits.

Go, my people, enter your rooms
and close your doors behind you.
Hide for a little while until the wrath has passed.

For look, the Lord is coming from His place
to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity.
The earth will reveal the blood shed on it
and will no longer conceal her slain.

I am not angry,
but if it produces thorns and briers for Me,
I will fight against it, trample it,
and burn it to the ground.

For the fortified city will be deserted,
pastures abandoned and forsaken like a wilderness.
Calves will graze there,
and there they will spread out and strip its branches.

When its branches dry out, they will be broken off.
Women will come and make fires with them,
for they are not a people with understanding.
Therefore their Maker will not have compassion on them,
and their Creator will not be gracious to them.

On that day
the Lord will thresh grain from the Euphrates River
as far as the Wadi of Egypt,
and you Israelites will be gathered one by one.

For he says: “Law after law, law after law,
line after line, line after line,
a little here, a little there.”

For you said, “We have cut a deal with Death,
and we have made an agreement with Sheol;
when the overwhelming scourge passes through,
it will not touch us,
because we have made falsehood our refuge
and have hidden behind treachery.”

For the Lord will rise up as He did at Mount Perazim.
He will rise in wrath, as at the Valley of Gibeon,
to do His work, His strange work,
and to perform His task, His disturbing task.

So now, do not mock,
or your shackles will become stronger.
Indeed, I have heard from the Lord God of Hosts
a decree of destruction for the whole land.

you will be visited by the Lord of Hosts
with thunder, earthquake, and loud noise,
storm, tempest, and a flame of consuming fire.

It will be like a hungry one who dreams he is eating,
then wakes and is still hungry;
and like a thirsty one who dreams he is drinking,
then wakes and is still thirsty, longing for water.
So it will be for all the many nations
who go to battle against Mount Zion.

For the Lord has poured out on you
an overwhelming urge to sleep;
He has shut your eyes—the prophets,
and covered your heads—the seers.

For you the entire vision will be like the words of a sealed document. If it is given to one who can read and he is asked to read it, he will say, “I can’t read it, because it is sealed.”

The Lord said:

Because these people approach Me with their mouths
to honor Me with lip-service—
yet their hearts are far from Me,
and their worship consists of man-made rules
learned by rote—

For the ruthless one will vanish,
the scorner will disappear,
and all those who lie in wait with evil intent
will be killed—

those who, with their speech,
accuse a person of wrongdoing,
who set a trap at the gate for the mediator,
and without cause deprive the righteous of justice.

For when he sees his children,
the work of My hands within his nation,
they will honor My name,
they will honor the Holy One of Jacob
and stand in awe of the God of Israel.

Woe to the rebellious children!
This is the Lord’s declaration.
They carry out a plan, but not Mine;
they make an alliance,
but against My will,
piling sin on top of sin.

They set out to go down to Egypt
without asking My advice,
in order to seek shelter under Pharaoh’s protection
and take refuge in Egypt’s shadow.

But Pharaoh’s protection will become your shame,
and refuge in Egypt’s shadow your disgrace.

For though his princes are at Zoan
and his messengers reach as far as Hanes,

everyone will be ashamed
because of a people who can’t help.
They are of no benefit, they are no help;
they are good for nothing but shame and reproach.

Go now, write it on a tablet in their presence
and inscribe it on a scroll;
it will be for the future,
forever and ever.

Its collapse will be like the shattering
of a potter’s jar, crushed to pieces,
so that not even a fragment of pottery
will be found among its shattered remains—
no fragment large enough to take fire from a hearth
or scoop water from a cistern.”

For the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, has said:
“You will be delivered by returning and resting;
your strength will lie in quiet confidence.
But you are not willing.”

Therefore the Lord is waiting to show you mercy,
and is rising up to show you compassion,
for the Lord is a just God.
All who wait patiently for Him are happy.

For you people will live on Zion in Jerusalem and will never cry again. He will show favor to you at the sound of your cry; when He hears, He will answer you.

Then He will send rain for your seed that you have sown in the ground, and the food, the produce of the ground, will be rich and plentiful. On that day your cattle will graze in open pastures.

Look, Yahweh comes from far away,
His anger burning and heavy with smoke.
His lips are full of fury,
and His tongue is like a consuming fire.

And the Lord will make the splendor of His voice heard
and reveal His arm striking in angry wrath
and a flame of consuming fire,
in driving rain, a torrent, and hailstones.

Indeed! Topheth has been ready
for the king for a long time now.
Its funeral pyre is deep and wide,
with plenty of fire and wood.
The breath of the Lord, like a torrent of brimstone,
kindles it.

Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help
and who depend on horses!
They trust in the abundance of chariots
and in the large number of horsemen.
They do not look to the Holy One of Israel
and they do not seek the Lord’s help.

For this is what the Lord said to me:

As a lion or young lion growls over its prey
when a band of shepherds is called out against it,
and is not terrified by their shouting
or subdued by their noise,
so the Lord of Hosts will come down
to fight on Mount Zion
and on its hill.

For on that day, every one of you will reject the silver and gold idols that your own hands have sinfully made.

His rock will pass away because of fear,
and his officers will be afraid because of the signal flag.

This is the Lord’s declaration—whose fire is in Zion and whose furnace is in Jerusalem.

For a fool speaks foolishness
and his mind plots iniquity.
He lives in a godless way
and speaks falsely about the Lord.
He leaves the hungry empty
and deprives the thirsty of drink.

But a noble person plans noble things;
he stands up for noble causes.

In a little more than a year
you overconfident ones will shudder,
for the vintage will fail
and the harvest will not come.

Beat your breasts in mourning
for the delightful fields and the fruitful vines,

for the ground of my people
growing thorns and briers,
indeed, for every joyous house in the joyful city.

For the palace will be forsaken,
the busy city abandoned.
The hill and the watchtower will become
barren places forever,
the joy of wild donkeys,
and a pasture for flocks,

Lord, be gracious to us! We wait for You.
Be our strength every morning
and our salvation in time of trouble.

The Lord is exalted, for He dwells on high;
He has filled Zion with justice and righteousness.

There will be times of security for you—
a storehouse of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge.
The fear of the Lord is Zion’s treasure.

You will conceive chaff;
you will give birth to stubble.
Your breath is fire that will consume you.

The peoples will be burned to ashes,
like thorns cut down and burned in a fire.

You who are far off, hear what I have done;
you who are near, know My strength.”

The sinners in Zion are afraid;
trembling seizes the ungodly:
“Who among us can dwell with a consuming fire?
Who among us can dwell with ever-burning flames?”

For the majestic One, our Lord, will be there,
a place of rivers and broad streams
where ships that are rowed will not go,
and majestic vessels will not pass.

For the Lord is our Judge,
the Lord is our lawgiver,
the Lord is our King.
He will save us.

The Lord is angry with all the nations—
furious with all their armies.
He will set them apart for destruction,
giving them over to slaughter.

When My sword has drunk its fill in the heavens,
it will then come down on Edom
and on the people I have set apart for destruction.

The Lord’s sword is covered with blood.
It drips with fat,
with the blood of lambs and goats,
with the fat of the kidneys of rams.
For the Lord has a sacrifice in Bozrah,
a great slaughter in the land of Edom.

For the Lord has a day of vengeance,
a time of paying back Edom
for its hostility against Zion.

The desert owl and the screech owl will possess it,
and the great owl and the raven will dwell there.
The Lord will stretch out a measuring line
and a plumb line over her
for her destruction and chaos.

Her palaces will be overgrown with thorns;
her fortified cities, with thistles and briers.
She will become a dwelling for jackals,
an abode for ostriches.

The desert creatures will meet hyenas,
and one wild goat will call to another.
Indeed, the screech owl will stay there
and will find a resting place for herself.

He has ordained a lot for them;
His hand allotted their portion with a measuring line.
They will possess it forever;
they will dwell in it from generation to generation.

Say to the cowardly:
“Be strong; do not fear!
Here is your God; vengeance is coming.
God’s retribution is coming; He will save you.”

Then the lame will leap like a deer,
and the tongue of the mute will sing for joy,
for water will gush in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert;

A road will be there and a way;
it will be called the Holy Way.
The unclean will not travel on it,
but it will be for the one who walks the path.
Even the fool will not go astray.

Look, you are trusting in Egypt, that splintered reed of a staff that will enter and pierce the hand of anyone who leans on it. This is how Pharaoh king of Egypt is to all who trust in him.

How then can you drive back a single officer among the weakest of my master’s officers and trust in Egypt for chariots and horsemen?

Then Eliakim, Shebna, and Joah said to the Rabshakeh, “Please speak to your servants in Aramaic, since we understand it. Don’t speak to us in Hebrew within earshot of the people who are on the wall.”

This is what the king says: “Don’t let Hezekiah deceive you, for he cannot deliver you.

Don’t listen to Hezekiah, for this is what the king of Assyria says: “Make peace with me and surrender to me. Then every one of you may eat from his own vine and his own fig tree and drink water from his own cistern

But they kept silent; they didn’t say anything, for the king’s command was, “Don’t answer him.”

Perhaps Yahweh your God will hear all the words of the Rabshakeh, whom his master the king of Assyria sent to mock the living God, and will rebuke him for the words that Yahweh your God has heard. Therefore offer a prayer for the surviving remnant.’”

They have thrown their gods into the fire, for they were not gods but made by human hands—wood and stone. So they have destroyed them.

You have mocked the Lord through your servants.
You have said, “With my many chariots
I have gone up to the heights of the mountains,
to the far recesses of Lebanon.
I cut down its tallest cedars,
its choice cypress trees.
I came to its distant heights,
its densest forest.

“‘This will be the sign for you: This year you will eat what grows on its own, and in the second year what grows from that. But in the third year sow and reap, plant vineyards and eat their fruit.

For a remnant will go out from Jerusalem and survivors, from Mount Zion. The zeal of the Lord of Hosts will accomplish this.’

He will go back
the way he came,
and he will not enter this city.
This is the Lord’s declaration.

In those days Hezekiah became terminally ill. The prophet Isaiah son of Amoz came and said to him, “This is what the Lord says: ‘Put your affairs in order, for you are about to die; you will not recover.’”

Indeed, it was for my own welfare
that I had such great bitterness;
but Your love has delivered me
from the Pit of destruction,
for You have thrown all my sins behind Your back.

For Sheol cannot thank You;
Death cannot praise You.
Those who go down to the Pit
cannot hope for Your faithfulness.

Then Hezekiah said to Isaiah, “The word of the Lord that you have spoken is good,” for he thought: There will be peace and security during my lifetime.

“Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and announce to her
that her time of forced labor is over,
her iniquity has been pardoned,
and she has received from the Lord’s hand
double for all her sins.”

A voice of one crying out:

Prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness;
make a straight highway for our God in the desert.

And the glory of the Lord will appear,
and all humanity together will see it,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.