16Then justice shall abide in the wilderness
And righteousness shall dwell on the farm land.
17For the work of righteousness shall be peace,
And the effect of righteousness, calm and confidence forever.
18Then my people shall dwell in peaceful homes,
In secure dwellings,
In untroubled places of rest.
19fAnd the brush shall sink and vanish,
Even as the city is laid low.
20Happy shall you be who sow by all waters,
Who g-send out cattle and asses to pasture.-g
33 Ha, you ravager who are not ravaged,
You betrayer who have not been betrayed!
When you have done ravaging, you shall be ravaged;
When you have finished betraying, you shall be betrayed.
2O LORD, be gracious to us!
It is to You we have looked;
a-Be their arm-a every morning,
Also our deliverance in time of stress.
3At [Your] roaring, peoples have fled,
Before Your majesty nations have scattered;
4And spoilb was gathered as locusts are gathered,
Itc was amassedd as grasshoppers are amassed.e
5The LORD is exalted,
He dwells on high!
[Of old] He filled Zion
With justice and righteousness.
6Faithfulness to f-Your charge-f was [her] wealth,
Wisdom and devotion [her] triumph,
Reverence for the LORD—that was herg treasure.
7Hark! The Arielitesh cry aloud;
Shalom’si messengers weep bitterly.
8Highways are desolate,
Wayfarers have ceased.
A covenant has been renounced,
Citiesj rejected
k-Mortal man-k despised.
9The land is wilted and withered;
Lebanon disgraced and moldering,
Sharon is become like a desert,
And Bashan and Carmel are stripped bare.
10“Now I will arise,” says the LORD,
“Now I will exalt Myself, now raise Myself high.
11You shall conceive hay,
Give birth to straw;
Myl breath will devour you like fire.
12Peoples shall be burnings of lime,m
Thorns cut down that are set on fire.
13Hear, you who are far, what I have done;
You who are near, note My might.”
14Sinners in Zion are frightened,
The godless are seized with trembling:
“Who of us can dwell with the devouring fire:
Who of us can dwell with the never-dying blaze?”
15He who walks in righteousness,
Speaks uprightly,
Spurns profit from fraudulent dealings,
Waves away a bribe instead of grasping it,
Stops his ears against listening to infamy,
Shuts his eyes against looking at evil—
16Such a one shall dwell in lofty security,
With inaccessible cliffs for his stronghold,
With his food supplied
And his drink assured.
17When your eyes behold n-a king in his beauty,-n
When they contemplate the land round about,
18Your throato shall murmur in awe,
“Where is one who could count? Where is one who could weigh?
Where is one who could count [all these] towers?”
19No more shall you see the barbarian folk,
The people of speech too obscure to comprehend,
So stammering of tongue that they are not understood.
20When you gaze upon Zion, our city of assembly,
Your eyes shall behold Jerusalem
As a secure homestead,
A tent not to be transported,
Whose pegs shall never be pulled up,
And none of whose ropes shall break.
21For there the LORD in His greatness shall be for us
Like a region of rivers, of broad streams,
Where no floating vessels can sail
And no mighty craft can travel—
p-Theirq ropes are slack,
They cannot steady the sockets of their masts,
They cannot spread a sail.-p
22For the LORD shall be our ruler,
The LORD shall be our prince,
The LORD shall be our king:
He shall deliver us.
23Then r-shall indeed much spoil be divided,-r
Even the lame shall seize booty.
24And none who lives there shall say, “I am sick”;
It shall be inhabited by folk whose sin has been forgiven.
34 Approach, O nations, and listen,
Give heed, O peoples!
Let the earth and those in it hear;
The world, and what it brings forth.
2For the LORD is angry at all the nations,
Furious at all their host;
He has doomed them, consigned them to slaughter.
3Their slain shall be left lying,
And the stench of their corpses shall mount;
And the hills shall be drenched with their blood,
4a-All the host of heaven shall molder.-a
The heavens shall be rolled up like a scroll,
And all their host shall wither
Like a leaf withering on the vine,
Or shriveled fruit on a fig tree.
5For My sword shall b-be drunk-b in the sky;
Lo, it shall come down upon Edom,
Upon the people I have doomed,
To wreak judgment.
6The LORD has a sword; it is sated with blood,
It is gorged with fat—
The blood of lambs and he-goats,
The kidney fat of rams.
For the LORD holds a sacrifice in Bozrah,
A great slaughter in the land of Edom.
7Wild oxen shall fall c-with them,-c
Young bulls with mighty steers;
And their land shall be drunk with blood,
Their soil shall be saturated with fat.
8For it is the LORD’s day of retribution,
The year of vindication for Zion’s cause.
9Itsd streams shall be turned to pitch
And its soil to sulfur.
Its land shall become burning pitch,
10Night and day it shall never go out;
Its smoke shall rise for all time.
Through the ages it shall lie in ruins;
Through the aeons none shall traverse it.
11e-Jackdaws and owls-e shall possess it;
Great owls and ravens shall dwell there.
He shall measure it with a line of chaos
And with weights of emptiness.f
12e-It shall be called, “No kingdom is there,”-e
Its nobles and all its lords shall be nothing.
13Thorns shall grow up in its palaces,
Nettles and briers in its strongholds.
It shall be a home of jackals,
An abode of ostriches.
14gWildcats shall meet hyenas,
Goat-demons shall greet each other;
There too the lilithh shall repose
And find herself a resting place.
15There the arrow-snake shall nest and lay eggs,
And shall brood and hatch in its shade.
There too the buzzards shall gather
With one another.
16Search and read it in the scroll of the LORD:
Not one of these shall be absent,
Not one shall miss its fellow.
For Hisi mouth has spoken,
It is His spirit that has assembled them,
17And it is He who apportioned it to them by lot,
Whose hand divided it for them with the line.
They shall possess it for all time,
They shall dwell there through the ages.
35 The arid desert shall be glad,
The wilderness shall rejoice
And shall blossom like a rose.a
2It shall blossom abundantly,
It shall also exult and shout.
It shall receive the glory of Lebanon,
The splendor of Carmel and Sharon.
They shall behold the glory of the LORD,
The splendor of our God.
3Strengthen the hands that are slack;
Make firm the tottering knees!
4Say to the anxious of heart,
“Be strong, fear not;
Behold your God!
Requital is coming,
The recompense of God—
He Himself is coming to give you triumph.”
5Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
And the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped.
6Then the lame shall leap like a deer,
And the tongue of the dumb shall shout aloud;
For waters shall burst forth in the desert,
Streams in the wilderness.
7Torrid earth shall become a pool;
Parched land, fountains of water;
The home of jackals, a pasture;b
The abode [of ostriches],c reeds and rushes.
8And a highway shall appear there,
Which shall be called the Sacred Way.
No one unclean shall pass along it,
But it shall be for them.d
e-No traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.-e
9No lion shall be there,
No ferocious beast shall set foot on it—
These shall not be found there.
But the redeemed shall walk it;
10And the ransomed of the LORD shall return,
And come with shouting to Zion,
Crowned with joy everlasting.
They shall attain joy and gladness,
While sorrow and sighing flee.
36 aIn the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah, King Sennacherib of Assyria marched against all the fortified towns of Judah and seized them. 2From Lachish, the king of Assyria sent the Rabshakeh,b with a large force, to King Hezekiah in Jerusalem. [The Rabshakeh] took up a position near the conduit of the Upper Pool, by the road of the Fuller’s Field; 3and Eliakim son of Hilkiah who was in charge of the palace, Shebna the scribe, and Joah son of Asaph the recorder went out to him.
4The Rabshakeh said to them, “You tell Hezekiah: Thus said the Great King, the king of Assyria: What makes you so confident? 5I supposec mere talk makes counsel and valor for war! Look, on whom are you relying, that you have rebelled against me? 6You are relying on Egypt, that splintered reed of a staff, which enters and punctures the palm of anyone who leans on it. That’s what Pharaoh king of Egypt is like to all who rely on him. 7And if you tell me that you are relying on the LORD your God, He is the very one whose shrines and altars Hezekiah did away with, telling Judah and Jerusalem, ‘You must worship only at this altar!’ 8Come now, make this wager with my master, the king of Assyria: I’ll give you two thousand horses, if you can produce riders to mount them. 9So how could you refuse anything, even to the deputy of one of my master’s lesser servants, relying on Egypt for chariots and horsemen? 10And do you think I have marched against this land to destroy it without the LORD? The LORD Himself told me: Go up against that land and destroy it.”
11Eliakim, Shebna, and Joah replied to the Rabshakeh, “Please, speak to your servants in Aramaic, since we understand it; do not speak to us in Judean in the hearing of the people on the wall.” 12But the Rabshakeh replied, “Was it to your master and to you that my master sent me to speak those words? It was precisely to the men who are sitting on the wall—who will have to eat their dung and drink their urine with you.” 13And the Rabshakeh stood and called out in a loud voice in Judean: 14“Hear the words of the Great King, the king of Assyria! Thus said the king: Don’t let Hezekiah deceive you, for he will not be able to save you. 15Don’t let Hezekiah make you rely on the LORD, saying, ‘The LORD will surely save us; this city will not fall into the hands of Assyria!’ 16Don’t listen to Hezekiah. For thus said the king of Assyria: Make your peace with me and come out to me,d so that you may all eat from your vines and your fig trees and drink water from your cisterns, 17until I come and take you away to a land like your own, a land of bread and wine, of grain [fields] and vineyards. 18Beware of
