2

God’s Anger with Jerusalem

  1How the Lord has covered the daughter of Zion
   With a cloud in His anger!
   He cast down from heaven to the earth
   The beauty of Israel,
   And did not remember His footstool
   In the day of His anger.
  2The Lord has swallowed up and has not pitied
   All the dwelling places of Jacob.
   He has thrown down in His wrath
   The strongholds of the daughter of Judah;
   He has brought them down to the ground;
   He has profaned the kingdom and its princes.
  3He has cut off in fierce anger
   Every horn of Israel;
   He has drawn back His right hand
   From before the enemy.
   He has blazed against Jacob like a flaming fire
   Devouring all around.
  4Standing like an enemy, He has bent His bow;
   With His right hand, like an adversary,
   He has slain all who were pleasing to His eye;
   On the tent of the daughter of Zion,
   He has poured out His fury like fire.
  5The Lord was like an enemy.
   He has swallowed up Israel,
   He has swallowed up all her palaces;
   He has destroyed her strongholds,
   And has increased mourning and lamentation
   In the daughter of Judah.
  6He has done violence to His tabernacle,
   As if it were a garden;
   He has destroyed His place of assembly;
   The Lord has caused
   The appointed feasts and Sabbaths to be forgotten in Zion.
   In His burning indignation He has spurned the king and the priest.
  7The Lord has spurned His altar,
   He has abandoned His sanctuary;
   He has given up the walls of her palaces
   Into the hand of the enemy.
   They have made a noise in the house of the Lord
   As on the day of a set feast.
  8The Lord has purposed to destroy
   The wall of the daughter of Zion.
   He has stretched out a line;
   He has not withdrawn His hand from destroying;
   Therefore He has caused the rampart and wall to lament;
   They languished together.
  9Her gates have sunk into the ground;
   He has destroyed and broken her bars.
   Her king and her princes are among the nations;
   The Law is no more,
   And her prophets find no vision from the Lord.
  10The elders of the daughter of Zion
   Sit on the ground and keep silence;
   They throw dust on their heads
   And gird themselves with sackcloth.
   The virgins of Jerusalem
   Bow their heads to the ground.
  11My eyes fail with tears,
   My heart is troubled;
   My bile is poured on the ground
   Because of the destruction of the daughter of my people,
   Because the children and the infants
   Faint in the streets of the city.
  12They say to their mothers,
   “Where is grain and wine?”
   As they swoon like the wounded
   In the streets of the city,
   As their life is poured out
   In their mothers’ bosom.
  13How shall I console you?
   To what shall I liken you,
   O daughter of Jerusalem?
   What shall I compare with you, that I may comfort you,
   O virgin daughter of Zion?
   For your ruin is spread wide as the sea;
   Who can heal you?
  14Your prophets have seen for you
   False and deceptive visions;
   They have not uncovered your iniquity,
   To bring back your captives,
   But have envisioned for you false prophecies and delusions.
  15All who pass by clap their hands at you;
   They hiss and shake their heads
   At the daughter of Jerusalem:
   “Is this the city that is called
   ‘The perfection of beauty,
   The joy of the whole earth’?”
  16All your enemies have opened their mouth against you;
   They hiss and gnash their teeth.
   They say, “We have swallowed her up!
   Surely this is the day we have waited for;
   We have found it,we have seen it!
  17The Lord has done what He purposed;
   He has fulfilled His word
   Which He commanded in days of old.
   He has thrown down and has not pitied,
   And He has caused an enemy to rejoice over you;
   He has exalted the horn of your adversaries.
  18Their heart cried out to the Lord,
   “O wall of the daughter of Zion,
   Let tears run down like a river day and night;
   Give yourself no relief;
   Give your eyes no rest.
  19“Arise, cry out in the night,
   At the beginning of the watches;
   Pour out your heart like water before the face of the Lord.
   Lift your hands toward Him
   For the life of your young children,
   Who faint from hunger at the head of every street.”
  20“See, O Lord, and consider!
   To whom have You done this?
   Should the women eat their offspring,
   The children they have cuddled?
   Should the priest and prophet be slain
   In the sanctuary of the Lord?
  21“Young and old lie
   On the ground in the streets;
   My virgins and my young men
   Have fallen by the sword;
   You have slain them in the day of Your anger,
   You have slaughtered and not pitied.
  22“You have invited as to a feast day
   The terrors that surround me.
   In the day of the Lord’s anger
   There was no refugee or survivor.
   Those whom I have borne and brought up
   My enemies have destroyed.”