Against Damascus
17
📚✭The burden concerning Damascus. See, Damascus will cease
from being a city,
and will become a heap of ruins.
2 📚The cities of Aroer
will be forsaken.
They will be for flocks,
which will lie down,
without anyone making
them afraid.
3 📚✭Also the fortress will cease
from Ephraim,
and the kingdom
from Damascus,
and the remnant of Syria.
They will be like the glory
of the children of Israel,
says the LORD of hosts.
4 📚And this will happen
in that day:
the glory of Jacob will wane,
and the fatness of his flesh
will become lean.
5 📚And it will be as when
the harvester gathers
the grain,
and reaps the heads
with his hand;
it will be like one gathering grain
in the Valley of Rephaim✭
6 📚✭Yet some gleanings
will be left in it,
like when an olive tree
is shaken,
two or three olives
at the top of the
uppermost bough,
four or five in its
most fruitful branches,
says the LORD God of Israel.
7 📚✭At that day a man will look
to his Maker,
and his eyes will have respect
for the Holy One of Israel.
8 📚And he will not look
to the altars✭,
the work of his hands,
nor will he show respect
for what his fingers
have made,
nor the idolatrous groves✭,
nor the images.
9 📚✭In that day his strong cities
will be like a forsaken bough,
and an uppermost branch,
which they left because
of the children of Israel;
and there will be desolation.
10 📚Because you have forgotten✭
the God of your salvation,
and have not remembered
the Rock of your strength,
therefore you plant
pleasant plants,
and set out foreign seedlings.
11 📚In the day you cause
your plant to grow,
and in the morning you cause
your seed to flourish;
but the harvest will be
a heap of ruins in the day
of grief and of desperate sorrow.
12 📚✭Alas for the uproar of
many people,
who make a noise
like the noise of the seas!
And alas for the rushing
of nations,
which make a rushing
like the rushing of
mighty waters!
13 📚The nations will rush like
the rushing of many waters,
but God will rebuke them,
and they will flee far away,
and be chased like chaff
on the mountains
before the wind,
and like a thing that rolls
before the whirlwind.
14 📚✭And, look,
at evening trouble!
Before morning he is
no more!
This is the portion
of those who plunder us,
and the lot of those
who rob us.