God's Anger Comes Upon Jerusalem

1How the Lord has covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his anger, and cast down from heaven unto the earth the beauty of Israel, and remembered not his footstool in the day of his anger!

2The Lord has swallowed up all the habitations of Jacob, and has not pitied: he has thrown down in his wrath the strongholds of the daughter of Judah; he has brought them down to the ground: he has polluted the kingdom and its princes.

3He has cut off in his fierce anger all the might of Israel: he has drawn back his right hand from before the enemy, and he burned against Jacob like a flaming fire, which devours round about.

4He has bent his bow like an enemy: he stood with his right hand as an adversary, and has slain all that were pleasant to the eye in the tent of the daughter of Zion: he poured out his fury like fire.

5The Lord was as an enemy: he has swallowed up Israel, he has swallowed up all her palaces: he has destroyed his strongholds, and has increased in the daughter of Judah mourning and lamentation.

6And he has violently taken away his tabernacle, as if it were a garden: he has destroyed his places of the assembly: the LORD has caused the solemn feasts and sabbaths to be forgotten in Zion, and has despised in the indignation of his anger the king and the priest.

7The Lord has cast off his altar, he has abhorred his sanctuary, he has given up into the hand of the enemy the walls of her palaces; they have made a noise in the house of the LORD, as in the day of a solemn 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8The LORD has purposed to destroy the wall of the daughter of Zion: he has stretched out a line, he has not withdrawn his hand from destroying: therefore he made the rampart and the wall to lament; they languished together.

9Her gates are 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; her prophets also find no vision from the LORD.

10The elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground, and keep silence: they have cast up dust upon their heads; they have girded themselves with sackcloth: the virgins of Jerusalem hang down their heads to the ground.

11My eyes do fail with tears, my soul is troubled, my heart is poured upon the earth, for 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? when they faint as the wounded in the streets of the city, when their soul was poured out into their mothers' bosom.

13What thing shall I take to witness for you? what thing shall I liken to you, O daughter of Jerusalem? what shall I equal to you, that I may comfort you, O virgin daughter of Zion? for your run is vast as the sea: who can heal you?

14Your prophets have seen vain and foolish things for you: and they have not uncovered your iniquity, to turn away your captivity; but have given you false oracles and causes of banishment.

15All that pass by clap their hands at you; they hiss and wag their head at the daughter of Jerusalem, saying, Is this the city that men call The perfection of beauty, The joy of the whole earth?

16All your enemies have opened their mouth against you: they hiss and gnash the teeth: they say, We have swallowed her up: certainly this is the day that we looked for; we have found, we have seen it.

17The LORD has done that which he had purposed; he has fulfilled his word that he had commanded in the days of old: he has thrown down, and has not pitied: and he has caused your enemy to rejoice over you, he has set up the might of your adversaries.

18Their heart cried unto the Lord, O wall of the daughter of Zion, let tears run down like a river day and night: give yourself no relief; let not your eyes rest.

19Arise, cry out in the night: in the beginning of the watches pour out your heart like water before the face of the Lord: lift up your hands toward him for the life of your young children, that faint for hunger at the head of every street.

20Behold, O LORD, and consider to whom you have done this. Shall the women eat their offspring, the children of their tender care? shall the priest and the prophet be slain in the sanctuary of the Lord?

21The young and the 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 killed, and not pitied.

22You have called as in a solemn day my terrors round about, so that in the day of the LORD'S anger none escaped nor remained: those that I have cared for and brought up has my enemy consumed.