3by asking both the priests of the temple of the LORD who rules over all and the prophets, "Should we weep in the fifth month, fasting as we have done over the years?"
5"Speak to all the people and priests of the land as follows: 'When you fasted and lamented in the fifth and seventh months through all these seventy years, did you truly fast for me--for me, indeed?
7Should you not have obeyed the words that the LORD cried out through the former prophets when Jerusalem was peacefully inhabited and her surrounding cities, the Negev, and the Shephelah were also populated?
12Indeed, they made their heart as hard as diamond, so that they could not obey the Torah and the other words the LORD who rules over all had sent by his Spirit through the former prophets. Therefore, the LORD who rules over all had poured out great wrath.
13"'It then came about that just as I cried out, but they would not obey, so they will cry out, but I will not listen,' the LORD LORD who rules over all had said.
14Rather, I will sweep them away in a storm into all the nations they are not familiar with.' Thus the land had become desolate because of them, with no one crossing through or returning, for they had made the fruitful land a waste."
