Isaiah 34:1-15 ▼

1 Come near, O nations, to hear; and pay attention O peoples! Let the earth hear, and its fullness, the world, and all its offspring.

2 For wrath is unto YHWH against all the nations, and rage against all their hosts; He has devoted them to destruction, He has given them over to the slaughter!

3 And their slain will be thrown out, and from their corpses their stench will rise, and the mountains will flow with their blood.

4 And all the host of heavens will be made to rot, and the heavens will be rolled up like a scroll; and all their host will fade away, like the fading of a leaf from the vine and like a falling from a fig tree.

5 For in the heavens My sword has drunk its fill; behold, upon Edom it will come down, and upon the people I have devoted to judgment.

6 The sword of YHWH has been full of blood, dripping with fat and with the blood of lambs and goats, with the fat of the kidneys of rams; for a sacrifice is unto YHWH in Bozrah, and a great slaughter in the land of Edom.

7 And the wild oxen will go down with them and the young bulls with the mighty ones; and their land will be watered with blood, and their dust will be soaked with fat.

8 For a day of vengeance is unto YHWH, a year of recompense for the cause of Zion.

9 And her streams will be turned to pitch, and her dust to brimstone, and her land will become a burning pitch.

10 Night and day it will not be quenched; her smoke will ascend forever; she will be desolate from generation to generation; no one will pass through her forever and ever;

11 and the hawk and the hedgehog will dispossess her, and the owl and the raven will dwell in her; and He will stretch out over her a measuring line of confusion, and a plumb line of emptiness.

12 And nothing is there for her nobles to call a kingdom, and all her princes will be nothing.

13 And thorns will come up in her palaces, thistles and briers in her fortresses; and she will be a habitation of jackals, a courtyard for daughters of the ostrich.

14 And the desert creatures will meet with the jackals, and the wild goat will bleat alongside his companion; indeed, Lilith will rest there and find for herself a place of rest,

15 There the owl will nest and lay and hatch and gather them under her shadow; even there will gather the birds of prey, each with her mate.