¹And the word of the Lord came to me and said, ²“You shall not take a wife, and you shall not have sons or daughters in this place. ³For this is what the Lord says concerning the sons and concerning the daughters who are born in this place, and concerning their mothers who bore them, and concerning their fathers who begot them in this land: ⁴‘They will die disease-ridden deaths. They will not be mourned for, and they will not be buried. They will be dung on the surface of the ground, and they will be consumed by the sword and by famine, and their corpses will be food for the birds of the sky and for the animals of the land.’ ⁵For this is what the Lord says: ‘Do not go to the house of wailing, and do not go to lament, and do not bemoan them, for I have taken my peace away from this people – says the Lord – both kindness and mercy. ⁶And great and small in this land will die. They will not be buried and they will not be lamented, and no-one will make incisions on himself or be made bald for them. ⁷And bread will not be broken for them in mourning to comfort anyone for the dead, and they will not give them a cup of condolence to drink, for one's father or for one's mother. ⁸And you will not go to the banqueting house to sit with them to eat and to drink. ⁹For this is what the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, says: «I am about to put an end to this place before your eyes and in your days – the sound of joy and the sound of happiness and the sound of the bridegroom and the sound of the bride.» ’ ¹⁰And it will come to pass, when you tell this people all these things, that they will say to you, ‘Why did the Lord pronounce all this great trouble over us, and what is our iniquity, and what is our sin by which we have sinned against the Lord our God?’ ¹¹And you will say to them, ‘Because your fathers forsook me, says the Lord, and they walked after other gods and served them and worshipped them, and they forsook me, and they did not keep my law. ¹²But you have acted worse than your fathers, and here you are each walking after the obstinacy of his evil heart, so as not to listen to me. ¹³So I will cast you out of this land, to a land which you have not known – neither you nor your fathers. And there you will serve other gods day and night, for I will not show you grace. ¹⁴Therefore behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when it will no longer be said, «As the Lord lives, who brought the sons of Israel up out of the land of Egypt», ¹⁵but rather, «As the Lord lives, who brought the sons of Israel up from the land of the north, and from all the lands into which he had driven them.» For I will bring them back to their land which I gave to their fathers. ¹⁶I am about to send many fishermen, says the Lord, and they will fish them, and after that I will send many hunters, and they will hunt them from every mountain, and from every hill, and from the clefts in the rocks. ¹⁷For my eyes are on all their ways – they are not hidden from me, and their iniquity is not concealed from my eyes. ¹⁸And I will first requite their iniquity and their sin double for their defiling of my land with the corpses of their abominations and their abhorrences which have filled my inheritance.’ ”

¹⁹The Lord is my strength and my stronghold,

And my refuge on a day of distress.

To you the Gentiles will come from the ends of the earth,

And they will say,

“Our fathers inherited nothing but lies

– Vanity –

And there was nothing profitable in them.”

²⁰“Will a man make himself some gods?

But they are not gods.

²¹That is why I am about to reveal something to them.

This time, I will reveal to them

My hand and my might,

And they will know

That my name is the Lord.

Reference(s) in Chapter 16: v.9 ↔ Revelation 18:23.