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¹⁹As often as it passeth through, it shall take you;

For morning by morning shall it pass through,

By day and by night;

And it shall be sheer terror to understand the message.

²⁰For the bed is too short for a man to stretch himself;

And the covering too narrow when he gathereth himself up.

²¹For the Lord will rise up as in mount Perazim,

He will be wroth as in the valley of Gibeon;

That He may do His work, strange is His work,

And bring to pass His act, strange is His act.

²²Now therefore be ye not scoffers,

Lest your bands be made strong;

For an extermination wholly determined have I heard from the Lord, the God of hosts,

Upon the whole land.

 

²³Give ye ear, and hear my voice;

Attend, and hear my speech.

²⁴Is the plowman never done with plowing to sow,

With the opening and harrowing of his ground?

²⁵When he hath made plain the face thereof,

Doth he not cast abroad the black cummin, and scatter the cummin,

And put in the wheat in rows and the barley in the appointed place

And the spelt in the border thereof?

²⁶For He doth instruct him aright;

His God doth teach him.

²⁷For the black cummin is not threshed with a threshing-sledge,

Neither is a cart-wheel turned about upon the cummin;

But the black cummin is beaten out with a staff,

And the cummin with a rod.

²⁸Is bread corn crushed?

Nay, he will not ever be threshing it;

And though the roller of his wagon and its sharp edges move noisily,

He doth not crush it.

²⁹This also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts:

Wonderful is His counsel, and great His wisdom.

29Ah, ^[1]Ariel, Ariel, the city where David encamped!

Add ye year to year,

Let the feasts come round!

²Then will I distress Ariel,

And there shall be mourning and moaning;

And she shall be unto Me as a hearth of God.

³And I will encamp against thee round about,

And will lay siege against thee with a mound,

And I will raise siege works against thee.

⁴And brought down thou shalt speak out of the ground,

And thy speech shall be low out of the dust;

And thy voice shall be as of a ghost out of the ground,

And thy speech shall chirp out of the dust.

⁵But the multitude of thy foes shall be like small dust,

And the multitude of the terrible ones as chaff that passeth away;

Yea, it shall be at an instant suddenly—

⁶There shall be a visitation from the Lord of hosts

With thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise,

1. That is, The hearth of God.

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