Isaiah 34

1Come near, you nations, and hear; pay attention, you peoples! Let the earth hear, and all that fills it, the world, and all that comes from it.

2For Yahweh is enraged against all the nations and furious with all their armies; he has devoted them to destruction; he has given them over to slaughter.

3Their slain will be thrown out, and the stench of their corpses will rise; the mountains will melt with their blood.

4All the host of heaven will rot away, and the heavens will be rolled up like a scroll; all their host will wither like a leaf withering from the vine, like a withered fig from the fig tree.

5For my sword has drunk its fill in the heavens; look, it comes down on Edom, on the people I have devoted to destruction, in judgment.

6Yahweh has a sword; it is filled with blood; it is gorged with fat, with the blood of lambs and goats, with the fat of the kidneys of rams. For Yahweh has a sacrifice in Bozrah and a great slaughter in the land of Edom.

7Wild oxen will go down with them, and young bulls with the mighty bulls. Their land will be soaked with blood, and their soil will be gorged with fat.

8For Yahweh has a day of vengeance, a year of repayment, to uphold Zion’s cause.

9Edom’s streams will be turned into pitch and its soil into sulfur; its land will become burning pitch.

10Night and day it will not be quenched; its smoke will go up forever. From generation to generation it will lie in ruins; no one will pass through it ever again.

11The desert owl and the hedgehog will possess it; the great owl and the raven will live there. He will stretch over it the measuring line of chaos and the plumb line of emptiness.

12Its nobles will have nothing there to be called a kingdom, and all its officials will come to nothing.

13Thorns will grow over its palaces, nettles and thistles in its fortresses. It will be a haunt for jackals, a home for ostriches.

14Desert creatures will meet with hyenas, and wild goats will call to one another; there too the night creature will settle and find herself a place of rest.

15There the owl will nest and lay eggs; she will hatch them and gather her young under her shadow; there too the kites will gather, each one with its mate.

16Search in the scroll of Yahweh and read: not one of these will be missing; none will be without its mate. For it is my mouth that has commanded it, and his Spirit that has gathered them.

17He has cast the lot for them; his hand has divided the land among them with the measuring line. They will possess it forever; from generation to generation they will live in it.