Isaiah 17
1 A pronouncement concerning Damascus. Look: Damascus will cease to be a city and become a heap of ruins.
2 The cities of Aroer are abandoned; they will become pasture for flocks, which will lie down there with no one to frighten them.
3 The fortress will vanish from Ephraim, and the kingdom from Damascus; the remnant of Aram will be like the glory of the Israelites, says the LORD of Armies.
4 On that day, Jacob’s glory will grow faint, and his body’s fat will waste away.
5 It will be like when a reaper gathers standing grain and harvests the heads with his arm; like when heads of grain are gleaned in the Valley of Rephaim.
6 Only gleanings will be left in it, as when an olive tree is shaken: two or three olives at the top of a branch, four or five on the fruitful tree’s boughs, says the LORD, the God of Israel.
7 On that day, people will look to their Maker, and their eyes will see the Holy One of Israel.
8 They will no longer look to the altars, the work of their hands, or see what their fingers have made: the Asherah poles and the incense altars.
9 On that day, his fortified cities will be like the abandoned places in the forest and on the wooded heights, abandoned before the Israelites; everything will become a wasteland.
10 For you have forgotten the God who saves you and have not remembered the Rock of your stronghold. So you plant beautiful seedlings and sow shoots from a foreign vine.
11 On the day you plant them, you make them grow; in the morning you make your seed blossom. But the harvest vanishes on the day of sickness and incurable pain.
12 Woe to the tumult of many peoples, roaring like the roaring sea, and to the uproar of nations, thundering like mighty waters!
13 The nations thunder like the sound of many waters, but he rebukes them, and they flee far away, driven like chaff on the mountains before the wind, like dry grass before a whirlwind.
14 At evening, terror; before morning, they are gone. This is the portion of those who plunder us, the lot of those who rob us.
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