Isaiah 16

¹ Send lambs to the king of the country from Sela, by way of the desert, to the mountain of the daughter of Zion.

² Flying backwards and forwards like bewildered nestlings, such are the daughters of Moab at the ford of the Arnon.

³ ‘Advise us what to do, decide for us. Spread your shadow as if it were night at the height of noon. Hide those who have been driven out, do not let the refugee be seen.

⁴ ‘Let those who have been driven out of Moab stay with you; be their refuge against the destroyer.’ Once the oppression is over, and the destroyer is no more, and those now trampling the country underfoot have gone away,

⁵ the throne will be made secure in gentleness, and on it there will sit in all fidelity, within the tent of David, a judge careful for justice and eager for integrity.

⁶ We have heard of the pride of Moab, an excessive pride – of his conceit, his pride, his arrogance; his pretensions are empty.

⁷ And so the Moabites must mourn for Moab, all of them lamenting together. For the raisin cakes of Kir-hareseth they mourn, in their utter bewilderment.

⁸ For blighted are the fields of Heshbon, and the vine of Sibmah whose clusters proved too strong for the overlords of the nations; it once reached all the way to Jazer, had even wound its way into the desert, and its shoots had spread even beyond the sea.

⁹ And so I weep, as Jazer weeps, for the vine of Sibmah. I water you with my tears, Heshbon and Elealeh. For over your fruit and your vintage a cheer has been heard;

¹⁰ joy and gladness have vanished from the orchards. No more revelry in the vineyards, no more happy shouting; no more wine trodden out in the presses, the shouting all silenced.

¹¹ And so for Moab my whole being quivers like lyre strings, my inmost self, for Kir-hareseth.

¹² In vain may Moab go to wear himself out at high places, to come and pray in his temple; he can do nothing.

¹³ Such was the sentence once pronounced against Moab by Yahweh.

¹⁴ Now Yahweh proclaims, ‘Within three years, as a wage-earner reckons them, the glorious power of Moab, despite his teeming population, will cease to command respect, and what remains of him will be slight, feeble, impotent’.