23. “ ‘I will bring on them endless disastersand use all my arrows against them.
24. They will die from hunger and fever;they will die from terrible diseases.I will send wild animals to attack them,and poisonous snakes to bite them.
25. War will bring death in the streets;terrors will strike in the homes.Young men and young women will die;neither babies nor old people will be spared.
26. I would have destroyed them completely,so that no one would remember them.
27. But I could not let their enemies boastthat they had defeated my people,when it was I myself who had crushed them.’
28. “Israel is a nation without sense;they have no wisdom at all.
29. They fail to see why they were defeated;they cannot understand what happened.
30. Why were a thousand defeated by one,and 10,000 by only two?The Lord, their God, had abandoned them;their mighty God had given them up.