1. Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees,
2. to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.
3. What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches?
4. Nothing will remain but to cringe among the captives or fall among the slain. Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away, his hand is still upraised.
5. “Woe to the Assyrian, the rod of my anger, in whose hand is the club of my wrath!
6. I send him against a godless nation, I dispatch him against a people who anger me, to seize loot and snatch plunder, and to trample them down like mud in the streets.
7. But this is not what he intends, this is not what he has in mind; his purpose is to destroy, to put an end to many nations.
8. ‘Are not my commanders all kings?’ he says.
9. ‘Has not Kalno fared like Carchemish? Is not Hamath like Arpad, and Samaria like Damascus?
10. As my hand seized the kingdoms of the idols, kingdoms whose images excelled those of Jerusalem and Samaria—