29. Now the land shakes and writhes, for Adonai’s plans against Babylon arise— to make the land of Babylon a desolation without inhabitant.
30. Babylon’s warriors ceased fighting. They stay in their strongholds. Their might is exhausted. They have become like women. Her dwellings are set ablaze, her gate-bars are broken.
31. One runner runs to meet another, and one messenger to meet another, to tell Babylon’s king that his city has been taken from end to end.
32. The fords have also been seized and the marshes burned with fire, so the warriors are in panic.
33. For thus says Adonai-Tzva’ot, the God of Israel: “The daughter of Babylon is like a threshing floor at treading time. A little longer, and the time of harvest for her will come.”
34. “Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon has devoured me, crushed me, set me aside like an empty dish, swallowed me up like a dragon, filled his belly with my delicacies, rinsed me away.”
35. The one dwelling in Zion says: “Let the violence done to me and my flesh be upon Babylon!” Jerusalem says: “My blood be on the Chaldeans!”
36. Therefore thus says Adonai: “Yes, I will uphold your cause and take vengeance for you. I will dry up her sea, and make her fountain dry.
37. Babylon will become heaps, a dwelling for jackals, a horror and a hissing, uninhabited.
38. They roar together like young lions, growl like lions cubs.
39. When they become hot, I will set out a banquet for them and will make them so drunk that they become merry— and then sleep a perpetual sleep and never awake.” It is a declaration of Adonai.
40. “I will drag them down like lambs to the slaughter, like rams with he-goats.
41. How has Sheshach been taken, the praise of the whole earth seized? How has Babylon become a horror among the nations!
42. The sea has risen over Babylon— she is covered with its roaring waves.