Isaiah 34

1Come close and listen, you nations; pay attention, you peoples! Let the earth hear, and everything in it, the world and all that springs from it. 2For the LORD is angry with all the nations, furious with all their armies. He has doomed them to destruction and handed them over to be slaughtered. 3Their dead will be flung aside unburied; the reek of their corpses will rise, and the mountains will run with their blood. 4The whole host of the heavens will decay, and the sky will be rolled up like a scroll. All its host will wither away, the way a leaf withers on the vine, or a fig shrivels on its tree. 5In the heavens my sword has drunk its fill; see, now it swoops down on Edom, on the people I have set apart for destruction, to judge them. 6The LORD has a sword, and it drips with blood and is greasy with fat, with the blood of lambs and goats, with the fat from the kidneys of rams. For in Bozrah the LORD is holding a sacrifice, a great slaughter across the land of Edom. 7Wild oxen will go down with them in the slaughter, bullocks along with the strong bulls. Their land will be drenched with blood, their dust glistening with fat. 8For the LORD has a day of vengeance, a year of repayment, to take up Zion’s case. 9Its streams will be changed into tar and its dust into sulfur; the whole land will become tar that burns. 10Its fire will burn night and day without going out, and its smoke will go up for all time. Age after age it will be a wasteland; never again will anyone pass through it. 11The desert owl and the hedgehog will take it over; the eared owl and the raven will nest there. Over it he will stretch the builder’s line of formlessness and hold the plumb stones of emptiness. 12Its nobles will find no kingdom there to proclaim, and all its princes will be gone. 13Thorns will spring up in its palaces, nettles and thistles in its walled towns. Jackals will make it their den, and ostriches will claim it as their yard. 14The wild beasts of the desert will gather with the hyenas, and the wild goat will cry to its companion. The night creature, too, will settle there and find somewhere to lie at rest. 15There the arrow snake will nest and lay its eggs; it will hatch them and gather its brood in its shade. There the kites will flock together, every one with its mate. 16Search the scroll of the LORD and read it through: of all these, not one will be absent, and none will go without its mate. It is my own mouth that gave the order, and his Spirit has brought them together. 17He has cast lots to give them their share, and with his own hand he has measured it out to them. They will hold it as their own for all time and live there age after age.