NSB(i)
20 He says: »You are my war-club, my weapon of war. I shatter nations with you and with you I destroy kingdoms.
21 »I will use you to crush horses and their riders. I will use you to crush chariots and their drivers.
22 »I will use you to crush men and women. I will use you to crush the old and the young. I will use you to crush young men and women.
23 »I will use you to crush shepherds and their flocks. I will use you to crush farmers and their oxen. I will use you to crush governors and officials.
24 »In your presence I will pay back Babylon and all the people who live in Babylon for all the evil things that they did in Zion,« proclaims Jehovah.
25 »I am against you, Babylon, you destructive mountain. You have destroyed the whole earth,« declares Jehovah. »I will use my power against you and roll you off the cliffs, and make you a scorched mountain.
26 »People will not find any stones in you to use as a cornerstone. They will not find any stones in you to use for a foundation. You will become permanent ruins,« declares Jehovah.
27 Raise your battle flag throughout the world. Blow the ram's horn among the nations. Prepare nations to attack Babylon. Tell the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz to attack it. Appoint a commander to lead the attack. Bring up horses like a swarm of locusts.
28 Prepare nations to attack Babylon. Prepare the king of the Medes, their governors, all their deputies, and all the countries that they rule.
29 The earth trembles and writhes in pain. Jehovah carries out his plans against Babylon to make Babylon a wasteland so that no one will live there.
30 The warriors of Babylon have stopped fighting. They stay in their fortified cities. Their strength has failed. They have become women. Their buildings are set on fire. The bars across their gates are broken.
31 Runners run to meet runners. Messengers follow messengers. They inform the king of Babylon that his entire city is captured.
32 The river crossings have been taken. The enemy has burned its marshes, and its soldiers are terrified.
33 »I am the All-Powerful Jehovah, the God of Israel, and I make this promise: Soon Babylon will be leveled and packed down like a threshing place at harvest time.
34 »The people of Jerusalem say: King Nebuchadnezzar made us panic. That monster (big snake) filled up with our treasures, leaving us empty. He gobbled down what he wanted and spit out the rest.
35 »The people of Babylon harmed some of us and killed others. Now Jehovah will make them pay.
36 Therefore Jehovah says: »I am going to plead your case and exact full vengeance for you. I will dry up her sea and make her fountain dry.
37 »Babylon will become a heap of ruins, a haunt of jackals, an object of horror and hissing, without inhabitants.
38 »They will roar together like young lions. They will growl like lions' cubs.
39 »When they become heated up, I will serve them their banquet and make them drunk, that they may become jubilant. Then they may sleep a perpetual sleep and not wake up, declares Jehovah.
40 »I will bring them down like lambs to the slaughter, like rams together with male goats.
41 »How Sheshak has been captured, and the praise of the whole earth been seized! How Babylon has become an object of horror among the nations!
42 »The sea has come up over Babylon. She has been engulfed with its tumultuous waves.
43 »Her cities have become an object of horror, a parched land and a desert, a land in which no man lives and through which no son of man passes.
44 »I will punish Bel in Babylon. I will make Bel spit out everything that it has swallowed. Nations will no longer stream to Babylon. Its walls will fall.
45 »Get out of her, my people! Run for your lives! Run from the burning anger of Jehovah.
46 »Do not lose courage or be afraid when rumors are heard in the land. One rumor comes one year; another rumor comes the next year. Rumors of violence are in the land. Rumors that one ruler will fight against another are in the land.