The people of God will come back home
1Yes, God will be good to Israel again. He will choose them to be his people again and He will give them their own land to live in. People from other nations will come and live with the Israelites. They will want to become part of Israel. 2Other nations will bring back the Israelites to their land and the people of other nations will become slaves and slave women of the Israelites in the land of the Lord. The other people took away the Israelites from their land, but now the Israelites will take away those people from their lands. The Israelites will rule over the people who did bad things to them.
People will laugh at the king of Babylon
3Israelites, you will not suffer anymore, and you will not have to work as slaves for other people anymore. The Lord will stop your suffering. When this happens, 4you must laugh at the king of Babylon. You must sing this song and say:
‘The man who has persecuted us will die,
and we will not suffer anymore.
5The Lord has broken the staff
of the bad people who ruled over us.
6The king of Babylon became angry,
and he beat a lot of people.
He did that again and again.
He was angry and he trampled people,
and he did not feel sorry for them.
7But now all the people of the earth
are resting in peace,
and they have all started singing.
8King of Babylon, the cypress trees
and cedar trees on Mount Lebanon
are also happy because you are dead,
because now there is no one
who comes to cut them down.
9The graves under the earth
tremble when you come,
and the spirits of the leaders under the earth
who have died are waking up.
The leaders who have died,
the kings who are dead,
are getting up from their thrones.
10They are all talking, and they say:
“You have now also become weak
like us. You are like us now.
11You have always had good
and beautiful things and you
have listened to the music of harps,
but now you are dead and
the worms are eating you.
12You were like the morning star,
but you have fallen from the sky.
You defeated other nations,
but you have fallen to the ground.”
13You said you would go up to heaven,
you would put your throne
where the highest stars are,
and you would be where the gods
came together, far away in the north.
14You would climb up above the clouds,
and you would become like the Most High God.
15But now you are going down
to the world of the dead,
to the deepest place in the underworld.
16Everyone who sees you there
will come to you and look at you.
They will ask:
“Is this the man whom people
in all lands were afraid of?
17Is this the man who made
the earth become like a desert?
Is this the man who destroyed cities
and who took away people and
did not let them go back to their homes?”
18All the kings of the nations
are buried in their own graves,
19but the people did not bury you.
They threw you away
like a bad piece of wood.
You are buried among the men
who have died in war.
You are like a dead body that people trample.
Other dead people are buried in tombs
that are made in rocks,
20but you are not with them.
No one has buried you because
you have destroyed your land
and killed your people.
No one will remember the name
of a bad person like you.
21They must prepare a place
where they can kill his sons,
because of all the bad things that their forefather has done.
The earth will not belong to them and
they will not build cities all over the world.’
22The Lord who rules over all says:
‘I will go to war_against the city of Babylon.
Not one of them will stay alive,
and they will have no descendants.
23I will make Babylon a place
where only wild animals will live.
It will be a wet place
where only reeds will grow.
I will sweep Babylon away
and destroy everything.’
This is what the Lord, who rules over all, said.
I will take away the yoke of the Assyrians
24The Lord who rules over all said:
‘I promise that it will be as I have decided.
And everything that I want to do will happen.
25I will break the Assyrians in my land,
and I will trample them all over the mountains.
I will take away the yoke of the Assyrians
from the Israelites' shoulders.
The Israelites will no longer
have to carry that yoke.’
26This is what the Lord
has decided to do with the earth,
and this is what He will do with all the nations.
27Yes, the Lord who rules over all
has decided and He will do
what He wants to do.
No one can stop Him.
The Philistines must be afraid and tremble
28The Lord was angry with the Philistine people. It was the year when King Ahaz died. 29The Lord said:
‘Philistines, don't rejoice.
You are happy because
the staff that hits you is broken.
But you will suffer a lot more.
It will be like when you kill a snake
and another snake that is more dangerous
comes to bite you,
or like when you break an egg of a snake
and a dragon comes out of it.
30The Israelites are poor,
but their children will have
enough food to eat, and they will be safe.
But Philistines, I will kill your children,
and they will not have food to eat and they will die.
31The people at the gates of your cities
must cry and mourn.
All the Philistines must be afraid and tremble,
because the enemies will come
from the north like a smoke cloud,
and their soldiers walk together in rows.’
32What will we say to the people
who bring messages from that nation?
We will say: ‘It is the Lord
who has built Jerusalem.
His people can not help themselves,
but they are safe there.’
