Daily Reading

1 How the city sits alone / That was full of people! / She who was once great among the nations / Has become like a widow; / She who was a princess among the provinces / Has become tributary.

2 Bitterly she weeps in the night, / And her tears are on her cheeks. / There is no one to comfort her / Among all her lovers; / All her friends have dealt treacherously with her; / They have become her enemies.

3 Judah has gone into exile, away from affliction / And away from great servitude; / She dwells among the nations / But finds no rest; / All her pursuers have overtaken her / In the midst of distress.

4 The ways of Zion mourn, / For no one comes to the appointed feast; / All her gates are desolate; / Her priests groan; / Her virgins are afflicted, / And she is in bitterness.

5 Her adversaries have become the head; / Her enemies prosper; / For Jehovah has afflicted her / Because of the multitude of her transgressions; / Her little ones have gone into captivity / Before the adversary.

6 And all her majesty has departed / From the daughter of Zion; / Her princes have become like deer / That find no pasture, / And they have fled without strength / Before the pursuer.

7 In the days of her affliction and her wanderings, / Jerusalem remembers / All her precious things / Which were in the days of old, / When her people fell into the hand of the adversary, / And there was no one to help her. / The adversaries saw her; / They mocked at her downfall.

8 Jerusalem has sinned grievously; / Therefore she has become an impurity. / All who honored her despise her, / Because they have seen her nakedness; / And she groans / And turns backwards.

9 Her uncleanness is in her skirts; / She did not remember her latter end; / Therefore she has come down astonishingly; / There is no one to comfort her. / O Jehovah, see my affliction, / For the enemy has magnified himself.

10 The adversary has spread out his hand / Over all her precious things, / For she has seen the nations / Enter her sanctuary, / Concerning whom You commanded that they should not enter / Into Your assembly.

11 All her people groan; / They seek bread; / They have given their precious things for food / To restore their soul. / See, O Jehovah, and look, / For I have become despised.

12 Is it nothing to you, all who pass by the way? / Look and see / If there is any pain like my pain / Which is dealt to me, / Whom Jehovah has afflicted / In the day of His burning anger.

13 He has sent fire from on high / Into my bones, and it prevails against them; / He has spread out a net for my feet; / He has turned me back; / He has made me a desolation / And faint all the day.

14 The yoke of my transgressions is bound by His hand; / They are knit together; / They have come up upon my neck; / He has made my strength fail; / The Lord has delivered me into hands / From which I am not able to rise up.

15 The Lord has made light of all my mighty men / In my midst; / He has called an assembly against me / To crush my young men. / The Lord has trodden, as in a winepress, / The virgin daughter of Judah.

16 For these things I weep; / My eye, my eye runs down with water, / For the comforter who should revive my soul / Is far from me; / My children have become desolate, / Because the enemy has prevailed.

17 Zion stretches out her hands, / Yet there is no one to comfort her. / Jehovah has commanded concerning Jacob / That those around him should be his adversaries; / Jerusalem has become an impurity / Among them.

18 Jehovah is righteous, / For I have rebelled against His commandment. / Hear now, all the peoples, / And see my pain; / My virgins and my young men / Have gone into captivity.

19 I have called to my lovers; / They have deceived me; / My priests and my elders / Have perished in the city, / While they sought food for themselves / To restore their souls.

20 See, O Jehovah, for I am in distress, / My bowels are in ferment; / My heart is overturned within me, / For I have been very rebellious. / In the street the sword bereaves; / In the house it is like death.

21 They have heard that I groan; / There is no one to comfort me; / All my enemies have heard of my trouble; / They are glad that You have done it. / You will bring the day that You have proclaimed, / And they will be like me.

22 Let all their wickedness come before You, / And deal with them / As You have dealt with me / For all my transgressions; / For my sighs are many, / And my heart is faint.

1 How the Lord in His anger / Has covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud! / He has cast from heaven to earth / The glory of Israel, / And has not remembered His footstool / In the day of His anger.

2 The Lord has swallowed up all the habitations of Jacob; / He has not spared; / He has torn down in His overflowing wrath / The strongholds of the daughter of Judah. / He has brought them down to the ground; / He has profaned the kingdom and its princes.

3 He has cut off in fierce anger / All the horn of Israel. / He has withdrawn His right hand / From before the enemy. / He has burned among Jacob like a flame of fire; / It consumes all around.

4 He has bent His bow like an enemy; / He has set His right hand like an adversary / And has slain all that was pleasant to the eye. / In the tent of the daughter of Zion / He has poured out His wrath like fire.

5 The Lord has become like an enemy; / He has swallowed up Israel; / He has swallowed up all her palaces; / He has destroyed her strongholds / And multiplied in the daughter of Judah / Mourning and lamentation.

6 And He has violently taken away His pavilion like a garden; / He has destroyed the place of His assembly; / Jehovah has caused the appointed feast and the Sabbath / To be forgotten in Zion; / He has despised, in the indignation of His anger, / The king and the priest.

7 The Lord has cast off His altar; / He has abhorred His sanctuary; / He has delivered up into the hand of the enemy / The walls of her palaces. / They have made a noise in the house of Jehovah / As though it were the day of an appointed feast.

8 Jehovah has thought to destroy / The walls of the daughter of Zion; / He has stretched out the line / And has not withdrawn His hand from destroying; / And He has made the rampart and the wall to mourn; / They languish together.

9 Her gates have sunk into the ground; / He has destroyed and broken her bars; / Her king and her princes are among nations / Where there is no law; / Her prophets also do not find / A vision from Jehovah.

10 The elders of the daughter of Zion / Sit on the ground; they are silent. / They have cast dust upon their head; / They have girded themselves with sackcloth. / The virgins of Jerusalem / Hang down their head to the ground.

11 My eyes are consumed with tears; / My bowels are in ferment; / My liver is poured out on the earth, / Because of the brokenness of the daughter of my people, / Because the little ones and the nursing children / Faint in the streets of the city.

12 They say to their mothers, / Where is the grain and the wine? / When they faint like one wounded / In the streets of the city, / When they pour out their soul / Into their mothers’ bosom.

13 What shall I testify to you? What shall I liken you to, / O daughter of Jerusalem? / What shall I compare you to, that I may comfort you, / O virgin daughter of Zion? / For your breach is great like a sea. / Who will heal you?

14 Your prophets have seen for you / Vanity and folly, / And they have not uncovered your iniquity / To turn again your captivity; / But they have seen for you burdens / Of vanity and of causes of banishment.

15 All those who pass on the way / Clap their hands at you; / They hiss and wag their head / At the daughter of Jerusalem, saying, / Is this the city which they called, / The perfection of beauty, / The joy of the whole earth?

16 All your enemies / Have opened their mouth against you; / They hiss and gnash the teeth; / They say, We have swallowed her up. / This is certainly the day that we have looked for; / We have found it; we have seen it.

17 Jehovah has done what He purposed; / He has fulfilled His word, / Which He commanded from the days of old; / He has torn down and has not spared, / And He has caused the enemy to rejoice over you; / He has exalted the horn of your adversaries.

18 Their heart cried out to the Lord: / O wall of the daughter of Zion, / Let tears run down like a stream / Day and night; / Give yourself no respite; / Let not the pupil of your eye cease.

19 Arise, cry out in the night / At the beginning of the watches; / Pour out your heart like water / Before the face of the Lord; / Lift up your hands toward Him / For the life of your little ones, / Who faint because of famine / At the head of every street.

20 See, O Jehovah, and look, / With whom You have dealt thus? / Shall the women eat their fruit, / The little ones nursed by them? / Shall the priest and the prophet be slain / In the sanctuary of the Lord?

21 The youth and the old man / Lie on the ground in the streets; / My virgins and my young men / Have fallen by the sword; / You have slain them in the day of Your anger; / You have slaughtered; You have not spared.

22 You have called for, as though in the day of an appointed feast, / My terrors on every side, / And in the day of Jehovah’s anger / There was none who escaped or remained; / Those whom I have nursed and brought up / My enemy has consumed.

19 Having therefore, brothers, boldness for entering the Holy of Holies in the blood of Jesus,

20 Which entrance He initiated for us as a new and living way through the veil, that is, His flesh,

21 And having a great Priest over the house of God,

22 Let us come forward to the Holy of Holies with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.

23 Let us hold fast the confession of our hope unwavering, for He who has promised is faithful;

24 And let us consider one another so as to incite one another to love and good works,

25 Not abandoning our own assembling together, as the custom with some is, but exhorting one another; and so much the more as you see the day drawing near.

26 For when we sin willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice of bulls and goats for sins,

27 But a certain fearful expectation of judgment and fervor of fire, which is to consume the adversaries.

28 Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without compassion on the testimony of two or three witnesses.

29 By how much do you think he will be thought worthy of worse punishment who has trampled underfoot the Son of God and has considered the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified a common thing and has insulted the Spirit of grace?

30 For we know Him who said, “ Vengeance is Mine; I will repay”; and again, “ The Lord will judge His people.”

31 It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

32 But call to mind the former days, in which, having been enlightened, you endured a great conflict of sufferings;

33 On one hand, being made a spectacle both in reproaches and in afflictions, and on the other, having become partakers with those who are treated the same.

34 For you both sympathized with those in bonds and accepted with joy the plundering of your possessions, knowing that you yourselves have a better possession and one that abides.

35 Do not cast away therefore your boldness, which has great reward.

36 For you have need of endurance in order that, having done the will of God, you may obtain the promise.

37 “For in yet a very little while the Coming One will come and will not delay.

38 But My righteous one shall live by faith; and if he shrinks back, My soul does not delight in him.”

39 But we are not of those who shrink back to ruin but of those who have faith to the gaining of the soul.