Then a famine occurred throughout ¹  Egypt and Canaan, causing ²  great suffering, and our ³  ancestors ⁴  could not find food.

Endure your suffering ¹  as discipline; ²  God is treating you as sons. For what son is there that a father does not discipline?

So we cried out to the Lord, the God of our ancestors, and he ¹  heard us and saw our humiliation, toil, and oppression.

That day will be a day of God’s anger, ¹  a day of distress and hardship, a day of devastation and ruin, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and dark skies,

saying, ‘These last fellows worked one hour, and you have made them equal to us who bore the hardship and burning heat of the day.’

and we did not eat anyone’s food without paying. ¹  Instead, in toil and drudgery we worked ²  night and day in order not to burden any of you.

If the God of my father – the God of Abraham, the one whom Isaac fears ¹  – had not been with me, you would certainly have sent me away empty-handed! But God saw how I was oppressed and how hard I worked, ²  and he rebuked you last night.”

This is a message ¹  about the animals in the Negev: Through a land of distress and danger, inhabited by lionesses and roaring lions, ²  by snakes and darting adders, ³  they transport ⁴  their wealth on the backs of donkeys, their riches on the humps of camels, to a nation that cannot help them. ⁵ 

¹ In the third ²  year of King Cyrus of Persia a message was revealed to Daniel (who was also called Belteshazzar). This message was true and concerned a great war. ³  He understood the message and gained insight by the vision.