Shave your heads bald as you mourn for the children you love; ¹  shave your foreheads as bald ²  as an eagle, ³  for they are taken from you into exile.

They confiscate the fields they desire, and seize the houses they want. ¹  They defraud people of their homes, ²  and deprive people of the land they have inherited. ³ 

The best of them is like a thorn; the most godly among them are more dangerous than a row of thorn bushes. ¹  The day you try to avoid by posting watchmen – your appointed time of punishment – is on the way, ²  and then you will experience confusion. ³ 

Your courtiers ¹  are like locusts, your officials ²  are like a swarm of locusts! They encamp in the walls on a cold day, yet when the sun rises, they ³  fly away; ⁴  and no one knows where they ⁵  are. ⁶ 

Your shepherds ¹  are sleeping, O king of Assyria! Your officers ²  are slumbering! ³  Your people are scattered like sheep ⁴  on the mountains and there is no one to regather them!

You march out to deliver your people, to deliver your special servant. ¹  You strike the leader of the wicked nation, ²  laying him open from the lower body to the neck. ³  Selah.

Their wealth will be stolen and their houses ruined! They will not live in the houses they have built, nor will they drink the wine from the vineyards they have planted.

Seek the Lord’s favor, ¹  all you humble people ²  of the land who have obeyed his commands! ³  Strive to do what is right! ⁴  Strive to be humble! ⁵  Maybe you will be protected ⁶  on the day of the Lord’s angry judgment.

Howl, fir tree, because the cedar has fallen; the majestic trees have been destroyed. Howl, oaks of Bashan, because the impenetrable forest has fallen.

When ¹  it was evening ²  the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the workers and give the pay ³  starting with the last hired until the first.’

He told them, “You will drink my cup, ¹  but to sit at my right and at my left is not mine to give. Rather, it is for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father.”

“But woe to you, experts in the law ¹  and you Pharisees, hypocrites! ²  You keep locking people out of the kingdom of heaven! ³  For you neither enter nor permit those trying to enter to go in. ⁴ 

“Woe to you, experts in the law ¹  and you Pharisees, hypocrites! You cross land and sea to make one convert, ²  and when you get one, ³  you make him twice as much a child of hell ⁴  as yourselves!

“Woe to you, experts in the law ¹  and you Pharisees, hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.

“Woe to you, experts in the law ¹  and you Pharisees, hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs that look beautiful on the outside but inside are full of the bones of the dead and of everything unclean. ² 

He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied correctly about you hypocrites, as it is written: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart ¹  is far from me.

Or those eighteen who were killed ¹  when the tower in Siloam fell on them, ²  do you think they were worse offenders than all the others who live in Jerusalem? ³ 

But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus had already known from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) ¹ 

Jesus ¹  said,] ²  “For judgment I have come into this world, so that those who do not see may gain their sight, ³  and the ones who see may become blind.”

The person who has my commandments and obeys ¹  them is the one who loves me. ²  The one ³  who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and will reveal ⁴  myself to him.”