Isaiah
22 The boding “valley of vision”:
What is the matter that you are all gone up on the roofs, 2 you full of hubbub, uproarious city, hilarious town? Your slain are not slain with swords nor dead in battle. 3*** All your chieftains have taken fight together, they are imprisoned by bows; all your stoutest are imprisoned together, have taken refuge afar. 4 Therefore I say “Pay no attention to me, let me have the bitterness of my weeping; do not be in a hurry to comfort me for the wrecking of the daughter of my people.[”] 5* For the Lord Jehovah of Armies has a day of jumbling and trampling and fumbling in the valley of vision. From Karkar they have mobilized against the highland, 6* and ʽElam has taken up quivers and Syria mounted horses and Kir bared shields, 7* and the choicest of your vales are full of chariots, and the horsemen have beset the gate; 8 and he has taken off Judah’s shelter. And on that day you looked at the arms in the Forest house, 9 and saw how many the breaches of David’s City were, and gathered together the water of the lower reservoir, 10 and counted the houses in Jerusalem, and pulled down the houses to fortify the wall, 11* and made a basin between the two walls for the water of the old reservoir, but you did not look to him who made it nor see him who shaped it. 12 And on that day the Lord Jehovah of Armies called to weeping and wailing and shaved head and sackcloth tied round, 13 and here was rejoicing and merrymaking, killing cattle and slaughtering sheep, eating meat and drinking wine, “to eat and to drink, because tomorrow we shall die.” 14* And Jehovah of Armies is revealed in my ears, “you will not have this guilt purged till you die.”
15 Says the Lord Jehovah of Armies “Go and go in to this caretaker, Steward Shebna: 16 What have you here and whom have you here, that you have cut yourself out a grave here, you that cut your grave high, that mark off in the crag an abode for yourself! 17* Here is Jehovah going to shake you loose, man, 18* and wrap you up, wind you right up like a ball, and fling you into a distant country; there you shall die and there your grand chariots shall go, disgrace of your sovereign’s house.
19 “And I will push you off your footing and break you up from your stand, 20 and on that day I will call my servant Eljakim the son of Hilkijah 21 and dress him in your coat and brace him with your sash and put your authority in his hands, and he shall become a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the house of Judah; 22 and I will put the key of David’s house on his shoulder, and he shall open and nobody will shut, and shut and nobody will open. 23* And I will drive him as a peg in a sure place, and he shall become a seat of state for his family.
24* “And they will hang on him all the accumulations of his family, the offspring and the offscouring, every sort of small ware from flat ware to every sort of hollow ware. 25 On that day, quoth Jehovah of Armies, the peg driven in a sure place will give, will be cut through and fall, and the load on it will be gone, because Jehovah has spoken.”