A Lament Over the Land

2 Hear this, O elders,

and give ear, all the inhabitants of the land.

Has this happened in your days?

Or the days of your ancestors?

3 Tell it to your children,

and your children to their children,

and their children to the following generation.

4 What the cutting locust left,

the swarming locust has eaten.

What the swarming locust left,

the hopping locust has eaten.

And what the hopping locust left,

the destroying locust has eaten.

5 Wake up, drunkards, and weep!

Wail, all drinkers of wine, over the new wine,

for it is cut off from your mouth.

6 Because a nation has ⌊invaded⌋a my land,

strong ⌊and beyond counting⌋.b

Its teeth are the teeth of a lion,

and its fangs are those of a lioness.

7 It has made my vine a desolation,

and my fig tree a completely splintered stump.

It has stripped them bare and thrown them down;

their branches have turned white.

8 Lament like a virgin girded in sackcloth

for the husband of her youth.

9 The offering and libation are withheld

from the housec of Yahweh.

The priests mourn,

the ministers of Yahweh.

10 The field is destroyed;

the earth mourns

because the grain is destroyed,

the new wine dries up,

the olive oil languishes.

11 Be ashamed, farmers;

Wail, vinedressers,

over the wheat and over the barley,

because the harvest of the field is ruined.

12 The vine withers

and the fig tree droops.

The pomegranate tree, and also the palm tree, the apple tree

—all the trees of the field—are dried up.

Indeed, joy is dried up

among the sons of men.