Damascus is Rock City
1Message about Damascus [1]Listen. One day Damascus won’t exist anymore,
Except as a pile of broken stones.
Untended flocks will graze freely in the fields,
With no one to scare them away.
3Ephraim’s towns won’t need to worry
About defenses such as city walls.
The Damascus threat will end.
Syrian survivors will share the fate
That is coming to Israelite people.
The LORD of everyone says so.
4When this happens
The Israelite golden age
Dives to dirt.
Its economy breaks,
People lose it all.
5The land will look as bare
As a field picked clean,
Silent and naked in Rephaim Valley. [3]
6You’ll find no more people
Than olives in a harvested tree.
Two or three here and there,
Four or five high and low.
That’s what the LORD says,
Israel’s God.
7This is when Israel will come back to God.
They’ll look to their Holy One for help. 8They’ll stop worshiping at shrines they built and furnished with altars, sacred poles, and incense stands. 9But by then, it’ll be too late for the Israelite cities. Even the biggest towns looked as empty as Hivite and Amorite towns were when Joshua and the Israelites first arrived. Back then, the Hivite and Amorite towns were deserted because Israel wiped them out.
You fall from God, your cities fall
10Your cities fell for a reason.
You fell away from God.
The God who protects you like a rock wall.
You planted fields as though nothing was wrong,
Importing the finest seed plants.
But they’ll wither and die after that terrible day
When you’re hit with relentless grief and pain.
12Listen to thundering footsteps,
Coalition forces roaring like the sea.
Armies of the world like swells of a storm.
Crashing on the coast.
13Armies of foreign nations thunder when they march,
Like massive waves of water on the shore.
God will chase them off.
They’ll scatter like wheat chaff in the wind,
Like a dirt devil curling down the trail.
14Watch out at night for the terror coming.
Before morning you’ll be gone.
This is what’s going to happen
To the nations that push us around,
Plunder, raid, and rape us and our land.
