Get down, sit in the earth, young Miss Babel,
sit on the ground without a throne, Miss Kasdim.
Because you will not again have people call you
sensitive and delightful.
Get the millstones and grind meal,
expose your hair.
Uncover your tresses, expose your leg,
cross rivers.
Your nakedness will be exposed,
yes, your reviling will be visible.
I shall take redress,
no one will intervene.
(Our restorer: Yahweh of Armies is his name,
Yisra’el’s sacred one.)

Sit in silence, enter into darkness,
Miss Kasdim.
Because you will not again have them call you
mistress of kingdoms.
I was angry with my people, I treated my domain as ordinary,
I gave them into your hand.
You didn’t show compassion to them;
upon the aged you made your yoke very heavy.
You said, ‘I shall be here permanently,
mistress always.’
You didn’t receive these things into your mind;
you were not mindful of its outcome.

So now listen to this, charming one,
who sits in confidence,
Who says to herself,
‘I and none else am still here,
I shall not sit as a widow,
I shall not know the loss of children.’
The two of these will come to you,
in a moment, on one day.
The loss of children and widowhood
in full measure will have come upon you.
In the multiplying of your chants
and in the great abounding of your charms,
You’ve been confident in your bad dealing;
you said, ‘There’s no one looking at me.’
Your smartness, your knowledge,
it turned you back. You said to yourself,
‘I and none else am still here.’
But bad fortune is going to come upon you
whose countercharm you won’t know.
Disaster will fall upon you
that you won’t be able to expiate.
There will come upon you suddenly
devastation that you won’t know about.

Stand, please, in your charms
and in the multiplying of your chants,
in which you’ve laboured from your youth.
Perhaps you’ll be able to succeed,
perhaps you will terrify.
You’re collapsing in the multiplying of your plans;
they should indeed stand up and deliver you,
The people who observe the heavens,
who look at the stars,
Who make known for the months
some of what will come upon you.
There, they’ve become like straw
that fire burns up.
They can’t rescue themselves
from the power of the blaze.
It’s not a coal for warming, a flame for sitting before.
Such have they been for you,
those with whom you have laboured,
your charmers from your youth.
They’ve wandered, each of them his own way;
there’s no one delivering you.

Goldingay, John; Goldingay, John; Wright, Tom; Wright, Tom. The Bible for Everyone . SPCK. Kindle Edition.

God be in head and in my understanding;
God be in my eyes and in my looking;
God be in my mouth and in my speaking;
God be in my heart and in my thinking;
God be at my end and at my departing.