50. You who have escaped the sword,go away, do not stand still.Remember the Lord afar off,and let Jerusalem come into your mind.
51. We are humiliatedbecause we have heard reproach.Shame has covered our faces,for strangers have come intothe holy places of the house of the Lord.
52. Therefore, surely the days are coming, says the Lord,when I will punish her graven images,and the mortally wounded shall groanthrough all her land.
53. Though Babylon should mount up to heaven,and though she should fortify the height of her strength,yet from Me will destroyers come to her,says the Lord.
54. A sound of an outcry comes from Babylon,and great destructionfrom the land of the Chaldeans,
55. because the Lord has devastated Babylon,and destroyed the great voice out of her.When her waves roar like great waters,a noise of their voice is uttered.
56. Because the destroyer is coming against her, even upon Babylon,and her mighty men will be captured,every one of their bows are broken.For the Lord is a God of recompense;He will completely repay.
57. I will make her officials drunk, and her wise men,her captains, and her rulers, and her mighty men;and they will sleep a perpetual sleep, and not awake,says the King whose name is the Lord of Hosts.
58. Thus says the Lord of Hosts: The broad wall of Babylon will be utterly broken,and her high gates will be burned with fire;and the peoples will labor in vain,and the nations become exhausted only for fire.
59. The word which Jeremiah the prophet commanded Seraiah the son of Neriah, the son of Mahseiah, when he went with Zedekiah the king of Judah into Babylon in the fourth year of his reign. Now Seraiah was a quartermaster.
60. So Jeremiah wrote in a single scroll all the evil that should come upon Babylon, even all these words that are written against Babylon.
61. Jeremiah said to Seraiah, “When you come to Babylon, then see that you read aloud all these words,
62. and say, ‘O Lord, You have spoken against this place to cut it off, that no one will remain in it, neither man nor beast, but that it shall be desolate forever.’
63. It will be that when you have made an end of reading this scroll that you will bind a stone to it, and cast it into the midst of the Euphrates,
64. and say, ‘Thus Babylon will sink and not rise from the disaster that I will bring upon her, and they will become weary.’ ”Thus far are the words of Jeremiah.