17. Judgment also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet: and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding-place.
18. And your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, then ye shall be trodden down by it.
19. From the time that it goeth forth it shall take you: for morning by morning shall it pass over, by day and by night: and it shall be a vexation only to understand the report.
20. For the bed is shorter than that a man can stretch himself on it: and the covering narrower than that he can wrap himself in it.
21. For the LORD will rise as on mount Perazim, he will be wroth as in the valley of Gibeon, that he may do his work, his strange work; and bring to pass his act, his strange act.
22. Now therefore be ye not mockers, lest your bands be made strong: for I have heard from the Lord GOD of hosts a consumption, even determined upon the whole earth.
23. Give ye ear, and hear my voice; hearken, and hear my speech.
24. Doth the plowman plow all day to sow? doth he open and break the clods of his ground?
25. When he hath made even the face of it, doth he not cast abroad the vetches, and scatter the cummin, and cast in the principal wheat, and the appointed barley, and the rye in their place?
26. For his God doth instruct him to discretion, and doth teach him.
27. For the vetches are not threshed with a threshing instrument, neither is a cart-wheel turned about upon the cummin; but the vetches are beaten out with a staff, and the cummin with a rod.
28. Bread-corn is bruised; because he will not always be threshing it, nor break it with the wheel of his cart, nor bruise it with his horsemen.