Nations, come near and listen, here is news for all mankind; give heed the whole world must, and all that lives on it, earth and all earth breeds.

On all nations the Lord will be avenged, never an armed host but must feel the blow, forfeit, all of them, and doomed to perish.

See where they lie slain, their carrion polluting the air, the very hills rotted away with their blood!

Fade they into nothing, yonder heavenly powers; shrivel, like a scroll, the heavens themselves, nor any star there but must wither, as leaf withers on vine or fig-tree;

in the very heavens my sword shall drink deep of blood. On Edom doubt not it shall fall, death-sentence to execute,

the sword of the Lord, glutted with blood! Well nourished with fat, where it drank the blood of lambs and goats, of stalled rams! There are victims ready for the Lord in Bosra; great slaughter then shall be in the land of Edom.

Down go the wild bulls with the rest, the bullocks, leaders of the herd; earth must be sodden with their blood, rich grow the soil with fat of their pampered kings.

Swiftly it comes, the day of the Lord’s vengeance, the year that shall see Sion’s wrongs redressed.

Pitch they shall be henceforward, the brooks of Edom, its soil brimstone; a land of burning pitch,

never quenched night or day, its smoke going up eternally; age after age it shall yet be desolate, untravelled for ever by the foot of man.

Pelican and hedge-hog shall claim it, ibis and raven be its tenants; plotted with the Lord’s measuring-line, an empty void, tried with his plummet, a hanging ruin.

Cry they for a king to govern it, that has no chieftain now; all its princes have vanished.

Thorns and nettles shall grow in its palaces, briers over its battlements; it shall be the lair of serpents, the pasture-ground of the ostrich.

Devils and monstrous forms shall haunt it, satyr call out to satyr; there the vampire lies down and finds rest.

Hedge-hog makes a nest to rear its young, nurtured safely in yonder shade; vulture there with vulture meets.✻

Turn back, when the time comes, to this record of divine prophecy,✻ and read it afresh; you shall learn, then, that none of these signs was lacking, none waited for the coming of the next. The Lord it was entrusted me with the prophecies I utter; by his Spirit that strange company was called together.

For each its own dwelling-place; in his hand was the line that measured it out to them; there they shall live on for ever, to all ages undisturbed.