¹The oracle of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is removed from being a city, and will become a heap of ruin.

²The cities of Aroer are abandoned; they will be for flocks, and they will crouch, with no one to terrify them.

³The fortress will cease from Ephraim, and the kingdom from Damascus; and the remnant of Aram will be like the weightiness of the children of Israel—the utterance of Yahweh of hosts.

⁴And it will be in that day: the weightiness of Jacob will be brought low, and the fatness of his flesh will be made lean.

⁵And it will be like the gathering of the harvest of standing grain, when his arm reaps the ears of grain; and it will be like one who gathers ears of grain in the valley of Rephaim.

⁶And gleanings will be left in it, like the beating of an olive tree: two, three olives at the head of the treetop, four, five on the boughs of the fruit-bearing one—the utterance of Yahweh, the God of Israel.

⁷In that day the human will gaze upon his maker, and his eyes will look to the holy one of Israel.

⁸And he will not gaze at the altars, the work of his hands; and what his fingers made he will not see, nor the Asherah poles nor the sun-pillars.

⁹In that day the cities of his stronghold will be like the abandoned places of the forest and the treetop, which they abandoned before the children of Israel; and it will be a wasteland.

¹⁰For you have forgotten the God of your rescue, and the rock of your stronghold you have not remembered; therefore you plant plantings of pleasantness, and the shoot of a stranger you sow it.

¹¹In the day of your planting you fence it round, and in the morning your seed you make bud; a harvest is a heap in the day of sickness and incurable pain.

¹²Woe! The roar of many peoples—like the roaring of seas they roar! And the uproar of nations—like the uproar of mighty waters they crash!

¹³The peoples will make a din like the din of many waters; but he will rebuke it, and it will flee from a distance, and will be chased like chaff of the mountains before the wind, and like a whirling wheel before the storm-wind.

¹⁴At the time of evening, behold, terror; before morning, it is no more. This is the portion of those who plunder us, and the lot of those who despoil us.