1 "And you, Son of man, get a sharp sword and use it as a barber's razor; run it over your head and your beard. Then take scales for weighing and divide the hair.
2 One third you will burn in the fire inside the city when the days of the siege are finished; one third you will take and strike with the sword around the city; and one third you will scatter to the wind, and I will unsheathe a sword after them.
3 Take from there a few strands and tie them up in the fold of your garment.
4 From these too take some and throw them into the fire and burn them up; from it fire will spread to the whole house of Israel.
5 "Thus says the Lord GOD: This is Jerusalem. I placed her in the center of the nations, with lands surrounding her.
6 Yet she defied my judgments more wickedly than the nations, and my statutes more than the lands surrounding her; for they rejected my judgments and did not walk in my statutes.
7 So thus says the Lord GOD: Because you have been more unruly than the nations around you, and have not walked in my statutes or carried out my judgments, nor even acted according to the judgments of the nations that are all around you,
8 therefore thus says the Lord GOD: See, I myself am against you, and I will carry out judgments among you before the eyes of the nations.
9 Because of all your abominations I will do to you what I have not done before and will never do the like again.
10 So fathers will eat sons within you, and sons will eat their fathers. I will carry out judgments on you and scatter all that is left of you to every wind.
11 Therefore, as I live, declares the Lord GOD, because you defiled my sanctuary with all your vile things and all your abominations, I in turn will cut you down; my eye will not spare and I will show no pity.
12 One third of you will die by pestilence and waste away by famine inside you; one third will fall by the sword around you; and one third I will scatter to every wind, and unsheathe a sword after them.
13 "So my anger will run its course; I will vent my wrath on them and be satisfied. And when I have finished venting my wrath on them, they will know that I, the LORD, spoke in my zeal.
14 I will make you a ruin and an object of scorn among the nations around you, before the eyes of every passerby.
15 You will be a scorn and a byword, a lesson and an object of horror to the nations around you, when I carry out judgments on you in anger and wrath and with raging punishments. I, the LORD, have spoken.
16 When I shoot at them the deadly arrows of famine, arrows that destroy, which I will shoot to destroy you, I will add famine upon you and break your staff of bread.
17 I will send famine and savage beasts on you, and they will leave you childless; pestilence and bloodshed will sweep through you, and I will bring the sword against you. I, the LORD, have spoken."