1-4. God! Barbarians have broken into your home,violated your holy temple,left Jerusalem a pile of rubble!They’ve served up the corpses of your servantsas carrion food for birds of prey,Threw the bones of your holy peopleout to the wild animals to gnaw on.They dumped out their bloodlike buckets of water.All around Jerusalem, their bodieswere left to rot, unburied.We’re nothing but a joke to our neighbors,graffiti scrawled on the city walls.
11-13. Give groaning prisoners a hearing;pardon those on death row from their doom—you can do it!Give our jeering neighbors what they’ve got coming to them;let their God-taunts boomerang and knock them flat.Then we, your people, the ones you love and care for,will thank you over and over and over.We’ll tell everyone we meethow wonderful you are, how praiseworthy you are!