27 In that day the Lord will take his terrible, swift sword and punish leviathan, the swiftly moving serpent, the coiling, writhing serpent, the dragon of the sea.

² In that day of Israel’s freedom^[a] let this anthem be their song:

³ Israel^[b] is my vineyard; I, the Lord, will tend the fruitful vines; every day I’ll water them, and day and night I’ll watch to keep all enemies away. ^4-5 My anger against Israel is gone. If I find thorns and briars bothering her, I will burn them up, unless these enemies of mine surrender and beg for peace and my protection. ⁶ The time will come when Israel will take root and bud and blossom and fill the whole earth with her fruit!

^7-8 Has God punished Israel as much as he has punished her enemies? No, for he has devastated her enemies,^[c] while he has punished Israel but a little, exiling her far from her own land as though blown away in a storm from the east. ⁹ And why did God do it? It was to purge away^[d] her sins, to rid her of all her idol altars and her idols. They will never be worshiped again. ¹⁰ Her walled cities will be silent and empty, houses abandoned, streets grown up with grass, cows grazing through the city munching on twigs and branches.

¹¹ My people are like the dead branches of a tree, broken off and used to burn beneath the pots. They are a foolish nation, a witless, stupid people, for they turn away from God. Therefore, he who made them will not have pity on them or show them his mercy. ¹² Yet the time will come when the Lord will gather them together one by one like hand-picked grain, selecting them here and there from his great threshing floor that reaches all the way from the Euphrates River to the Egyptian boundary. ¹³ In that day the great trumpet will be blown, and many about to perish among their enemies, Assyria and Egypt, will be rescued and brought back to Jerusalem to worship the Lord in his holy mountain.