Zephaniah 2:11-15

The Message

^8-12“I’ve heard the crude taunts of Moab,
    the mockeries flung by Ammon,
The cruel talk they’ve used to put down my people,
    their self-important strutting along Israel’s borders.
Therefore, as sure as I am the living God,” says
        God-of-the-Angel-Armies,
    Israel’s personal God,
“Moab will become a ruin like Sodom,
    Ammon a ghost town like Gomorrah,
One a field of rocks, the other a sterile salt flat,
    a moonscape forever.
What’s left of my people will finish them off,
    will pick them clean and take over.
This is what they get for their bloated pride,
    their taunts and mockeries of the people
    of God-of-the-Angel-Armies.
God will be seen as truly terrible—a Holy Terror.
    All earth-made gods will shrivel up and blow away;
And everyone, wherever they are, far or near,
    will fall to the ground and worship him.
Also you Ethiopians,
    you, too, will die—I’ll see to it.”

* * *

^13-15Then God will reach into the north
    and destroy Assyria.
He will waste Nineveh,
    leave her dry and treeless as a desert.
The ghost town of a city,
    the haunt of wild animals,
Nineveh will be home to raccoons and coyotes—
    they’ll bed down in its ruins.
Owls will hoot in the windows, ravens will croak in the doorways—
    all that fancy woodwork now a perch for birds.
Can this be the famous Fun City
    that had it made,
That boasted, “I’m the Number-One City!
    I’m King of the Mountain!”
So why is the place deserted,
    a lair for wild animals?
Passersby hardly give it a look;
    they dismiss it with a gesture.