The Sovereign LORD Almighty was calling you then to weep and mourn, to shave your heads and wear sackcloth.

Instead, you laughed and celebrated. You killed sheep and cattle to eat, and you drank wine. You said, "We might as well eat and drink! Tomorrow we'll be dead."

Can this be the joyful city of Tyre, founded so long ago? Is this the city that sent settlers across the sea to establish colonies?

and thorn bushes and briers are growing on my people's land. Weep for all the houses where people were happy and for the city that was full of life.

You refuse to admit that a day of disaster is coming, but what you do only brings that day closer.

You like to compose songs, as David did, and play them on harps.

"And this is what the LORD has said about the Assyrian emperor: 'He will not enter this city or shoot a single arrow against it. No soldiers with shields will come near the city, and no siege mounds will be built around it.

An angel of the LORD went to the Assyrian camp and killed 185,000 soldiers. At dawn the next day there they lay, all dead!

When I go out in the fields, I see the bodies of men killed in war; when I go into the towns, I see people starving to death. Prophets and priests carry on their work, but they don't know what they are doing."

the LORD had said, "Whoever stays on in the city will die in war or of starvation or disease. But those who go out and surrender to the Babylonians will not be killed; they will at least escape with their life."

On the ninth day of the fourth month of that same year, when the famine was so bad that the people had nothing left to eat,

Look, O LORD! Why are you punishing us like this? Women are eating the bodies of the children they loved! Priests and prophets are being killed in the Temple itself !

Those who died in the war were better off than those who died later, who starved slowly to death, with no food to keep them alive.

The disaster that came to my people brought horror; loving mothers boiled their own children for food.