Jeremiah 22

This is what the LORD says: “Go down to the house of the king of Judah and speak this word there. Say: Hear the word of the LORD, king of Judah who sits on David’s throne, you, your servants, and your people who enter these gates. This is what the LORD says: Practice justice and righteousness; deliver the one who has been robbed from the hand of the oppressor. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless, or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place. For if you truly do this, kings sitting on David’s throne will enter the gates of this house, riding in chariots and on horses, each with his servants and his people. But if you do not listen to these words, I swear by myself, declares the LORD, that this house will become a ruin. For this is what the LORD says concerning the house of the king of Judah: You are Gilead to me, the summit of Lebanon, yet surely I will make you a wilderness, uninhabited cities. I will consecrate destroyers against you, each with his weapons;
they will cut down your choice cedars and cast them into the fire. Many nations will pass by this city, and each will say to his neighbor, ‘Why has the LORD done this to this great city?’ They will answer, ‘Because they forsook the covenant of the LORD their God, bowed down to other gods, and served them.’” Do not weep for the dead or mourn for him.
Weep bitterly for the one who goes away, for he will never return or see his native land again. For this is what the LORD says concerning Shallum son of Josiah, king of Judah, who reigned in place of his father Josiah and went away from this place: “He will not return here again. He will die in the place where they carried him into exile and will see this land no more. Woe to him who builds his house without righteousness and his upper rooms without justice, who makes his neighbor work for nothing and does not give him his wages! He says, ‘I will build myself a spacious house with roomy upper chambers.’ He cuts out windows for it, panels it with cedar, and paints it vermilion. Does competing in cedar make you a king?
Did your father not eat and drink and practice justice and righteousness?
Then it went well with him. He judged the case of the poor and needy;
then it went well.
Is this not what it means to know me?
declares the LORD. But your eyes and your heart are set only on your unjust gain, on shedding innocent blood, and on practicing oppression and violence. Therefore this is what the LORD says concerning Jehoiakim son of Josiah, king of Judah: They will not mourn for him, ‘Alas, my brother!
Alas, sister!’ They will not mourn for him, ‘Alas, lord!
Alas, his majesty!’ He will have the burial of a donkey, dragged away and thrown beyond the gates of Jerusalem. Go up to Lebanon and cry out;
raise your voice in Bashan, and cry out from Abarim, for all your lovers have been broken. I spoke to you in your prosperity, but you said, ‘I will not listen.’ This has been your way from your youth: you have not obeyed my voice. The wind will shepherd all your shepherds, and your lovers will go into captivity.
Then you will be ashamed and humiliated because of all your wickedness. You who dwell in Lebanon, nesting among the cedars, how you will be pitied when pangs come upon you, pain like a woman in labor! As I live, declares the LORD, even if Coniah son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, were a signet ring on my right hand, I would tear you off from there. I will give you into the hand of those who seek your life, into the hand of those you fear, into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and into the hand of the Chaldeans. I will hurl you and your mother, who bore you, into another land where neither of you was born, and there you will die. They will not return to the land to which they long to return.” Is this man Coniah a despised, shattered image, or a vessel no one wants?
Why have he and his offspring been hurled away, cast into a land they do not know? Earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the LORD! This is what the LORD says: “Record this man as childless, a man who will not prosper in his days, for none of his offspring will succeed in sitting on David’s throne and ruling again in Judah.”

Rights and attribution