The Book of the Prophet Isaiah

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- Chapter 18 -

Terrible things will happen to you people of Ethiopia! In your land there are many boats at the upper part of the Nile River.

Your rulers send ambassadors that sail quickly down the river in papyrus boats. Tell your messengers to go quickly! Go to people who are tall and who have smooth skins. People everywhere are afraid of those people, because they conquer and destroy other nations; they are people who live in a land that rivers divide.

You messengers must tell to the people of the world, to all people everywhere, “Look when the battle flag is lifted on top of the mountain, and listen when the ram’s horn blows to signal that the battle is about to begin.”

Listen because Yahweh has told me this: “I will watch quietly from where I live. I will watch quietly like the heat that shimmers as it rises on a summer day. I will work effectively like the cloud of mist that settles during the heat of harvest.

Before the harvest, the farmer sees the grapevines making blossoms and the flowers growing into grapes, and he knows that the time is right to cut off the new growth and spreading branches that keep the tree from growing strong. In the same way I know when the time is right to take action against that nation, and I will send an army to attack it.

All the soldiers in that nation’s army will be killed, and their corpses will lie in the fields for vultures to eat their flesh in the summer. Then wild animals will chew on their bones all during the winter.”

At that time, the people of the nation that rivers divide will take gifts to Yahweh in Jerusalem. Those people are tall and have smooth skins; people everywhere are afraid of those people, because they conquer and destroy other nations. They will take gifts to Jerusalem, the city where Yahweh, Commander of the angel armies, lives.

Ah, the land of the rustling of wings, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia;

that sends ambassadors by the sea, even in vessels of papyrus on the waters, saying, “Go, you swift messengers, to a nation tall and smooth, to a people awesome from their beginning onward, a nation that measures out and treads down, whose land the rivers divide!”

All you inhabitants of the world, and you dwellers on the earth, when a banner is lifted up on the mountains, look! When the trumpet is blown, listen!

For the LORD said to me, “I will be still, and I will see in my dwelling place, like clear heat in sunshine, like a cloud of dew in the heat of harvest.”

For before the harvest, when the blossom is over, and the flower becomes a ripening grape, he will cut off the sprigs with pruning hooks, and he will cut down and take away the spreading branches.

They will be left together for the ravenous birds of the mountains, and for the animals of the earth. The ravenous birds will eat them in the summer, and all the animals of the earth will eat them in the winter.

In that time, a present will be brought to the LORD of Armies from a people tall and smooth, even from a people awesome from their beginning onward, a nation that measures out and treads down, whose land the rivers divide, to the place of the name of the LORD of Armies, Mount Zion.