Isaiah 27

¹In that day the Lord will take his terrible, swift sword and punish Leviathan,^a the swiftly moving serpent, the coiling, writhing serpent. He will kill the dragon of the sea.

²“In that day,

sing about the fruitful vineyard.

³I, the Lord, will watch over it,

watering it carefully.

Day and night I will watch so no one can harm it.

⁴My anger will be gone.

If I find briers and thorns growing,

I will attack them;

I will burn them up—

⁵unless they turn to me for help.

Let them make peace with me;

yes, let them make peace with me.”

⁶The time is coming when Jacob’s descendants will take root.

Israel will bud and blossom

and fill the whole earth with fruit!

⁷Has the Lord struck Israel

as he struck her enemies?

Has he punished her

as he punished them?

⁸No, but he exiled Israel to call her to account.

She was exiled from her land

as though blown away in a storm from the east.

⁹The Lord did this to purge Israel’s^b wickedness,

to take away all her sin.

As a result, all the pagan altars will be crushed to dust.

No Asherah pole or pagan shrine will be left standing.

¹⁰The fortified towns will be silent and empty,

the houses abandoned, the streets overgrown with weeds.

Calves will graze there,

chewing on twigs and branches.

¹¹The people are like the dead branches of a tree,

broken off and used for kindling beneath the cooking pots.

Israel is a foolish and stupid nation,

for its people have turned away from God.

Therefore, the one who made them

will show them no pity or mercy.

¹²Yet the time will come when the Lord will gather them together like handpicked grain. One by one he will gather them—from the Euphrates River^c in the east to the Brook of Egypt in the west. ¹³In that day the great trumpet will sound. Many who were dying in exile in Assyria and Egypt will return to Jerusalem to worship the Lord on his holy mountain.