Zechariah

11 Lebanon, open your doors for fire to eat among your cedars. 2* Howl, cypress, because a cedar has fallen, that parklands are ravaged! howl, Bashan oaks, because the Basor bush is down! 3*** I hear the shepherds howling because their park-realm is ravaged; I hear the two-year-old lions roaring because the Jordan jungle is ravaged.

4 Said my God Jehovah, “Shepherd the slaughtering sheep, 5* whose buyers kill and are not responsible, and whose sellers say ‘Bless Jehovah, I have been getting rich,’ and whose shepherds have no mercy on them; 6** for I will no longer have mercy on the inhabitants of the earth, quoth Jehovah. Here I am handing mankind over to each other and to their respective kings, and they will pound the earth up, and I will not deliver out of their hands.” 7 And I shepherded the slaughtering sheep for the sheep-traders; I got myself two staves, one of which I called Goodwill and the other Ties, and shepherded the sheep. 8* And I killed off the three shepherds in one month; and I lost patience with them, and they on their part were disgusted with me. 9 And I said “I will not shepherd you: what dies shall die and what is missing shall be missing, and what remains shall eat each other’s flesh”; 10 and I took my staff Goodwill and chopped it in two, to break the terms I had come to with all the peoples, 11 and they were broken on that day; and the sheep-traders who were watching me knew it was Jehovah’s word. 12 And I said to them “If you think best, give me my pay; if not, don’t”; and they weighed out my pay, thirty shekels of silver. 13* And Jehovah said to me “Throw it to the treasury, the grand valuation I got out of them”; and I threw it in Jehovah’s house, to the treasury. 14 And I chopped my second staff in two, Ties, to break the brotherhood between Judah and Israel.

15 And Jehovah said to me “Take a shepherd’s outfit again, an incompetent one’s. 16* For here I am setting up in the country a shepherd who will not attend to what is missing nor hunt up what strays nor cure what breaks a leg nor feed what is on its feet, but eat the flesh of what is fat and tear their hoofs. 17* Woe to my sham shepherd who quits the sheep! a sword on his arm and on his right eye! his arm shall dry out and his right eye shall go dim.