13. And the Lord said unto me,(402) Because they forsook My Law which I set before them, and hearkened not to My Voice,(403) [14] but have walked after the stubbornness of their heart, and after the Baals, as their fathers taught them. 15. Therefore thus saith the Lord(404) the God of Israel, Behold I will give them wormwood to eat and the waters of poison to drink. 16. And I will scatter them among the nations, whom neither they nor their fathers knew, and send after them the sword till I have consumed them. Thus saith the Lord: 17 Call the keening women to come, And send for the wise ones, That they come and make haste(405) 18 To lift us a dirge, Till with tears our eyes run down, Our eyelids with water. For hark! from Ṣion the voice of wailing, 19 “How we are undone! “Sore abashed we, land who have left, Our homes overthrown!”(406) Hear, O women, the saying of the Lord, 20 Your ears take in the word of His mouth, Teach the lament to your daughters Each to her comrade the dirge: “For Death has come up by our windows 21 And into our palaces, Cutting off from the streets the children The youths from the places;(407) And the corpses of men are fallen 22 As dung on the field, As sheaves left after the reaper And nobody gathers!” Thus saith the Lord: 23 Boast not the wise in his wisdom, Boast not the strong in his strength, Boast not the rich in his riches, But he that would boast in this let him boast, 24 Insight and knowledge of Me, That I am the Lord, who work troth, Judgment and justice on earth, For in these I delight. 25. Behold, the days are coming—Rede of the Lord—that I shall visit on everyone circumcised as to the foreskin. 26. Egypt and Judah and Edom, the sons of Ammon and Moab, and all with the corner(408) clipt, who dwell in the desert; for all the nations are uncircumcised in their heart and all the house of Israel. Which just means that Israel, circumcised in the flesh but not in the spirit, are as bad as the heathen who share with them bodily circumcision. Ch. X. 1-16 is a spirited, ironic poem on the follies of idolatry which bears both in style and substance marks of the later exile. On the other hand X. 17-23 is a small collection of short Oracles in metre, which there is no reason to deny to Jeremiah. The text of the first, verses 17-18, is uncertain. If with the help of the Greek we render it as follows it implies not an actual, but an inevitable and possibly imminent, siege of Jerusalem. The couplet in 17 may alone be original and 18, the text of which is reducible neither to metre nor wholly to sense, a prose note upon it. Sweep in thy wares from beyond,(409) X. 17 In siege that shalt sit!