Psalms 59:14–15

¹⁶For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.

⁶They return at evening: they make a noise like a dog, and go round about the city.

²³He wandereth abroad for bread, saying, Where is it? he knoweth that the day of darkness is ready at his hand.

¹⁰Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.

¹BUT now they that are younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.

²Yea, whereto might the strength of their hands profit me, in whom old age was perished?

³For want and famine they were solitary; fleeing into the wilderness in former time desolate and waste.

⁴Who cut up mallows by the bushes, and juniper roots for their meat.

⁵They were driven forth from among men, (they cried after them as after a thief;)

⁶To dwell in the clifts of the valleys, in caves of the earth, and in the rocks.

⁷Among the bushes they brayed; under the nettles they were gathered together.

⁹We gat our bread with the peril of our lives because of the sword of the wilderness.

²⁵And there was a great famine in Samaria: and, behold, they besieged it, until an ass’s head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a cab of dove’s dung for five pieces of silver.

²⁶And as the king of Israel was passing by upon the wall, there cried a woman unto him, saying, Help, my lord, O king.

²⁷And he said, If the Lord do not help thee, whence shall I help thee? out of the barnfloor, or out of the winepress?

²⁸And the king said unto her, What aileth thee? And she answered, This woman said unto me, Give thy son, that we may eat him to day, and we will eat my son to morrow.

²⁹So we boiled my son, and did eat him: and I said unto her on the next day, Give thy son, that we may eat him: and she hath hid her son.

⁴⁸Therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies which the Lord shall send against thee, in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things: and he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he have destroyed thee.

⁵³And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters, which the Lord thy God hath given thee, in the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall distress thee:

⁵⁴So that the man that is tender among you, and very delicate, his eye shall be evil toward his brother, and toward the wife of his bosom, and toward the remnant of his children which he shall leave:

⁵⁵So that he will not give to any of them of the flesh of his children whom he shall eat: because he hath nothing left him in the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall distress thee in all thy gates.

⁵⁶The tender and delicate woman among you, which would not adventure to set the sole of her foot upon the ground for delicateness and tenderness, her eye shall be evil toward the husband of her bosom, and toward her son, and toward her daughter,

⁵⁷And toward her young one that cometh out from between her feet, and toward her children which she shall bear: for she shall eat them for want of all things secretly in the siege and straitness, wherewith thine enemy shall distress thee in thy gates.

⁵⁸If thou wilt not observe to do all the words of this law that are written in this book, that thou mayest fear this glorious and fearful name, THE LORD THY GOD;

¹¹Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand: they all look to their own way, every one for his gain, from his quarter.

²¹And they shall pass through it, hardly bestead and hungry: and it shall come to pass, that when they shall be hungry, they shall fret themselves, and curse their king and their God, and look upward.

⁴The tongue of the sucking child cleaveth to the roof of his mouth for thirst: the young children ask bread, and no man breaketh it unto them.

⁵They that did feed delicately are desolate in the streets: they that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills.

⁹They that be slain with the sword are better than they that be slain with hunger: for these pine away, stricken through for want of the fruits of the field.

¹⁰The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children: they were their meat in the destruction of the daughter of my people.

⁷For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.

⁸All these are the beginning of sorrows.

⁵¶ Thus saith the Lord concerning the prophets that make my people err, that bite with their teeth, and cry, Peace; and he that putteth not into their mouths, they even prepare war against him.