¹² And a letter came to him from Elijah the prophet, saying,

³ Now the Lord was with Jehoshaphat, because he walked in the former ways of his father David; he did not seek the Baals, ⁴ but sought ^[a]the God of his father, and walked in His commandments and not according to ^(A)the acts of Israel.

Asa Reigns in Judah^(A)

² Asa did what was good and right in the eyes of the Lord his God, ³ for he removed the altars of the foreign gods and ^(B)the ^[a]high places, and ^(C)broke down the sacred pillars ^(D)and cut down the wooden images. ⁴ He commanded Judah to ^(E)seek the Lord God of their fathers, and to observe the law and the commandment. ⁵ He also removed the ^[b]high places and the incense altars from all the cities of Judah, and the kingdom was quiet under him.

Elijah Ascends to Heaven

2 And it came to pass, when the Lord was about to ^(A)take up Elijah into heaven by a whirlwind, that Elijah went with ^(B)Elisha from Gilgal.

²⁵ “And this is the inscription that was written:

^[a]MENE, MENE, ^[b]TEKEL, ^[c]UPHARSIN.

²⁶ This is the interpretation of each word. MENE: God has numbered your kingdom, and finished it; ²⁷ TEKEL: ^(A)You have been weighed in the balances, and found wanting; ²⁸ PERES: Your kingdom has been divided, and given to the ^(B)Medes and ^(C)Persians.”^{[d] 29} Then Belshazzar gave the command, and they clothed Daniel with purple and put a chain of gold around his neck, and made a proclamation concerning him ^(D)that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom.

^5 (A)In the same hour the fingers of a man’s hand appeared and wrote opposite the lampstand on the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace; and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.

²⁸ “Take yet another scroll, and write on it all the former words that were in the first scroll which Jehoiakim the king of Judah has burned. ²⁹ And you shall say to Jehoiakim king of Judah, ‘Thus says the Lord: “You have burned this scroll, saying, ^(A)‘Why have you written in it that the king of Babylon will certainly come and destroy this land, and cause man and beast to ^(B)cease from here?’ ” ³⁰ Therefore thus says the Lord concerning Jehoiakim king of Judah: ^(C)“He shall have no one to sit on the throne of David, and his dead body shall be ^(D)cast out to the heat of the day and the frost of the night. ³¹ I will punish him, his ^[a]family, and his servants for their iniquity; and I will bring on them, on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and on the men of Judah all the doom that I have pronounced against them; but they did not heed.” ’ ”

³² Then Jeremiah took another scroll and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah, who wrote on it ^[b]at the instruction of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire. And besides, there were added to them many similar words.

²³ And it happened, when Jehudi had read three or four columns, that the king cut it with the scribe’s knife and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the scroll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth.

² “Take a ^(A)scroll of a book and ^(B)write on it all the words that I have spoken to you against Israel, against Judah, and against ^(C)all the nations, from the day I spoke to you, from the days of ^(D)Josiah even to this day.