¹¹ I will increase the number of people and animals living on you, and they will be fruitful^(A) and become numerous. I will settle people^(B) on you as in the past^(C) and will make you prosper more than before.^(D) Then you will know that I am the Lord.

¹² “This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘In this place, desolate^(A) and without people or animals^(B)—in all its towns there will again be pastures for shepherds to rest their flocks.^(C)

⁷ “So then, the days are coming,”^(H) declares the Lord, “when people will no longer say, ‘As surely as the Lord lives, who brought the Israelites up out of Egypt,’^{(I) 8} but they will say, ‘As surely as the Lord lives, who brought the descendants of Israel up out of the land of the north and out of all the countries where he had banished them.’ Then they will live in their own land.”^(J)

Prayer and Praise

²⁷ “The days are coming,”^(A) declares the Lord, “when I will plant^(B) the kingdoms of Israel and Judah with the offspring of people and of animals.

¹³ Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord,^(A) when I open your graves and bring you up from them.^(B)

¹⁸ “This is what the Lord says:

¹² The Lord blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the former part. He had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand donkeys.

⁴⁰ since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us^(A) would they be made perfect.^(B)