³³ I will scatter you among the nations and bring out my sword against you. Your land will become desolate, and your cities will lie in ruins.

¹⁴ As with a whirlwind, I scattered them among the distant nations, where they lived as strangers. Their land became so desolate that no one even traveled through it. They turned their pleasant land into a desert.”

²³ But I took a solemn oath against them in the wilderness. I swore I would scatter them among all the nations

⁶⁴ For the Lord will scatter you among all the nations from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship foreign gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods made of wood and stone! ⁶⁵ There among those nations you will find no peace or place to rest. And the Lord will cause your heart to tremble, your eyesight to fail, and your soul to despair. ⁶⁶ Your life will constantly hang in the balance. You will live night and day in fear, unsure if you will survive.

²⁷ For the Lord will scatter you among the nations, where only a few of you will survive.

²⁴ They will be killed by the sword or sent away as captives to all the nations of the world. And Jerusalem will be trampled down by the Gentiles until the period of the Gentiles comes to an end.

¹⁵ I will scatter you among the nations and purge you of your wickedness.

¹⁶ I will scatter them around the world, in places they and their ancestors never heard of, and even there I will chase them with the sword until I have destroyed them completely.”

Greetings from James

1 This letter is from James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.

I am writing to the “twelve tribes”—Jewish believers scattered abroad.

Greetings!