²³ Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days! For there will be great distress on the earth and wrath against this people;

²⁹ For the days are surely coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.’

¹⁷ Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days!^(A)

¹⁹ Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days!

¹⁷ For the time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God; if it begins with us, what will be the end for those who do not obey the gospel of God?^(A)

Warning to Rich Oppressors

5 Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you.

²⁶ For if we willfully persist in sin after having received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins^{(A) 27} but a fearful prospect of judgment and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.^{(B) 28} Anyone who has violated the law of Moses dies without mercy “on the testimony of two or three witnesses.”^{(C) 29} How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by those who have spurned the Son of God, profaned the blood of the covenant by which they were sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace?^{(D) 30} For we know the one who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.”^[a] And again, “The Lord will judge his people.”^{(E) 31} It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

¹⁶ by hindering us from speaking to the gentiles so that they may be saved. Thus they have constantly been filling up the measure of their sins, but wrath^[a] has overtaken them at last.^[b](A)

⁵⁶ She who is the most refined and gentle among you, so gentle and refined that she does not venture to set the sole of her foot on the ground, will begrudge food to the husband whom she embraces, to her own son, and to her own daughter,^{(A) 57} begrudging even the afterbirth that comes out from between her thighs and the children that she bears, because she is eating them in secret for lack of anything else, in the desperate straits to which the enemy siege will reduce you in your towns.