⁴ Then this message from the Lord of the Heavenly Armies came to me: ⁵ “Talk to everyone in the land, as well as to the priests. Ask them, ‘When you were fasting and mourning during the fifth and seventh months^[a] for the past seventy years, were you really fasting for me? ⁶ And when you eat and drink, you’re eating and drinking for your own benefit, aren’t you? ⁷ Isn’t this what the Lord proclaimed through the former prophets, when a prosperous Jerusalem was inhabited, as were its surrounding cities, the Negev,^[b] and the Shephelah?’”^[c]