Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

78 A psalm for Asaph. O God, the heathens are come into thy inheritance, they have defiled thy holy temple: they have made Jerusalem as a place to keep fruit.

² They have given the dead bodies of thy servants to be meat for the fowls of the air: the flesh of thy saints for the beasts of the earth.

³ They have poured out their blood as water, round about Jerusalem and there was none to bury them.

⁴ We are become a reproach to our neighbours: a scorn and derision to them that are round about us.

⁵ How long, O Lord, wilt thou be angry for ever: shall thy zeal be kindled like a fire?

⁶ Pour out thy wrath upon the nations that have not known thee: and upon the kingdoms that have not called upon thy name.

⁷ Because they have devoured Jacob; and have laid waste his place.

³⁰ Then Josue built an altar to the Lord the God of Israel in mount Hebal,

³¹ As Moses the servant of the Lord had commanded the children of Israel, and it is written in the book of the law of Moses: an altar of unhewn stones which iron had not touched: and he offered upon it holocausts to the Lord, and immolated victims of peace offerings.

³² And he wrote upon stones the Deuteronomy of the law of Moses, which he had ordered before the children of Israel.

³³ And all the people, and the ancients, and the princes and judges stood on both sides of the ark, before the priests that carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord, both the stranger and he that was born among them, half of them by mount Garizim, and half by mount Hebal, as Moses the servant of the Lord had commanded. And first he blessed the people of Israel.

³⁴ After this he read all the words of the blessing and the cursing and all things that were written in the hook of the law.

³⁵ He left out nothing of those things which Moses had commanded, but he repeated all before all the people of Israel, with the women and children and strangers that dwelt among them.

¹³ And the sixth angel sounded the trumpet: and I heard a voice from the four horns of the great altar, which is before the eyes of God,

¹⁴ Saying to the sixth angel, who had the trumpet: Loose the four angels, who are bound in the great river Euphrates.

¹⁵ And the four angels were loosed, who were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year: for to kill the third part of men.

¹⁶ And the number of the army of horsemen was twenty thousand times ten thousand. And I heard the number of them.

¹⁷ And thus I saw the horses in the vision: and they that sat on them, had breastplates of fire and of hyacinth and of brimstone, and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions: and from their mouths proceeded fire, and smoke, and brimstone.

¹⁸ And by these three plagues was slain the third part of men, by the fire and by the smoke and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths.

¹⁹ For the power of the horses is in their mouths, and in their tails. For, their tails are like to serpents, and have heads: and with them they hurt.

²⁰ And the rest of the men, who were not slain by these plagues, did not do penance from the works of their hands, that they should not adore devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and wood, which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:

²¹ Neither did they penance from their murders, nor from their sorceries, nor from their fornication, nor from their thefts.