Human Pride Falls in the Day of the LORD

The house of Jacob is full of the things it trusts instead of the LORD

The people are replenished from the east, soothsayers like the Philistines, and they please themselves in the children of strangers. The land is full of silver and gold, of horses and chariots, and of idols; they worship the work of their own hands. The mean man bows down, and the great man humbles himself; therefore forgive them not.

Foreign practices, stored wealth, military stock, and handmade gods are named as the furniture of pride. The unit is a charge against Judah's misplaced trust. It does not license ethnic stigma against neighboring peoples, and it does not turn every later disaster into a claimed fulfillment of this day.

The day of the LORD is the day every human height is lowered

Enter into the rock, and hide in the dust, for fear of the LORD, and for the glory of his majesty. The day of the LORD of hosts shall be upon every one that is proud and lofty, upon cedars, oaks, mountains, high towers, fenced walls, ships of Tarshish, and pleasant pictures. The loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the LORD alone shall be exalted in that day. Idols he shall utterly abolish.

People cast their idols of silver and gold to the moles and to the bats, going into clefts of the rocks. Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of? The terror is the LORD's majesty, not a human holy war. The poem does not authorize cruelty, blaming the injured for catastrophe, or treating a modern shock as this day's direct arrival.