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Friendship, False and True

⁵ Pleasant speech multiplies friends,
   and a gracious tongue multiplies courtesies.
⁶ Let those who are friendly with you be many,
   but let your advisers be one in a thousand.
⁷ When you gain friends, gain them through testing,
   and do not trust them hastily.
⁸ For there are friends who are such when it suits them,
   but they will not stand by you in time of trouble.
⁹ And there are friends who change into enemies,
   and tell of the quarrel to your disgrace.
¹⁰ And there are friends who sit at your table,
   but they will not stand by you in time of trouble.
¹¹ When you are prosperous, they become your second self,
   and lord it over your servants;
¹² but if you are brought low, they turn against you,
   and hide themselves from you.
¹³ Keep away from your enemies,
   and be on guard with your friends.

¹⁴ Faithful friends are a sturdy shelter:
   whoever finds one has found a treasure.
¹⁵ Faithful friends are beyond price;
   no amount can balance their worth.
¹⁶ Faithful friends are life-saving medicine;
   and those who fear the Lord will find them.
¹⁷ Those who fear the Lord direct their friendship aright,
   for as they are, so are their neighbours also.

⁹ Hear this, you rulers of the house of Jacob
   and chiefs of the house of Israel,
who abhor justice
   and pervert all equity,
¹⁰ who build Zion with blood
   and Jerusalem with wrong!
¹¹ Its rulers give judgement for a bribe,
   its priests teach for a price,
   its prophets give oracles for money;
yet they lean upon the Lord and say,
   ‘Surely the Lord is with us!
   No harm shall come upon us.’
¹² Therefore because of you
   Zion shall be ploughed as a field;
Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins,
   and the mountain of the house a wooded height.

Peace and Security through Obedience

4In days to come
   the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
   and shall be raised up above the hills.
Peoples shall stream to it,
²   and many nations shall come and say:
‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
   to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
   and that we may walk in his paths.’
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
   and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
³ He shall judge between many peoples,
   and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;
they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
   and their spears into pruning-hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
   neither shall they learn war any more;
⁴ but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,
   and no one shall make them afraid;
   for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.

⁵ For all the peoples walk,
   each in the name of its god,
but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God
   for ever and ever.