¹And He answered and said unto me: 'Wherefore at that time he appointed for them a covenant and said: "Behold I have placed before thee life and death," And he called heaven and earth to witness against them.

²For he knew that his time was but short, But that heaven and earth endure always.

³But after his death they sinned and transgressed, Though they knew that they had the law reproving (them), And the light in which nothing could err, Also the spheres which testify, and Me.

⁴Now regarding everything that is, it is I that judge, but do not you take counsel in thy soul regarding these things, nor afflict thyself because of those which have been.

⁵For now it is the consummation of time that should be considered, whether of business, or of prosperity, or of shame and not the beginning thereof.

⁶Because if a man be prospered in his beginnings and shamefully entreated in his old age, he forgets all the prosperity that he had.

⁷And again, if a man is shamefully entreated in his beginnings, and at his end is prospered, he remembers not again his evil entreatment.

⁸And again hearken: though each one were prospered all that time-all the time from the day on which death was decreed against those who transgress-and in his end was destroyed, in vain would have been everything. 20. Zion has been taken away to hasten the Advent of the Judgment