¹² And a letter came to him from Elijah the prophet, saying, The Lord, the God of your father David, says, Because you have not kept to the ways of your father Jehoshaphat or the ways of Asa, king of Judah,

³ And the Lord was with Jehoshaphat, because he went in the early ways of his father, not turning to the Baals,

⁴ But turning to the God of his father and keeping his laws, and not doing as Israel did.

² And Asa did what was good and right in the eyes of the Lord his God;

³ For he took away the altars of strange gods and the high places, and had the upright stones broken and the wood pillars cut down;

⁴ And he made Judah go after the Lord, the God of their fathers, and keep his laws and his orders.

⁵ And he took away the high places and the sun-images from all the towns of Judah; and the kingdom was quiet under his rule.

²⁵ And this is the writing which was recorded, Mene, tekel, peres.

²⁶ This is the sense of the words: Mene; your kingdom has been numbered by God and ended.

²⁷ Tekel; you have been put in the scales and seen to be under weight.

²⁸ Peres; your kingdom has been cut up and given to the Medes and Persians.

²⁹ Then, by the order of Belshazzar, they put a purple robe on Daniel, and a gold chain round his neck, and a public statement was made that he was to be a ruler of high authority in the kingdom.

⁵ In that very hour the fingers of a man's hand were seen, writing opposite the support for the light on the white wall of the king's house, and the king saw the part of the hand which was writing.

²⁸ Take another book and put down in it all the words which were in the first book, which Jehoiakim, king of Judah, put into the fire.

²⁹ And about Jehoiakim, king of Judah, you are to say, This is what the Lord has said: You have put this book into the fire, saying, Why have you put in it that the king of Babylon will certainly come, causing the destruction of this land and putting an end to every man and beast in it?

³⁰ For this reason the Lord has said of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, He will have no son to take his place on the seat of David: his dead body will be put out to undergo the heat of the day and the cold of the night.

³¹ And I will send punishment on him and on his seed and on his servants for their evil-doing; I will send on them and on the people of Jerusalem and the men of Judah, all the evil which I said against them, but they did not give ear.

³² Then Jeremiah took another book, and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah, who put down in it, from the mouth of Jeremiah, all the words of the book which had been burned in the fire by Jehoiakim, king of Judah: and in addition a number of other words of the same sort.

²³ And it came about that whenever Jehudi, in his reading, had got through three or four divisions, the king, cutting them with his penknife, put them into the fire, till all the book was burned up in the fire which was burning in the fireplace.

² Take a book and put down in it all the words I have said to you against Israel and against Judah and against all the nations, from the day when my word came to you in the days of Josiah till this day.

¹¹ And while they went on their way, going on talking together, suddenly there were carriages and horses of fire separating them from one another and Elijah went up to heaven in a great wind.

¹ Now when the Lord was about to take Elijah up to heaven in a great wind, Elijah went with Elisha from Gilgal.

⁴³ He did as Asa his father had done, not turning away from it, but doing what was right in the eyes of the Lord; but the high places were not taken away: the people went on making offerings and burning them in the high places.

¹¹ Asa did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, as David his father did.

⁹ And looking, I saw a hand stretched out to me, and I saw the roll of a book in it;

¹⁰ And he put it open before me, and it had writing on the front and on the back; words of grief and sorrow and trouble were recorded in it.