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When heads of grain without number are sown, how great a threshing floor they will fill!"
33
Then I answered and said, "How long and when will these things be? Why are our years few and evil?"
34
He answered me and said, "You do not hasten faster than the Most High, for your haste is for yourself, but the Highest hastens on behalf of many.
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Did not the souls of the righteous in their chambers ask about these matters, saying, `How long are we to remain here? And when will come the harvest of our reward?
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And Jeremiel the archangel answered them and said, `When the number of those like yourselves is completed; for he has weighed the age in the balance,
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and measured the times by measure, and numbered the times by number; and he will not move or arouse them until that measure is fulfilled.'"
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Then I answered and said, "O sovereign Lord, but all of us also are full of ungodliness.
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And it is perhaps on account of us that the time of threshing is delayed for the righteous -- on account of the sins of those who dwell on earth."
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He answered me and said, "Go and ask a woman who is with child if, when her nine months have been completed, her womb can keep the child within her any longer."
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And I said, "No, lord, it cannot." And he said to me, "In Hades the chambers of the souls are like the womb.
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For just as a woman who is in travail makes haste to escape the pangs of birth, so also do these places hasten to give back those things that were committed to them from the beginning.