6 I remembered the word that Amos the prophet pronounced against Bethel: Your festivals will be transformed into sadness and all your songs into sorrowful wailing. And I wept.
7 After sunset I went out, dug a hole, and buried him.
8 My neighbors made fun of me, saying, "Is he no longer afraid that he will be killed for doing this kind of thing? He ran away, but now look: he is burying the dead again!"
9 That night I washed myself and went into my courtyard and fell asleep alongside the courtyard wall, with my face uncovered because of the heat.
10 I didn’t know that there were sparrows in the wall above me, and their warm droppings fell into my eyes, forming white spots. I went to doctors to be healed, but the more they applied their medicines on me, the worse the white spots became until I was completely blinded. I couldn’t see with my eyes for four years. All my relatives felt sorry for me, and Ahikar took care of me for two years until he went to Elymais.
11 At that time my wife Anna made a living by weaving cloth out of wool.
12 She would send the cloth to the wool suppliers, and they would pay her for it. On the seventh day of Dystrus, she finished a piece on the loom for her employers. They gave her the full wages, along with a young goat from their herd for her home.