The people urgently implored God, fasting and offering atonement. Everyone: friends and slaves, women and men, put on sackcloth. Everyone in Jerusalem threw themselves down in front of the temple.

They all cried out to God with one voice in a fervent prayer: he should not forsake them, nor allow horrors to be visited on them, nor allow destruction, theft, murder, violence, and defilement. They had strewn ashes on their turbans.