Jeremiah 49:23
Concerning Damascus. Hamath is confounded, and Arpad: for they have heard evil tidings: they are fainthearted; there is sorrow on the sea; it cannot be quiet. Concerning Damascus. Hamath is confounded, and Arpad: for they have heard evil tidings: they are fainthearted; there is sorrow on the sea; it cannot be quiet.
The verse belongs to the prophecies against the nations in Jeremiah 46-51, spoken against the kingdoms surrounding Israel, which include Damascus and Syria and above all Babylon. In those prophecies Babylon is presented both as an ancient empire and as a type of mystical Babylon. In its immediate setting the verse concerns Damascus, and Hamath and Arpad are named among the powers that would fall before Nebuchadnezzar as part of the pronounced doom of Syria.
The verse pictures the sea as full of sorrow, troubled and unable to become quiet. That troubled condition frames disasters and upheavals as signs that the earth is disquieted because of sin, that creation groans for deliverance, and that the times are perilous because God has a controversy with the nations.