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and of your sisters, ‘Compassion’.
2 “Rebuke your mother, rebuke her;
for she is not my wife,
and I am not her husband.
Let her remove the adulterous look from her face
and the unfaithfulness from between her breasts.
3 Otherwise, I will strip her naked
and make her as bare
as she was on the day she was born.
I will make her like a desert,
turn her into a parched land,
and slay her with thirst.
4 I will have no compassion on her children,
because they are children of adultery.
5 Their mother has been adulterous,
and she has conceived them in disgrace.
She said, ‘I will go after my lovers,
who give me my food and my water,
my wool and my linen, my oil, and my drink’.
6 Therefore, behold, I will block her path with thorns;
I will wall her in, so that she cannot find her way.
7 She will chase after her lovers, but not catch them;
she will seek them, but not find them.
Then she will say,
‘I will go back to my former husband,
for then I was better off than now’.
8 She did not realise that it was I
who gave her the grain, the new wine, and the oil,
who lavished on her the silver and gold—
which they used for Baal.
9 “Therefore I will take away My grain in its time,
and My new wine in its season.
I will take away My wool and My linen,
which were to cover her nakedness.
10 Now I will uncover her lewdness
before the eyes of her lovers,
and no one will rescue her out of My hands.
11 I will put an end to all her celebrations:
her yearly feasts, her New Moons,
and her Sabbath days—all her appointed festivals.
12 I will devastate her vines and her fig trees,
which she said were her wages
given to her by her lovers.
So I will turn them into a thicket,
and wild animals will devour them.
13 I will punish her for the days of her Baal festivals
when she burned incense to them;
she decked herself out with rings and jewellery,
and went after her lovers,
but Me she forgot,”
declares the Lord.
14 “Therefore I am now going to allure her;
I will lead her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.
15 There I will give her vineyards back to her,
and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she will sing as in the days of her youth,
as in the day she came out of the land of Egypt.
16 “In that day,” declares the Lord,
“you will call me, ‘My husband’;
you will no longer call Me, ‘my Baal’.
17 For I will remove the names of the Baals from her mouth;
no longer will their names be invoked.
18 On that day I will make a covenant for them
with the beasts of the field, the birds of the air,
and the creatures that crawl along the ground.
Bow and sword and battle
I will abolish from the land,
so they may all lie down in safety.
19 I will take you for My wife forever;
I will betroth you in righteousness and justice,
and in faithful love and compassion.
20 I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness,
and you will know the Lord.
21 “On that day I will respond,”
declares the Lord—
“I will respond to the skies,
and they will respond to the earth;
22 the earth will respond to the grain,
the new wine, and the oil,
and they will respond to Jezreel.
23 I will plant her in the land for Myself,
and I will have compassion on Lo-ruhamah,
and I will say to Lo-ammi, ‘You are My people’,
and they will say, ‘You are my God’.”