1. "Listen, O heavens, to what I am saying. Let the earth hear the words of my mouth.
2. Let my doctrine accumulate like the rain. Let my eloquence form like the dew, like a mist upon the plants, and like water droplets upon the grass.
3. For I will invoke the name of the Lord. Acknowledge the magnificence of our God!
4. The works of God are perfect, and all his ways are judgments. God is faithful and without any iniquity. He is just and upright.
5. They have sinned against him, and in their filth they are not his sons. They are a depraved and perverse generation.
6. How can this be the return you would offer to the Lord, O foolish and senseless people? Is he himself not your Father, who has possessed you, and made you, and created you?
7. Remember the days of antiquity. Consider each generation. Question your father, and he will declare it to you. Question your elders, and they will tell it to you.
8. When the Most High divided the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam, he appointed the limits of the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel.
9. But the Lord's portion is his people: Jacob, the lot of his inheritance.
10. He discovered him in a desert land, in a place of horror and a vast wilderness. He led him around and taught him, and he guarded him like the pupil of his eye,
11. just as an eagle encourages its young to fly, and, flying above them, stretches out its wings, and takes them up, and carries them on its shoulders.
12. The Lord alone was his leader, and there was no strange god with him.
13. He stood him upon an exalted land, so that he might eat the fruits of the fields, so that he might eat honey from the rock, and oil from the hardest stone,
14. butter from the herd, and milk from the sheep, with fat from the lambs, and with rams and goats from the sons of Bashan, with the kernel of the wheat, and so that he might drink the undiluted blood of the grape.
15. The beloved grew fat, and he kicked. Having grown fat and thick and wide, he abandoned God, his Maker, and he withdrew from God, his Savior.
16. They provoked him with strange gods, and they stirred him to anger by their abominations.
17. They immolated to demons and not to God, to gods whom they did not know, who were new and recent arrivals, whom their fathers did not worship.
18. You have forsaken the God who conceived you, and you have forgotten the Lord who created you.