1. Say to your brothers, “You are my people,” and to your sisters, “You have received mercy.”
2. “Plead with your mother, plead—for she is not my wife,and I am not her husband—that she put away her whoring from her face,and her adultery from between her breasts;
3. lest I strip her nakedand make her as in the day she was born,and make her like a wilderness,and make her like a parched land,and kill her with thirst.
4. Upon her children also I will have no mercy, because they are children of whoredom.
5. For their mother has played the whore;she who conceived them has acted shamefully.For she said, ‘I will go after my lovers,who give me my bread and my water,my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.’
6. Therefore I will hedge up her way with thorns,and I will build a wall against her,so that she cannot find her paths.
7. She shall pursue her loversbut not overtake them,and she shall seek thembut shall not find them. Then she shall say,‘I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now.’
8. And she did not knowthat it was I who gave her the grain, the wine, and the oil,and who lavished on her silver and gold, which they used for Baal.
9. Therefore I will take backmy grain in its time,and my wine in its season,and I will take away my wool and my flax,which were to cover her nakedness.