12. I will bring you, my people Israel, back to live again in the land. It will be your own land, and it will never again let your children starve.
13. “I, the Sovereign Lord, say: it is true that people say that the land eats people, and that it robs the nation of its children.
14. But from now on it will no longer eat people and rob you of your children. I, the Sovereign Lord, have spoken.
15. The land will no longer have to listen to the nations mocking it or see the peoples sneer at it. The land will no longer rob the nation of its children. I, the Sovereign Lord, have spoken.”
16. The Lord spoke to me.
17. “Mortal man,” he said, “when the Israelites were living in their land, they defiled it by the way they lived and acted. I regarded their behaviour as being as ritually unclean as a woman is during her monthly period.
18. I let them feel the force of my anger because of the murders they had committed in the land and because of the idols by which they had defiled it.
19. I condemned them for the way they lived and acted, and I scattered them through foreign countries.