9. I am on your side, and I will make sure that your land is ploughed again and that seeds are sown there.
10. I will make your population grow. You will live in the cities and rebuild everything that was left in ruins.
11. I will make people and cattle increase in number. There will be more of you than ever before, and you will have many children. I will let you live there as you used to live, and I will make you more prosperous than ever. Then you will know that I am the Lord.
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.
20. Wherever they went, they brought disgrace on my holy name, because people would say, ‘These are the people of the Lord, but they had to leave his land.’
21. That made me concerned for my holy name, since the Israelites brought disgrace on it everywhere they went.
22. “Now then, give the Israelites the message that I, the Sovereign Lord, have for them: what I am going to do is not for the sake of you Israelites, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have disgraced in every country where you have gone.
23. When I demonstrate to the nations the holiness of my great name — the name you disgraced among them — then they will know that I am the Lord. I, the Sovereign Lord, have spoken. I will use you to show the nations that I am holy.
24. I will take you from every nation and country and bring you back to your own land.
25. I will sprinkle clean water on you and make you clean from all your idols and everything else that has defiled you.
26. I will give you a new heart and a new mind. I will take away your stubborn heart of stone and give you an obedient heart.