5. Build houses and dwell in them; and plant gardens and eat their fruit.
6. Take wives and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, so that they may bear sons and daughters; so that you may increase there and not diminish.
7. Seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray to the Lord for it; for in its peace you will have peace.
8. For thus says the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let your prophets and your diviners who are in your midst deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams which they dream.
9. For they prophesy falsely to you in My name. I have not sent them, says the Lord.
10. For thus says the Lord: When seventy years have been completed for Babylon, I will visit you and perform My good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place.
11. For I know the plans that I have for you, says the Lord, plans for peace and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.
12. Then you shall call upon Me, and you shall come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you.
13. You shall seek Me and find Me, when you shall search for Me with all your heart.
14. I will be found by you, says the Lord, and I will turn away your captivity and gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back into the place from where I caused you to be carried away captive.
15. Because you have said, “The Lord has raised up prophets for us in Babylon,”
16. thus says the Lord concerning the king who sits on the throne of David, and concerning all the people who dwell in this city, your brothers who did not go out with you into exile,
17. thus says the Lord of Hosts: I will send upon them the sword, the famine, and the pestilence, and will make them like vile figs that cannot be eaten, they are so rotten.
18. I will pursue them with the sword, with famine, and with pestilence; and will make them a terror to all the kingdoms of the earth, to be a curse and an astonishment, a hissing and a reproach among all the nations where I have driven them,