18. You deserted the Rock, who fathered you; you forgot the God who gave you birth.
19. The Lord saw this and rejected them because he was angered by his sons and daughters.
20. “I will hide my face from them,” he said, “and see what their end will be; for they are a perverse generation, children who are unfaithful.
21. They made me jealous by what is no god and angered me with their worthless idols. I will make them envious by those who are not a people; I will make them angry by a nation that has no understanding.
22. For a fire will be kindled by my wrath, one that burns down to the realm of the dead below. It will devour the earth and its harvests and set afire the foundations of the mountains.
23. “I will heap calamities on them and spend my arrows against them.
24. I will send wasting famine against them, consuming pestilence and deadly plague; I will send against them the fangs of wild beasts, the venom of vipers that glide in the dust.
25. In the street the sword will make them childless; in their homes terror will reign. The young men and young women will perish, the infants and those with gray hair.
26. I said I would scatter them and erase their name from human memory,
27. but I dreaded the taunt of the enemy, lest the adversary misunderstand and say, ‘Our hand has triumphed; the Lord has not done all this.’ ”
28. They are a nation without sense, there is no discernment in them.
29. If only they were wise and would understand this and discern what their end will be!
30. How could one man chase a thousand, or two put ten thousand to flight, unless their Rock had sold them, unless the Lord had given them up?
31. For their rock is not like our Rock, as even our enemies concede.
32. Their vine comes from the vine of Sodom and from the fields of Gomorrah. Their grapes are filled with poison, and their clusters with bitterness.
33. Their wine is the venom of serpents, the deadly poison of cobras.
34. “Have I not kept this in reserve and sealed it in my vaults?