(1) "Say of your brothers, `My people,' and of your sisters, `My loved one.'
(2) "Rebuke your mother, rebuke her, for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband. Let her remove the adulterous look from her face and the unfaithfulness from between her breasts.
(3) Otherwise I will strip her naked and make her as bare as on the day she was born; I will make her like a desert, turn her into a parched land, and slay her with thirst.
(4) I will not show my love to her children, because they are the children of adultery.
(5) Their mother has been unfaithful and has conceived them in disgrace. She said, `I will go after my lovers, who give me my food and my water, my wool and my linen, my oil and my drink.'
(6) Therefore I will block her path with thornbushes; I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way.
(7) She will chase after her lovers but not catch them; she will look for them but not find them. Then she will say, `I will go back to my husband as at first, for then I was better off than now.'
(8) She has not acknowledged that I was the one who gave her the grain, the new wine and oil, who lavished on her the silver and gold-- which they used for Baal.
(9) "Therefore I will take away my grain when it ripens, and my new wine when it is ready. I will take back my wool and my linen, intended to cover her nakedness.
(10) So now I will expose her lewdness before the eyes of her lovers; no one will take her out of my hands.
(11) I will stop all her celebrations: her yearly festivals, her New Moons, her Sabbath days--all her appointed feasts.
(12) I will ruin her vines and her fig trees, which she said were her pay from her lovers; I will make them a thicket, and wild animals will devour them.
(13) I will punish her for the days she burned incense to the Baals; she decked herself with rings and jewelry, and went after her lovers, but me she forgot," declares the LORD.
(14) "Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her.
(15) There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor[1] a door of hope. There she will sing[2] as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt.
(16) "In that day," declares the LORD, "you will call me `my husband'; you will no longer call me `my master.[3] '
(17) I will remove the names of the Baals from her lips; no longer will their names be invoked.
(18) In that day I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the creatures that move along the ground. Bow and sword and battle I will abolish from the land, so that all may lie down in safety.
(19) I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in[4] righteousness and justice, in[5] love and compassion.
(20) I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the LORD.
(21) "In that day I will respond," declares the LORD-- "I will respond to the skies, and they will respond to the earth;
(22) and the earth will respond to the grain, the new wine and oil, and they will respond to Jezreel.[6]
(23) I will plant her for myself in the land; I will show my love to the one I called `Not my loved one.[7] ' I will say to those called `Not my people,[8] ' `You are my people'; and they will say, `You are my God.'"