Israel’s Infidelity, Punishment, and Redemption

²Plead with your mother, plead—
   for she is not my wife,
   and I am not her husband—
that she put away her whoring from her face,
   and her adultery from between her breasts,
³or I will strip her naked
   and expose her as in the day she was born,
and make her like a wilderness,
   and turn her into a parched land,
   and kill her with thirst.
⁴Upon her children also I will have no pity,
   because they are children of whoredom.
⁵For their mother has played the whore;
   she who conceived them has acted shamefully.
For she said, ‘I will go after my lovers;
   they give me my bread and my water,
   my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.’
⁶Therefore I will hedge her^* way with thorns;
   and I will build a wall against her,
   so that she cannot find her paths.
⁷She shall pursue her lovers,
   but not overtake them;
and she shall seek them,
   but shall not find them.
Then she shall say, ‘I will go
   and return to my first husband,
   for it was better with me then than now.’
⁸She did not know
   that it was I who gave her
   the grain, the wine, and the oil,
and who lavished upon her silver
   and gold that they used for Baal.
⁹Therefore I will take back
   my grain in its time,
   and my wine in its season;
and I will take away my wool and my flax,
   which were to cover her nakedness.
¹⁰Now I will uncover her shame
   in the sight of her lovers,
   and no one shall rescue her out of my hand.
¹¹I will put an end to all her mirth,
   her festivals, her new moons, her sabbaths,
   and all her appointed festivals.
¹²I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees,
   of which she said,
‘These are my pay,
   which my lovers have given me.’
I will make them a forest,
   and the wild animals shall devour them.
¹³I will punish her for the festival days of the Baals,
   when she offered incense to them
and decked herself with her ring and jewellery,
   and went after her lovers,
   and forgot me, says the Lord.

¹⁴Therefore, I will now persuade her,
   and bring her into the wilderness,
   and speak tenderly to her.