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32Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak; let the earth hear the words of my mouth. ²May my teaching drop like the rain, my speech condense like the dew; like gentle rain on grass, like showers on new growth. ³For I will proclaim the name of the Lord; ascribe greatness to our God! ⁴The Rock, his work is perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God, without deceit, just and upright is he; ⁵yet his degenerate children have dealt falsely with him, a perverse and crooked generation. ⁶Do you thus repay the Lord, O foolish and senseless people? Is not he your father, who created you, who made you and established you?

⁷Remember the days of old, consider the years long past; ask your father, and he will inform you; your elders, and they will tell you. ⁸When the Most High apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods; ⁹the Lord’s own portion was his people, Jacob his allotted share. ¹⁰He sustained him in a desert land, in a howling wilderness waste; he shielded him, cared for him, guarded him as the apple of his eye. ¹¹As an eagle stirs up its nest, and hovers over its young; as it spreads its wings, takes them up, and bears them aloft on its pinions, ¹²the Lord alone guided him; no foreign god was with him. ¹³He set him atop the heights of the land, and fed him with produce of the field; he nursed him with honey from the crags, with oil from flinty rock; ¹⁴curds from the herd, and milk from the flock, with fat of lambs and rams; Bashan bulls and goats, together with the choicest wheat— you drank fine wine from the blood of grapes.

¹⁵Jacob ate his fill; Jeshurun grew fat, and kicked. You grew fat, bloated, and gorged! He abandoned God who made him, and scoffed at the Rock of his salvation. ¹⁶They made him jealous with strange gods, with abhorrent things they provoked him. ¹⁷They sacrificed to demons, not God, to deities they had never known, to new ones recently arrived, whom your ancestors had not feared. ¹⁸You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you; you forgot the God who gave you birth.

¹⁹The Lord saw it, and was jealous he spurned his sons and daughters. ²⁰He said: I will hide my face from them, I will see what their end will be; for they are a perverse generation, children in whom there is no faithfulness. ²¹They made me jealous with what is no god, provoked me with their idols. So I will make them jealous with what is no people, provoke them with a foolish nation. ²²For a fire is kindled by my anger, and burns to the depths of Sheol; it devours the earth and its increase, and sets on fire the foundations of the mountains. ²³I will heap disasters upon them, spend my arrows against them: ²⁴wasting hunger, burning consumption, bitter pestilence. The teeth of beasts I will send against them, with venom of things crawling in the dust. ²⁵In the street the sword shall bereave, and in the chambers terror, for young man and woman alike, nursing child and old gray head.

²⁶I thought to scatter them and blot out the memory of them from humankind; ²⁷but I feared provocation by the enemy, for their adversaries might misunderstand and say, “Our hand is triumphant; it was not the Lord who did all this.” ²⁸They are a nation void of sense; there is no understanding in them. ²⁹If they were wise, they would understand this; they would discern what the end would be. ³⁰How could one have routed a thousand, and two put a myriad to flight, unless their Rock had sold them, the Lord had given them up? ³¹Indeed their rock is not like our Rock; our enemies are fools. ³²Their vine comes from the vinestock of Sodom, from the vineyards of Gomorrah; their grapes are grapes of poison, their clusters are bitter; ³³their wine is the poison of serpents, the cruel venom of asps. ³⁴Is not this laid up in store with me, sealed up in my treasuries? ³⁵Vengeance is mine, and recompense, for the time when their foot shall slip; because the day of their calamity is at hand, their doom comes swiftly. ³⁶Indeed the Lord will vindicate his people, have compassion on his servants, when he sees that their power is gone, neither bond nor free remaining. ³⁷Then he will say: Where are their gods, the rock in which they took refuge, ³⁸who ate the fat of their sacrifices, and drank the wine of their libations? Let them rise up and help you, let them be your protection!

³⁹See now that I, even I, am he; there is no god beside me. I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and no one can deliver from my hand. ⁴⁰For I lift up my hand to heaven, and swear: As I live forever, ⁴¹when I whet my flashing sword, and my hand takes hold on judgment; I will take vengeance on my adversaries, and will repay those who hate me. ⁴²I will make my arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh— with the blood of the slain and the captives, from the long-haired enemy. ⁴³Praise, O heavens, his people, worship him, all you gods! For he will avenge the blood of his children, and take vengeance on his adversaries; he will repay those who hate him, and cleanse the land for his people.