For you are our Father, and Abraham has not known us, and Israel has been ignorant of us. You are our Father, O Lord our Redeemer. Your name is beyond all ages.
But I said: How shall I place you among the sons, and distribute to you a desirable land, the preeminent inheritance of the host of the Gentiles? And I said: You will call me Father, and you will not cease to walk after me.
Certainly, Ephraim is an honorable son to me; surely, he is a tender child. For I will still remember him, as in the time when I first spoke about him. Because my heart is stirred up over him, surely I will take pity on him, says the Lord.
The beginning of the Lord's conversation with Hosea. And the Lord said to Hosea: "Go, take to yourself a wife of fornications, and make for yourself sons of fornications, because, by fornicating, the land will fornicate away from the Lord."
The son honors the father, and the servant his master. If, therefore, I am Father, where is my honor? And if I am Master, where is my fear? says the Lord of hosts to you, O priests, who despise my name. And you have said, "In what way, have we despised your name?"
Judah has transgressed, and abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem. For Judah has contaminated the sanctified of the Lord, which he loved, and has held the daughter of a strange god.
You are of your father, the devil. And you will carry out the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning. And he did not stand in the truth, because the truth is not in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks it from his own self. For he is a liar, and the father of lies.
How can this be the return you would offer to the Lord, O foolish and senseless people? Is he himself not your Father, who has possessed you, and made you, and created you?
Do not be like Cain, who was of the evil one, and who killed his brother. And why did he kill him? Because his own works were wicked, but his brother's works were just.