The priests stopped asking, ‘Where is the Lord? ’ The experts in the law no longer knew me, and the rulers rebelled against me. The prophets prophesied by Baal and followed useless idols.
This is what the Lord says: What fault did your ancestors find in me that they went so far from me, followed worthless idols, and became worthless themselves?
How happy you are, Israel! Who is like you, a people saved by the Lord? He is the shield that protects you, the sword you boast in. Your enemies will cringe before you, and you will tread on their backs. ,
She named the boy Ichabod, saying, ‘The glory has departed from Israel,’ referring to the capture of the ark of God and to the deaths of her father-in-law and her husband.
Didn’t you banish the priests of the Lord, the descendants of Aaron and the Levites, and make your own priests like the peoples of other lands do? Whoever comes to ordain himself with a young bull and seven rams may become a priest of what are not gods.
Why should I forgive you? Your children have abandoned me and sworn by those who are not gods. I satisfied their needs, yet they committed adultery; they gashed themselves at the prostitute’s house.
‘Therefore, this is what the Lord God says: Because you have been more insubordinate than the nations around you #– #you have not walked in my statutes or kept my ordinances; you have not even kept the ordinances of the nations around you #– #
They have provoked my jealousy with what is not a god; they have enraged me with their worthless idols. So I will provoke their jealousy with what is not a people; I will enrage them with a foolish nation.
For they have abandoned me; they have bowed down to Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Sidonians, to Chemosh, the god of Moab, and to Milcom, the god of the Ammonites. They have not walked in my ways to do what is right in my sight and to carry out my statutes and my judgements as his father David did.
But the angel of the Lord said to Elijah the Tishbite, ‘Go and meet the messengers of the king of Samaria and say to them, “Is it because there is no God in Israel that you are going to enquire of Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron?