Among the idols of the nations are there any that give rain? Or can the mere heavens send showers? Is it not you, Lord, our God, to whom we look? You alone do all these things.
Yet my people have forgotten me: they offer incense in vain. They stumble off their paths, the ways of old, Traveling on bypaths, not the beaten track.
He shall set fire to the temples of Egypt’s gods, burn the gods and carry them off. He shall pick the land of Egypt clean, as a shepherd picks lice off his cloak, and then depart victorious.
Proclaim this among the nations, announce it! Announce it, do not hide it, but say: Babylon is captured, Bel put to shame, Marduk terrified; its images are put to shame, its idols shattered.
They have acted shamefully; they have done abominable things, yet they are not at all ashamed, they do not know how to blush. Hence they shall be among those who fall; in their time of punishment they shall stumble, says the Lord.
Listen! the cry of the daughter of my people, far and wide in the land! “Is the Lord no longer in Zion, is her King no longer in her midst?” Why do they provoke me with their idols, with their foreign nonentities?
They have come, the days of punishment! they have come, the days of recompense! Let Israel know it! “The prophet is a fool, the man of the spirit is mad!” Because your iniquity is great, great, too, is your hostility.
On that day—oracle of the Lord of hosts—I will destroy the names of the idols from the land, so that they will be mentioned no more; I will also remove the prophets and the spirit of uncleanness from the land.
“Men, why are you doing this? We are of the same nature as you, human beings. We proclaim to you good news that you should turn from these idols to the living God, ‘who made heaven and earth and sea and all that is in them.’
Since they have incited me with a “no-god,” and provoked me with their empty idols, I will incite them with a “no-people”; with a foolish nation I will provoke them.
But early the next morning, when they arose, Dagon lay face down on the ground before the ark of the Lord, his head and hands broken off and lying on the threshold, his trunk alone intact.