Go, cry out this message for Jerusalem to hear! I remember the devotion of your youth, how you loved me as a bride, Following me in the wilderness, in a land unsown.
I passed by you again and saw that you were now old enough for love. So I spread the corner of my cloak over you to cover your nakedness; I swore an oath to you and entered into covenant with you—oracle of the Lord God—and you became mine.
Then the Lord said to me: Proclaim all these words in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem: Hear the words of this covenant and obey them.
Stand at the gate of the house of the Lord and proclaim this message there: Hear the word of the Lord, all you of Judah who enter these gates to worship the Lord!
Surely, the Lord, your God, has blessed you in all your undertakings; he has been concerned about your journey through this vast wilderness. It is now forty years that the Lord, your God, has been with you, and you have lacked nothing.
I will punish her for the days of the Baals, for whom she burnt incense, When she decked herself out with her rings and her jewelry, and went after her lovers— but me she forgot—oracle of the Lord.
They did not ask, “Where is the Lord who brought us up from the land of Egypt, Who led us through the wilderness, through a land of wastes and ravines, A land of drought and darkness, a land which no one crosses, where no one dwells?”
Remember how for these forty years the Lord, your God, has directed all your journeying in the wilderness, so as to test you by affliction, to know what was in your heart: to keep his commandments, or not.
She did not abandon the prostitution she had begun with the Egyptians, who had lain with her when she was young, fondling her virgin breasts and pouring out their lust upon her.
Even as young girls, they were prostitutes, serving as prostitutes in Egypt. There the Egyptians fondled their breasts and caressed their virgin nipples.
Cry out full-throated and unsparingly, lift up your voice like a trumpet blast; Proclaim to my people their transgression, to the house of Jacob their sins.
And Moses said, “When the Lord gives you meat to eat in the evening and in the morning your fill of bread, and hears the grumbling you utter against him, who then are we? Your grumbling is not against us, but against the Lord.”
Adulterers! Do you not know that to be a lover of the world means enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wants to be a lover of the world makes himself an enemy of God.
Yes, their mother has prostituted herself; she who conceived them has acted shamefully. For she said, “I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.”
Then I will give her the vineyards she had, and the valley of Achor as a door of hope. There she will respond as in the days of her youth, as on the day when she came up from the land of Egypt.
Like grapes in the desert, I found Israel; Like the first fruits of the fig tree, its first to ripen, I looked on your ancestors. But when they came to Baal-peor and consecrated themselves to the Shameful One, they became as abhorrent as the thing they loved.