So now, stop your scoffing, lest your shackles be strengthened! For I have heard from Adonai Elohei-Tzva’ot of destruction determined upon the whole land.
“Is not this the fast I choose: to release the bonds of wickedness, to untie the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to tear off every yoke?
I will scatter them among the nations whom neither they nor their fathers have known. I will pursue them with the sword, until I have finished with them.”
For we also once were foolish, disobedient, deluded, enslaved to various desires and pleasures, spending our lives in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another.