They quickly turned aside from the path that I commanded for them. They have made a molten calf, worshipped it, and sacrificed to it, and said, ‘This is your god, O Israel, that brought you up out of the land of Egypt.’”
One who walks righteously, and speaks uprightly, who refuses unjust gain by extortion, who shakes his hands free of bribes, who stops his ears from hearing of bloodshed, and shuts his eyes from looking on evil.
do not let any of you devise evil in your hearts against your neighbor; and do not love false oaths, for I hate all these things,”—it is a declaration of Adonai.
But now you have come to know God—or rather you have come to be known by God. So how can you turn back again to those weak and worthless principles? Do you want to be enslaved to them all over again?
You are to gather all its plunder into the middle of the street, and you are to burn with fire the city and all its plunder—all of it to Adonai your God. It will be a ruin forever—it shall never be built again.
Watch yourself, so there is no unworthy thing in your heart saying, ‘The seventh year, the year of cancelling debts, is near,’ and your eye is evil against your poor brother and you give him nothing. Then he may call out to Adonai against you, and it will be a sin upon you.
“Be very resolute to keep and to do all that is written in the book of the Torah of Moses, so that you may not turn aside from it to the right or to the left,
For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than after learning about it, to turn back from the holy commandment passed on to them.
They left us, but they didn’t really belong to us. If they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But they left us so it became clear that none of them belongs to us.
“I regret that I made Saul king, for he has turned back from following Me and has not carried out My commands.” So Samuel was troubled and cried out to Adonai all night long.