1 »Say to your brothers: ‘My people.’ Say to your sisters: ‘You have been shown loving kindness.’

2 »Plead with your mother your nation, for she is not my wife, neither am I her husband. Let her put away her acts of adultery from her face, and her adulteries from between her breasts!

3 »I will strip her naked and make her as in the day that she was born. I will make her as a wilderness, and make her like a dry land, and kill her with thirst.

4 »I will show no mercy to her children for they are children of fornication.

5 Their mother played the harlot. She that conceived them 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.

6 »Behold, I Jehovah will fence her way with thorns. I will build a wall against her that she will not find her path.

7 »She will follow after her lovers but she will not reach them. She will seek them, but will not find them! She will say: ‘I will return to my first husband for it was better for me then.’

8 »She did not know that I gave her the grain, the new wine and oil, and multiplied her silver and gold, which they used for Baal.

9 »Therefore I will take back my grain at that time, and my new wine in the season. I will pluck away my wool and my flax that should have covered her nakedness.

10 »Now I will uncover her lewdness obscene behavior in the sight of her lovers, and none will deliver her out of my hands.

11 »I will also cause all her exaltation to cease, her feasts, her new moons, and her Sabbaths, and all her solemn assemblies.

12 »I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees. Of this she said: These are my loose woman’s hire that my lovers have given me. I will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field will eat them.

13 »I will punish her for the days in which she burned incense to the Baals, when she decked herself with her earrings and her jewels, and went after her lovers, and forgot me,« said Jehovah.

14 »Therefore, behold, I will entice her into the wilderness, and speak kindly to her.

15 »I will give her vineyards from there and the valley of Achor for a door of hope. She will sing there as in the days of her youth and in the day when she came up out of Egypt.

16 »It will be at that day,« said Jehovah; »you will call me ‘husband’ Ishi. You will no longer call me my ‘master’ ba’ali.

17 »For I will take away the names of the Baals out of her mouth, and they will no more be mentioned by their name.

18 »At that time I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, and with the birds of the heavens, and with the creeping things of the ground. I will break the bow and the sword and the battle out of the land, and will make them lie down in safety.

19 »I will engage you to me for a very long time! Yes I will engage you to me in righteousness, and in justice, and in loving kindness, and in mercies.

20 »I will even engage you to me in faithfulness. Then you will know Jehovah.

21 »It will happen in that day. I will answer,« said Jehovah, »I will answer the heavens, and they will answer the earth!

22 »The earth will answer the grain, and the new wine, and the oil; and they will answer Jezreel.

23 »And I will sow her to me in the earth! I will have mercy compassion on her who had not obtained mercy. I will say to those who were not my people: ‘You are my people!’ They will answer: ‘You are my God!’«