² Level a charge against your mother; plead with her!
    She is not my wife,
        and I am not her husband.
    Let her remove prostitution from her presence,
        and adultery from between her breasts,
³     or else I will strip her naked
        and expose her as on the day she was born.
    I will make her like a desert,
        and turn her into a dry land,
        and make her die of thirst.
⁴ I will also have no compassion on her children
        because they are children of prostitution.
⁵ Their mother has played the prostitute;
        she who conceived them has behaved shamefully.
    She said, “I will seek out my lovers;
        they give me my bread and my water,
        my wool and my linen cloth, my oil and my drink.”

⁶ Therefore, I will line her path with thorns;
        and I will build a wall against her,
        so that she can’t find her paths.
⁷ She will go after her lovers,
        but she won’t catch up with them;
    she will seek them,
        but she won’t find them.
    Then she will say,
        “I will return to my first husband,
        for I had it better then than now.”
⁸ She didn’t know that I gave her
        the corn, the new wine, and the fresh oil,
    and that I gave her much silver,
        and gold that they used for Baal.
⁹ So now I will take back
        my corn in its time,
        and my wine in its season;
    and I will take away my wool and my linen cloth,
        which were to cover her nakedness.
¹⁰ Now I will uncover her nakedness
        in plain view of her lovers,
        and no one will rescue her from me.
¹¹ I will end all her religious celebrations,
        her festivals, her new moons, her Sabbath days,
        and all her sacred seasons.
¹² I will destroy her vines and her fig trees,
    of which she said,
    “These are my pay,
        which my lovers have given to me.”
    I will change them into a forest,
        and the wild animals will eat them.
¹³ I will punish her for the days dedicated to the Baals,
        when she offered sweet-smelling sacrifices to them
        and dressed herself up with rings and jewelry,
        and went after her lovers,
        and forgot me, says the Lord.

¹⁴ Therefore, I will charm her,
        and bring her into the desert,
        and speak tenderly to her heart.

3 If a man divorces his wife,
    and after she leaves him marries another,
        can he return to her again?
    Wouldn’t such an act completely corrupt the land?
Yet you have prostituted yourself with many lovers.
    Would you return to me?
        declares the Lord.
² Look to the well-traveled paths^[a] and see!
    Where haven’t you committed adultery?
On the roadsides you sit in wait for lovers,
    like a nomad in the wilderness.
You have corrupted the land
    with your cheap and reckless behavior.
³ That’s why the showers have failed
    and the spring rains have ceased.
Still you act like a brazen prostitute^[b]
    who refuses to blush.
⁴ At the same time you say to me,
    “My father, my friend since youth,
⁵         will you stay angry forever?
        Will you continue to be furious?”
This is what you say
    while you do as much evil as you possibly can.