Add parallel Print Page Options

The People’s Disobedience

16 As for you, do not pray for this people, do not raise a cry or prayer on their behalf, and do not intercede with me, for I will not hear you.(A) 17 Do you not see what they are doing in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? 18 The children gather wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes for the queen of heaven, and they pour out drink offerings to other gods, to provoke me to anger.(B) 19 Is it I whom they provoke? says the Lord. Is it not themselves, to their own hurt?(C) 20 Therefore thus says the Lord God: My anger and my wrath shall be poured out on this place, on humans and animals, on the trees of the field and the fruit of the ground; it will burn and not be quenched.

21 Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices, and eat the flesh.(D) 22 For in the day that I brought your ancestors out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to them or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices.(E) 23 But this command I gave them, “Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people; walk only in the way that I command you, so that it may be well with you.”(F) 24 Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but, in the stubbornness of their evil will, they walked in their own counsels and looked backward rather than forward.(G) 25 From the day that your ancestors came out of the land of Egypt until this day, I have persistently sent all my servants the prophets to them, day after day,(H) 26 yet they did not listen to me or pay attention, but they stiffened their necks. They did worse than their ancestors did.(I)

27 So you shall speak all these words to them, but they will not listen to you. You shall call to them, but they will not answer you.(J) 28 You shall say to them: This is the nation that did not obey the voice of the Lord their God and did not accept discipline; truth has perished; it is cut off from their lips.(K)

29 Cut off your hair and throw it away;
    raise a lamentation on the bare heights,[a]
for the Lord has rejected and forsaken
    the generation that provoked his wrath.(L)

30 For the people of Judah have done evil in my sight, says the Lord; they have set their abominations in the house that is called by my name, defiling it.(M) 31 And they go on building the high place[b] of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire—which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind.(N) 32 Therefore the days are surely coming, says the Lord, when it will no more be called Topheth or the valley of the son of Hinnom but the valley of Slaughter, for they will bury in Topheth until there is no more room.(O) 33 The corpses of this people will be food for the birds of the air and for the animals of the earth, and no one will frighten them away. 34 And I will bring to an end the sound of mirth and gladness, the voice of the bride and bridegroom in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem, for the land shall become a waste.(P)

At that time, says the Lord, the bones of the kings of Judah, the bones of its officials, the bones of the priests, the bones of the prophets, and the bones of the inhabitants of Jerusalem shall be brought out of their tombs,(Q) and they shall be spread before the sun and the moon and all the host of heaven, which they have loved and served, which they have followed, and which they have inquired of and worshiped, and they shall not be gathered or buried; they shall be like dung on the surface of the ground.(R) Death shall be preferred to life by all the remnant that remains of this evil family in all the places where I have driven them, says the Lord of hosts.(S)

Footnotes

  1. 7.29 Or the trails
  2. 7.31 Gk Tg Vg: Heb high places