Jeremiah 44:11-23

Contemporary English Version

¹¹ I, the Lord All-Powerful, have decided to wipe you out with disasters. ¹² There were only a few of you left in Judah, and you decided to go to Egypt. But you will die such horrible deaths in war or from starvation, that people of other countries will use the name of Judah as a curse word. ¹³ I punished Jerusalem with war, hunger, and disease, and that's how I will punish you. ¹⁴ None of you will survive. You may hope to return to Judah someday, but only a very few of you will escape death and be able to go back.

The People Refuse To Worship the Lord

¹⁵ A large number of Jews from both northern and southern Egypt listened to me as I told them what the Lord had said. Most of the men in the crowd knew that their wives often burned incense to other gods. So they and their wives shouted:

¹⁶ Jeremiah, what do we care if you speak in the Lord's name? We refuse to listen! ¹⁷ We have promised to worship the goddess Astarte, the Queen of Heaven,^[a] and that is exactly what we are going to do. We will burn incense and offer sacrifices of wine to her, just as we, our ancestors, our kings, and our leaders did when we lived in Jerusalem and the other towns of Judah. We had plenty of food back then. We were well off, and nothing bad ever happened to us. ¹⁸ But since the time we stopped burning incense and offering wine sacrifices to her, we have been dying from war and hunger.

¹⁹ Then the women said, “When we lived in Judah, we worshiped the Queen of Heaven and offered sacrifices of wine and special loaves of bread shaped like her. Our husbands knew what we were doing, and they approved of it.”

²⁰ Then I told the crowd:

²¹ Don't you think the Lord knew that you and your ancestors, your leaders and kings, and the rest of the people were burning incense to other gods in Jerusalem and everywhere else in Judah? ²² And when he could no longer put up with your disgusting sins, he placed a curse on your land and turned it into a desert, as it is today. ²³ This disaster happened because you worshiped other gods and rebelled against the Lord by refusing to obey him or follow his laws and teachings.