Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

Psalm 54

For the Music Director. With stringed instruments. A Contemplative Maskil of David, when the Ziphites went and told Saul, “Is David not hiding among us?”

Israel Exiled to Assyria

⁵ Then the king of Assyria went throughout all the land, went up to Samaria, and besieged it for three years. ⁶ In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria seized Samaria and exiled Israel to Assyria. He put them in Halah, in Habor by the River of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.

⁷ This happened because the children of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up from the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They had feared other gods ⁸ and walked in the statutes of the nations, whom the Lord dispossessed before the children of Israel, and walked in the statutes which the kings of Israel had made. ⁹ The children of Israel ascribed things to the Lord their God that were not so, and they built for themselves high places in all their cities from the watchtower to the fortified city. ¹⁰ They set up standing stones and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every green tree. ¹¹ There they burned incense on all the high places, as the nations did whom the Lord had carried away before them. And they did wicked things to provoke the Lord to anger, ¹² for they served idols, of which the Lord had said to them, “You shall not do this thing.” ¹³ But the Lord warned Israel and Judah by all the prophets and by all the seers, saying, “Turn from your evil ways, and keep My commandments and My statutes, according to all the law which I commanded your fathers and which I sent to you by My servants the prophets.”

¹⁴ But they would not listen. They stiffened their necks, like the neck of their fathers, who did not believe in the Lord their God. ¹⁵ They rejected His statutes and His covenant that He had made with their fathers and the decrees He had given them. They followed idols, and became idolaters, and followed the surrounding nations, concerning whom the Lord commanded them, that they should not do like them.

¹⁶ They forsook all the commandments of the Lord their God, made themselves cast images (two calves), made an Asherah pole, worshipped all the host of heaven, and served Baal. ¹⁷ They caused their sons and daughters to pass through the fire, used divination and omens, and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the Lord to anger Him.

¹⁸ Therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel and removed them from His presence. None remained except the tribe of Judah.

²⁹ “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You build the tombs of the prophets, and adorn the memorials of the righteous, ³⁰ and say, ‘If we lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have partaken with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ ³¹ Therefore you are witnesses against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. ³² Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers’ guilt.

³³ “You serpents! You generation of vipers! How can you escape the judgment of hell? ³⁴ Therefore I send you prophets, and wise men, and scribes. Some of them you will kill and crucify, and some you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute them from city to city, ³⁵ that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. ³⁶ Truly I say to you, all these things will come on this generation.

The Lament Over Jerusalem^(A)

³⁷ “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you, how often I would have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would not! ³⁸ Look, your house is left to you desolate. ³⁹ For I tell you, you shall not see Me again until you say, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.’^[a]”