¹The word of Yahweh came to me, saying:

²You must not take a wife for yourself, and you will not have sons and daughters in this place.

³For thus Yahweh said concerning the sons and concerning the daughters born in this place, and concerning their mothers who bore them, and concerning their fathers who fathered them in this land:

⁴They will die of deadly diseases; they will not be mourned and will not be buried; they will be dung on the face of the ground. By the sword and by famine they will come to an end, and their corpses will become food for the birds of the skies and for the animals of the land.

⁵For thus Yahweh said: Do not enter a house of mourning, and do not go to lament, and do not shake your head for them; for I have withdrawn my wholeness from this people, the utterance of Yahweh, the loyal love and the compassions.

⁶The great and the small will die in this land; they will not be buried, and no one will mourn for them, and no one will gash himself, and no one will make himself bald for them.

⁷And no one will break bread for them in mourning, to comfort him over the dead; and no one will give them the cup of consolations to drink for his father or his mother.

⁸And you must not go into a house of feasting to sit with them, to eat and to drink.

⁹For thus Yahweh of hosts, the God of Israel, said: Look, I am about to make cease from this place, before your eyes and in your days, the sound of joy, and the sound of gladness, the sound of the bridegroom, and the sound of the bride.

¹⁰And it will be, when you tell this people all these words, and they say to you, 'On account of what has Yahweh spoken against us all this great evil? And what is our guilt, and what is our sin that we have sinned against Yahweh our God?'

¹¹And you will say to them: 'Because your fathers forsook me, the utterance of Yahweh, and walked after other gods, and served them, and bowed down to them, and forsook me, and did not keep my instruction.'

¹²And you yourselves have done evil in acting worse than your fathers; and look, you are walking, each one after the stubbornness of his evil heart, so as not to listen to me.

¹³And I will hurl you from off this land onto the land that you did not know, you and your fathers; and you will serve there other gods by day and by night, since I will not give you favor.

¹⁴Therefore, look, days are coming, the utterance of Yahweh, when it will not be said again, 'As Yahweh lives, who brought up the children of Israel from the land of Egypt;

¹⁵Instead, as Yahweh lives, who brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north and from all the lands where he had banished them — and I will bring them back to their ground, which I gave to their fathers.

¹⁶Look, I am sending for many fishermen, the utterance of Yahweh, and they will fish them out; and after that I will send for many hunters, and they will hunt them from off every mountain and from off every hill and from the clefts of the crags.

¹⁷For my eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from my face, and their guilt is not concealed from before my eyes.

¹⁸And I will repay first the double of their guilt and their sin, because they have profaned my land with the carcasses of their detestable things, and they have filled my inheritance with their abominations.

¹⁹O Yahweh, my strength and my stronghold and my refuge in the day of distress, to you nations will come from the ends of the land and they will say: Our fathers inherited only falsehood, a vapor, and there is no profit in them.

²⁰Can a man make gods for himself? Yet they are no gods.

²¹Therefore, look, I am about to make them know — this time I will make them know my hand and my might — and they will know that my name is Yahweh.