Chapter 9
From Days of Celebration to Days of Punishment
1 Do not rejoice, Israel,
do not exult like the nations!
For you have prostituted yourself, abandoning your God,
loving a prostitute’s fee
upon every threshing floor.
2 Threshing floor and wine press will not nourish them,
the new wine will fail them.
3 They will not dwell in the Lord’s land;
Ephraim will return to Egypt,
and in Assyria they will eat unclean food.
4 They will not pour libations of wine to the Lord,
and their sacrifices will not please him.
Their bread will be like mourners’ bread,(A)
that makes unclean all who eat of it;
Their food will be for their own appetites;
it cannot enter the house of the Lord.
5 What will you do on the festival day,
the day of the Lord’s feast?
6 When they flee from the devastation,
Egypt will gather them, Memphis will bury them.
Weeds will overgrow their silver treasures,
and thorns, their tents.
7 They have come, the days of punishment!
they have come, the days of recompense!
Let Israel know it!
“The prophet is a fool,(B)
the man of the spirit is mad!”
Because your iniquity is great,
great, too, is your hostility.
8 The watchman of Ephraim, the people of my God, is the prophet;(C)
yet a fowler’s snare is on all his ways,
hostility in the house of his God.
9 They have sunk to the depths of corruption,
as in the days of Gibeah;(D)
God will remember their iniquity
and punish their sins.
From Former Glory to a History of Corruption
10 Like grapes in the desert,
I found Israel;
Like the first fruits of the fig tree, its first to ripen,(E)
I looked on your ancestors.
But when they came to Baal-peor(F)
and consecrated themselves to the Shameful One,
they became as abhorrent as the thing they loved.
11 Ephraim is like a bird:
their glory flies away—
no birth, no pregnancy, no conception.(G)
12 Even though they bring up their children,
I will make them childless, until no one is left.
Indeed, woe to them
when I turn away from them!
13 Ephraim, as I saw, was a tree
planted in a meadow;
But now Ephraim will bring out
his children to the slaughterer!
14 Give them, Lord!
give them what?
Give them a miscarrying womb,
and dry breasts!(H)
15 All their misfortune began in Gilgal;
yes, there I rejected them.
Because of their wicked deeds
I will drive them out of my house.
I will love them no longer;
all their princes are rebels.
16 Ephraim is stricken,
their root is dried up;(I)
they will bear no fruit.(J)
Were they to bear children,
I would slay the beloved of their womb.
17 My God will disown them
because they have not listened to him;
they will be wanderers among the nations.(K)
Footnotes
- 9:1
- 9:4
- 9:5
- 9:6
- 9:8
- 9:9
- 9:10
- 9:15
- 9:16
Cross references
- 9:4 : Dt 26:14.
- 9:7 : 2 Kgs 9:11; Jn 10:20.
- 9:8 : Jer 6:17; Ez 3:17; 33:2, 6, 7.
- 9:9 : Jgs 19–21.
- 9:10 : Is 28:4; Jer 2:2.
- 9:10 : Nm 25.
- 9:11 : Dt 28:18.
- 9:14 : Jb 3:11–12; Lk 23:29.
- 9:16 : Am 2:9.
- 9:16 : Mt 21:19.
- 9:17 : Gn 4:12, 14; Dt 28:64–65.
