1. `Say ye to your brethren--Ammi, And to your sisters--Ruhamah.
2. Plead ye with your mother--plead, (For she [is] not My wife, and I [am] not her husband,) And she turneth her whoredoms from before her, And her adulteries from between her breasts,
3. Lest I strip her naked. And have set her up as [in] the day of her birth, And have made her as a wilderness, And have set her as a dry land, And have put her to death with thirst.
4. And her sons I do not pity, For sons of whoredoms [are] they,
5. For gone a-whoring hath their mother, Acted shamefully hath their conceiver, For she hath said, I go after my lovers, Those giving my bread and my water, My wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.
6. Therefore, lo, I am hedging up thy way with thorns, And I have made for her a wall, And her paths she doth not find.
7. And she hath pursued her lovers, And she doth not overtake them, And hath sought them, and doth not find, And she hath said: I go, and I turn back unto My first husband, For--better to me then than now.
8. And she knew not that I had given to her, The corn, and the new wine, and the oil. Yea, silver I did multiply to her, And the gold they prepared for Baal.
9. Therefore do I turn back, And I have taken My corn in its season, And My new wine in its appointed time, And I have taken away My wool and My flax, covering her nakedness.
10. And now do I reveal her dishonour before the eyes of her lovers, And none doth deliver her out of My hand.
11. And I have caused to cease all her joy, Her festival, her new moon, and her sabbath, Even all her appointed times,
12. And made desolate her vine and her fig-tree, Of which she said, A gift they [are] to me, That my lovers have given to me, And I have made them for a forest, And consumed them hath a beast of the field.