Hosea - The Old Testament

¹ Hear this, you priests, listen, House of Israel, pay attention, royal House, for it is you who have justice in your care, but you have been a snare at Mizpah and a net outspread on Tabor.

² They have dug the ditch deep at Shittim and so I am going to punish them all.

³ Ephraim have I known, Israel is not hidden from me; and yet, Ephraim, you have played the whore, Israel is befouled.

⁴ Their deeds do not allow them to return to their God, since an urge to play the whore possesses them and they no longer know Yahweh.

⁵ Israel's arrogance is his accuser, the guilt of Israel and Ephraim is their undoing, Judah too will be undone with them.

⁶ Though they go in search of Yahweh with their sheep and cattle, they will not find him; he has withdrawn from them.

⁷ They have betrayed Yahweh because they have fathered bastards; now the new moon will devour them and their fields.

⁸ Sound the horn in Gibeah, the trumpet in Ramah, raise the war cry in Beth-Aven, 'We are behind you, Benjamin!'

⁹ When the day of punishment comes, Ephraim will be a wasteland; on the tribes of Israel I have pronounced certain doom.

¹⁰ The rulers of Judah act like men who move the boundary stone; I shall pour my wrath out on them like a flood.

¹¹ Ephraim is oppressed, crushed by the sentence, for having deliberately followed a Lie.

¹² Because of this, I shall be like ringworm for Ephraim and like gangrene for the House of Judah.

¹³ Once Ephraim realised that he was sick and Judah that he had an ulcer, Ephraim then went to Assyria, he sent messengers to the Great King; but he has no power to cure you or to heal you of your sore;

¹⁴ for I shall be like a lion to Ephraim, like a young lion to the House of Judah; I myself shall rend them, then go my way, shall carry them off, beyond hope of rescue.

¹⁵ I shall go back to my place until they confess their guilt and seek me, seek me eagerly in their distress.