⁸A message came to me from the Lord. King Zedekiah had made a covenant with all of the people in Jerusalem. He had told them to set their Hebrew slaves free. ⁹All of them had to do it. That applied to male and female slaves alike. No one was allowed to hold another Jew as a slave.

¹⁰So all of the officials and people entered into that covenant. They agreed to set their male and female slaves free. They agreed not to hold them as slaves anymore. Instead, they set them free. ¹¹But later they changed their minds. They took back the people they had set free. They made them slaves again.

¹²Then a message came to me from the Lord. ¹³The Lord is the God of Israel. He says, “I made a covenant with your people long ago. I brought them out of Egypt. That is the land where they were slaves. I said, ¹⁴‘Every seventh year you must set your people free. You must set free all of the Hebrews who have sold themselves to you. Let them serve you for six years. Then you must let them go free.’ But your people did not listen to me. They did not pay any attention to me.

¹⁵“Recently you turned away from your sins. You did what is right in my eyes. Each of you set your Hebrew slaves free. You even made a covenant in front of me. You did it in the house where I have put my Name. ¹⁶But now you have turned around. You have treated my name as if it were not holy. Each of you has taken back your male and female slaves. You had set them free to go where they wished. But now you have forced them to become your slaves again.”

Read in Logos