Hosea 2:1–13

¹‘Say ye to your brethren—Ammi, And to your sisters—Ruhamah. ²Plead 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, ³Lest 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. ⁴And her sons I do not pity, For sons of whoredoms are they, ⁵For 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.

⁶Therefore, lo, I am hedging up thy way with thorns, And I have made for her a wall, And her paths she doth not find. ⁷And 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. ⁸And 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. ⁹Therefore 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. ¹⁰And now do I reveal her dishonour before the eyes of her lovers, And none doth deliver her out of My hand. ¹¹And I have caused to cease all her joy, Her festival, her new moon, and her sabbath, Even all her appointed times, ¹²And 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. ¹³And I have charged on her the days of the Baalim, To whom she maketh perfume, And putteth on her ring and her ornament, And goeth after her lovers, And Me forgat—an affirmation of Jehovah.