3 From afar Yahweh appeared to me, saying, “I have loved you with an everlasting love. Therefore I have drawn you with loyal love.
4 I will again build you, and you will be built, O virgin Israel. You will again adorn yourself with your tambourines, and you will go forth in the dancing in a ring of the merrymakers.
5 You will again plant vineyards on the mountains of Samaria. The planters will plant, and they will enjoy it.
6 For there will be a day when watchmen will call in the hill country of Ephraim, ‘Stand up, and let us go up to Zion, to Yahweh our God.’ ”
7 For thus says Yahweh, “Sing for joy for Jacob with gladness, and shout out for the head of the nations. Proclaim, praise, and say, ‘Save, O Yahweh, your people, the remnant of Israel.’
8 Look, I am going to bring them from the land of the north, and I will gather them from the remotest part of the earth. Among them the blind, and the lame, those who are pregnant, and those who give birth, together, a great assembly, they will return here.
9 With weeping they will come, and with pleas for mercy I will bring them; I will let them walk by streams of water in a straight path. They will not stumble in it, for I have become to Israel a father, and Ephraim, he is my firstborn.”