1 Do not rejoice, Israel,do not exult like the nations!For you have prostituted yourself, abandoning your God,loving a prostitute’s feeupon every threshing floor.
2 Threshing floor and wine press will not nourish them,the new wine will fail them.
3 They will not dwell in the Lord’s land;Ephraim will return to Egypt,and in Assyria they will eat unclean food.
4 They will not pour libations of wine to the Lord,and their sacrifices will not please him.Their bread will be like mourners’ bread, that makes unclean all who eat of it;Their food will be for their own appetites;it cannot enter the house of the Lord.
5 What will you do on the festival day,the day of the Lord’s feast?
6 When they flee from the devastation,Egypt will gather them, Memphis will bury them.Weeds will overgrow their silver treasures,and thorns, their tents.
7 They have come, the days of punishment!they have come, the days of recompense!Let Israel know it!“The prophet is a fool,the man of the spirit is mad!”Because your iniquity is great,great, too, is your hostility.
8 The watchman of Ephraim, the people of my God, is the prophet;yet a fowler’s snare is on all his ways,hostility in the house of his God.
9 They have sunk to the depths of corruption,as in the days of Gibeah; God will remember their iniquityand punish their sins.
10 Like grapes in the desert,I found Israel;Like the first fruits of the fig tree, its first to ripen,I looked on your ancestors.But when they came to Baal-peor and consecrated themselves to the Shameful One,they became as abhorrent as the thing they loved.
11 Ephraim is like a bird:their glory flies away—no birth, no pregnancy, no conception.
12 Even though they bring up their children,I will make them childless, until no one is left.Indeed, woe to themwhen I turn away from them!
13 Ephraim, as I saw, was a treeplanted in a meadow;But now Ephraim will bring outhis children to the slaughterer!
14 Give them, Lord!give them what?Give them a miscarrying womb,and dry breasts!
15 All their misfortune began in Gilgal;yes, there I rejected them.Because of their wicked deedsI will drive them out of my house.I will love them no longer;all their princes are rebels.
16 Ephraim is stricken,their root is dried up;they will bear no fruit.Were they to bear children,I would slay the beloved of their womb.
17 My God will disown thembecause they have not listened to him;they will be wanderers among the nations.