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!