¶“The LORD saw it, and rejected them,
Out of indignation with His sons and His daughters.
“Then He said, ‘I will hide My face from them,
I will see what their end shall be;
For they are a perverse generation,
Sons in whom there is no faithfulness.
‘They have made Me jealous with what is not God;
They have provoked Me to anger with their idols.
So I will make them jealous with those who are not a people;
I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation.
‘For a fire is kindled by My anger,
And it burns to the depths of Sheol (the place of the dead, the nether world),
It devours the earth with its yield,
And sets on fire the foundations of the mountains.
¶‘I will heap misfortunes on them;
I will use My arrows on them.
‘They will be wasted by hunger, and consumed by plague
And a bitter destruction;
And I will send the teeth of beasts against them,
With the venom of crawling things of the dust.
‘Outside the sword will bereave,
And inside [the chambers] terror—
For both young man and virgin,
For the nursing child and the man of gray hair.
‘I would have said, “I will cut them to pieces [scattering them far away],
I will remove the memory of them from men,”
Had I not feared the provocation of the enemy,
That their adversaries would misjudge,
That they would say, “Our [own] hand has prevailed,
And the LORD has not done all this.” ’
¶“For they are a nation devoid of counsel,
And there is no understanding in them.
“O that they were wise, that they understood this,
That they could discern their future and ultimate fate!
“How could one chase a thousand,
And two put ten thousand to flight,
Unless their Rock had sold them,
And the LORD had given them up?
“For their rock is not like our Rock,
Even our enemies themselves judge this.
“For their vine is from the vine of Sodom,
And from the fields of Gomorrah;
Their grapes are grapes of poison,
Their clusters, bitter.
“Their wine is the venom of serpents,
And the deadly poison of vipers.
¶‘Is it not laid up in store with Me,
Sealed up in My treasuries?
‘Vengeance is Mine, and retribution,
In due time their foot will slip;
For the day of their disaster is at hand,
And their doom hurries to meet them.’
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