CHAPTER 16
1And the word of the LORD came to me saying: 2“You shall not take you a wife nor shall you have sons and daughters in this place. 3For thus said the LORD concerning the sons and concerning the daughters born in this place and concerning their mothers who bore them and concerning their fathers who begat them in this land. 4Deaths by illness shall they die. They shall not be lamented and shall not be buried. Manure on the face of the soil they shall become, and by the sword and by famine they shall come to an end, and their carcasses shall be food for the fowl of the heavens and the beasts of the earth. 5For thus said the LORD: Do not go to the house of a wake and do not go to lament and do not console them, for I have taken away My well-being from this people, said the LORD, the kindness and the mercy. 6And great and small shall die in this land. They shall not be buried and shall not be lamented, nor shall one gash himself or shave his head for them. 7They shall not break bread for them in mourning to console him for the dead, and they shall not give him the cup of consolation for his father or for his mother. 8Nor to the house of feasting shall you come to sit with them to eat and to drink. 9For thus said the LORD of Armies, God of Israel: I am about to stifle from this place before your eyes and in your days the sound of gladness and the sound of joy, the sound of the bridegroom and the sound of the bride. 10And it shall be when you tell this people all these things and they say to you, ‘For what did the LORD speak about us all this great evil, and what is our crime and what is our offense that we have offended against the LORD our God?’ 11You shall say to them, ‘Because your fathers forsook Me, said the LORD, and went after other gods and served them and bowed down to them, and Me did they forsake and My teaching they did not keep. 12As for you, you did more evil than your fathers, and here you are going each after the stubbornness of his evil heart so as not to heed me.’ 13And I will cast you from this land to a land you do not know, neither you nor your fathers, and you shall serve there other gods day and night, as I will show you no mercy. 14Therefore, look, days are coming, said the LORD, when it shall no longer be said, ‘As the LORD lives, Who brought up the Israelites from the land of Egypt.’ 15But rather, ‘As the LORD lives, Who brought up the Israelites from the land of the north and from all the lands into which He drove them,’ and I will bring them back to their country that I gave to their fathers. 16I am about to send many fishermen, said the LORD, and they shall fish them, and afterward I will send many hunters and they shall hunt them down from every mountain and from every hill and from the crevices in the rocks.
17For My eyes are on all their ways. They are not hidden from Me, and their crime is not concealed from My eyes. 18And I will first pay back double for their crime and their offense, for their profaning My land with the carcasses of their vile things. And their abominations have filled My estate.”
19The LORD is my strength and my stronghold,
and my refuge on a day of distress.
To You the nations shall come
from the ends of the earth and shall say:
But to lies our fathers were heir,
mere breath that cannot avail.
20Can a human make him a god,
when these are not gods?
21Therefore, I am about to show them,
this time will I show them,
My hand and my power,
and they shall know that My name is the LORD.