Hosea 2:1-23
2 * 2:3 Call your brothers ʽAmmi and your sisters Ruhamah.
2 2:4 Upbraid your mother, upbraid her—because she is not my wife nor I her husband—that she remove her unchastity from her face and her adultery from between her breasts,
3 2:5 for fear I should strip her naked and set her as on the day of her birth and make her like a wilderness and render her like a dried-out country and kill her with thirst,
4 2:6 and have no tenderness for her children, because they are illegitimate children;
5 2:7 because their mother was unchaste, she whose body bred them acted shamelessly, because she thought “Let me follow my lovers that give me my bread and water, my wool and flax, my oil and drink.”
6 2:8 So I am pleaching up her road with briers and mending her fence, and she shall not find her paths;
7 2:9 and she shall pursue her lovers and not overtake them, and look for them and not find them, and think “I will go off back to my first husband, because I was better off then than now”;
8 2:10 and she had not known that it was I who gave her the grain and the grape-juice and the oil, and let her have much silver, and gold which they worked up for the Baal.
9 2:11 So I will reverse it and take back my grain at its season and my grape-juice at its date, and snatch away my wool and flax to cover her nakedness;
10 2:12 I will now uncover her indecency in sight of her lovers, and nobody shall rescue her out of my hands.
11 2:13 And I will stop all her delights, her feasts, her new moons, and her sabbaths, and all her dates,
12 2:14 and lay waste her vines and fig-trees of which she thought “They are a tip that my lovers have given me,” and make them into a scrubwood that the wild beasts will eat,
13 * 2:15 and I will punish her for the days of the Baals to whom she made burnings and bejeweled herself with her nose-ring and pendant and went after her lovers and forgot me, quoth Jehovah.
14 2:16 So I am going to inveigle her and get her into the wilderness and talk of love to her,
15 2:17 and give her her vineyards from there, and Trouble Vale for a door of hope; and she shall answer there as in her days of girlhood and as on the day of her coming up out of Egypt.
16 2:18 And on that day, quoth Jehovah, you shall call me “my ish” (husband) and no longer “my baal” (liege),
17 2:19 and I will take the names of the Baals out of your mouth and they shall no longer be named.
18 2:20 And I will make a treaty with the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the reptiles and insects of the ground for them on that day, and will break bow and sword and battle out of the country and have them lie down in security,
19 2:21 and will betroth you to myself forever, betroth you by honesty and justice and friendliness and tenderness,
20 2:22 betroth you by loyalty, and you shall know Jehovah.
21 2:23 And on that day I will answer, quoth Jehovah, I will answer the sky and it shall answer the earth
22 * 2:24 and the earth shall answer the grain and the grape-juice and the oil and they shall answer Jezreʽel;
23 ** 2:25 and I will seed her in the country for myself, and be tender to Her-For-Whom-There-Was-No-Tenderness, and say to Not-My-People “You are my people,“ and he shall say “My God.”
Footnotes
^ 2:3 Var. your brother ʽAmmi and your sister
^ 2:15 (pendant) Unc.
^ 2:24 Jezreʽel means Deity-Sows
^ 2:25 Conj.* seed him
^ 2:25 Heb. be tender to Lo-Ruhamah and say to Lo-ʽAmmi
