Hosea

¹ Don't party away your life with the heathen. You walk away from your God at the drop of a hat and like a whore sell yourself promiscuously at every sex-and-religion party on the street.

² You'll end up hungrier than ever.

³ Some of you are going to end up bankrupt in Egypt. Some of you will be disillusioned in Assyria.

⁴ you won't have much chance to worship God— Sentenced to rations of bread and water, and your souls polluted by the spirit-dirty air. You'll be starved for God, exiled from God's own country.

⁵ Will you miss festival worship of God?

⁶ you'll fall into the fire of Egypt. Egypt will give you a fine funeral! What use will all your god-inspired silver be then as you eke out a living in a field of weeds?

⁷ It's payday! Did Israel bluster, "The prophet is crazy! The 'man of the Spirit' is nuts!"? Think again. Because of your great guilt, you're in big trouble.

⁸ working under God's orders. But everyone is trying to trip him up. He's hated right in God's house, of all places.

⁹ rivaling that ancient and unspeakable crime at Gibeah. God's keeping track of their guilt. He'll make them pay for their sins.

¹⁰ it was like finding grapes out in the desert. When I found your ancestors, it was like finding a fig tree bearing fruit for the first time. But when they arrived at Baal-peor, that pagan shrine, they took to sin like a pig to filth, wallowing in the mud with their newfound friends.

¹¹ their beauty dissipated in confusion and clamor, Frenetic and noisy, frigid and barren, and nothing to show for it—neither conception nor childbirth.

¹² unfit parents and take away their children! Yes indeed—a black day for them when I turn my back and walk off!

¹³ He might just as well take them and kill them outright!"

¹⁴ Give them a dried-up womb and shriveled breasts.

¹⁵ at the pagan shrine at Gilgal. Oh, how I hated them there! Because of their evil practices, I'll kick them off my land. I'm wasting no more love on them. Their leaders are a bunch of rebellious adolescents.

¹⁶ roots withered, no more fruit. Even if by some miracle they had children, the dear babies wouldn't live—I'd make sure of that!"

¹⁷ They wouldn't listen. They're doomed to be wanderers, vagabonds among the godless nations.