As a mother consoles a child, so I will console you, and you will be consoled over Jerusalem.”

“So, once more I will state my case against you,” says the Lord. “I will also state it against your children and grandchildren.

“My, how good you have become at chasing after your lovers! Why, you could even teach prostitutes a thing or two!

But, you have been unfaithful to me, nation of Israel, like an unfaithful wife who has left her husband,” says the Lord.

The people I call my own have turned on me like a lion in the forest. They have roared defiantly at me. So I will treat them as though I hate them.

I, the Lord, say: ‘That is how I will deal with this city and its citizens. I will make it like Topheth.

So I, the Lord, affirm that I am opposed to those prophets who steal messages from one another that they claim are from me.

“Therefore, the Lord who rules over all says, ‘You have not listened to what I said.

In a far-off land the Lord will manifest himself to them. He will say to them, ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love. That is why I have continued to be faithful to you.

Yet in days to come I will reverse Ammon’s ill fortune.” says the Lord.

So her young men will fall in her city squares. All her soldiers will be destroyed at that time,” says the Lord.

Say, ‘I am an object lesson for you. Just as I have done, it will be done to them; they will go into exile and captivity.’

Therefore I handed her over to her lovers, the Assyrians for whom she lusted.

“‘Therefore this is what the sovereign Lord says: Woe to the city of bloodshed! I will also make the pile high.

“‘Therefore this is what the sovereign Lord says: Because you think you are godlike,

This is what you must do on the seventh day of the month for anyone who sins inadvertently or through ignorance; so you will make atonement for the temple.

However, in the future I will allure her; I will lead her back into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her.

Therefore, I will certainly cut you into pieces at the hands of the prophets; I will certainly kill you in fulfillment of my oracles of judgment; for my judgment will come forth like the light of the dawn.

But the more I summoned them, the farther they departed from me. They sacrificed to the Baal idols and burned incense to images.

Therefore they will disappear like the morning mist, like early morning dew that evaporates, like chaff that is blown away from a threshing floor, like smoke that disappears through an open window.