So I will pull your skirt up over your face and expose you to shame like a disgraced adulteress!

Their children are always thinking about their altars and their sacred poles dedicated to the goddess Asherah, set up beside the green trees on the high hills

The human mind is more deceitful than anything else. It is incurably bad. Who can understand it?

You will never come back to this land to which you will long to return!”

My message is like a fire that purges dross! It is like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces! I, the Lord, so affirm it!

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

They set up their disgusting idols in the temple which I have claimed for my own and defiled it.

We have lived in tents. We have obeyed our ancestor Jonadab and done exactly as he commanded us.

Baruch answered, “Yes, they came from his own mouth. He dictated all these words to me and I wrote them down in ink on this scroll.”

Then the officials said to Baruch, “You and Jeremiah must go and hide. You must not let anyone know where you are.”

So Jeremiah was put in prison in a cell in the dungeon in Jonathan’s house. He was kept there for a long time.

“Find Jeremiah and look out for him. Do not do anything to harm him, but do with him whatever he tells you.”

Then Jeremiah replied to all the people, both men and women, who responded to him in this way.

But even the swiftest cannot get away. Even the strongest cannot escape. There in the north by the Euphrates River they stumble and fall in defeat.

For the Lord says, “Look! Like an eagle with outspread wings a nation will swoop down on Moab.

ג (Gimel) He has walled me in so that I cannot get out; he has weighted me down with heavy prison chains.

“My portion is the Lord,” I have said to myself, so I will put my hope in him.

We must pay money for our own water; we must buy our own wood at a steep price.

We have submitted to Egypt and Assyria in order to buy food to eat.

The crown has fallen from our head; woe to us, for we have sinned!