But if you return to me and keep my commandments and do them, even though all of your outcasts are at the furthest parts of heaven, I will gather them and bring them to the place which I have chosen to make my name dwell.'

Then he said before his brothers and the army of Samaria, "What are the feeble Jews doing? Will they restore [these things] for themselves? Will they sacrifice? Will they finish it in a day? Will they revive the stones from the piles of rubble--even those burned up?"

So neither I nor my brothers nor my young men nor the men of the guard who were behind me took off our clothes. Each one [kept] his weapon [even] in the water.

Even when they made for themselves a molten idol of a calf and said, 'This is your God who brought you out from Egypt,' and committed great blasphemies.

Did not King Solomon of Israel sin in this way? And among the many nations there was no king like him, and he was beloved by his God, and God made him king over all Israel. Yet the foreign women made even him sin.