This is what the Lord says: "Because Judah has committed three covenant transgressions -- make that four! -- I will not revoke my decree of judgment. They rejected the Lord's law; they did not obey his commands. Their false gods, to which their fathers were loyal, led them astray.

I brought you up from the land of Egypt; I led you through the wilderness for forty years so you could take the Amorites' land as your own.

Listen, you Israelites, to this message which the Lord is proclaiming against you! This message is for the entire clan I brought up from the land of Egypt:

Does a bird swoop down into a trap on the ground if there is no bait? Does a trap spring up from the ground unless it has surely caught something?

"They do not know how to do what is right." (The Lord is speaking.) "They store up the spoils of destructive violence in their fortresses.

"I withheld rain from you three months before the harvest. I gave rain to one city, but not to another. One field would get rain, but the field that received no rain dried up.

"I sent against you a plague like one of the Egyptian plagues. I killed your young men with the sword, along with the horses you had captured. I made the stench from the corpses rise up into your nostrils. Still you did not come back to me." The Lord is speaking!

"The virgin Israel has fallen down and will not get up again. She is abandoned on her own land with no one to help her get up."

Justice must flow like torrents of water, righteous actions like a stream that never dries up.

You will pick up your images of Sikkuth, your king, and Kiyyun, your star god, which you made for yourselves,

When their close relatives, the ones who will burn the corpses, pick up their bodies to remove the bones from the house, they will say to anyone who is in the inner rooms of the house, "Is anyone else with you?" He will respond, "Be quiet! Don't invoke the Lord's name!"

You say, "When will the new moon festival be over, so we can sell grain? When will the Sabbath end, so we can open up the grain bins? We're eager to sell less for a higher price, and to cheat the buyer with rigged scales!

These are the ones who now take oaths in the name of the sinful idol goddess of Samaria. They vow, 'As surely as your god lives, O Dan,' or 'As surely as your beloved one lives, O Beer Sheba!' But they will fall down and not get up again."

Even if they could dig down into the netherworld, my hand would pull them up from there. Even if they could climb up to heaven, I would drag them down from there.

"You Israelites are just like the Ethiopians in my sight," says the Lord. "Certainly I brought Israel up from the land of Egypt, but I also brought the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir.

"Be sure of this, the time is coming," says the Lord, "when the plowman will catch up to the reaper and the one who stomps the grapes will overtake the planter. Juice will run down the slopes, it will flow down all the hillsides.