Hosea 2

¹“Say of your brothers, ‘My people,’ and of your sisters, ‘My loved one.’

²Rebuke your mother, rebuke her, for she is not My wife, and I am not her husband. Let her remove the adultery from her face and the unfaithfulness from between her breasts.

³Otherwise, I will strip her naked and expose her like the day of her birth. I will make her like a desert and turn her into a parched land, and I will let her die of thirst.

⁴I will have no compassion on her children, because they are the children of adultery.

⁵For their mother has played the harlot and has conceived them in disgrace. For she thought, ‘I will go after my lovers, who give me bread and water, wool and linen, oil and drink.’

⁶Therefore, behold, I will hedge up her path with thorns; I will enclose her with a wall, so she cannot find her way.

⁷She will pursue her lovers but not catch them; she will seek them but not find them. Then she will say, ‘I will return to my first husband, for then I was better off than now.’

⁸For she does not acknowledge that it was I who gave her grain, new wine, and oil, who lavished on her silver and gold—which they crafted for Baal.

⁹Therefore I will take back My grain in its time and My new wine in its season; I will take away My wool and linen, which were given to cover her nakedness.

¹⁰And then I will expose her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and no one will deliver her out of My hands.

¹¹I will put an end to all her exultation: her feasts, New Moons, and Sabbaths—all her appointed feasts.