14. Their cows and goats gave plenty of milk;they had the best sheep, goats, and cattle,the finest wheat, and the choicest wine.
15. “The Lord's people grew rich, but rebellious;they were fat and stuffed with food.They abandoned God their Creatorand rejected their mighty saviour.
16. Their idolatry made the Lord jealous;the evil they did made him angry.
17. They sacrificed to gods that are not real,new gods their ancestors had never known,gods that Israel had never obeyed,
18. They forgot their God, their mighty saviour,the one who had given them life.
19. “When the Lord saw this, he was angryand rejected his sons and daughters.
20. ‘I will no longer help them,’ he said;‘then I will see what happens to them,those stubborn, unfaithful people.
21. With their idols they have made me angry,jealous with their so-called gods,gods that are really not gods.So I will use a so-called nation to make them angry;I will make them jealous with a nation of fools.
22. My anger will flame up like fireand burn everything on earth.It will reach to the world belowand consume the roots of the mountains.
23. “ ‘I will bring on them endless disastersand use all my arrows against them.
24. They will die from hunger and fever;they will die from terrible diseases.I will send wild animals to attack them,and poisonous snakes to bite them.
25. War will bring death in the streets;terrors will strike in the homes.Young men and young women will die;neither babies nor old people will be spared.
26. I would have destroyed them completely,so that no one would remember them.
27. But I could not let their enemies boastthat they had defeated my people,when it was I myself who had crushed them.’
28. “Israel is a nation without sense;they have no wisdom at all.
29. They fail to see why they were defeated;they cannot understand what happened.
30. Why were a thousand defeated by one,and 10,000 by only two?The Lord, their God, had abandoned them;their mighty God had given them up.
31. Their enemies know that their own gods are weak,not mighty like Israel's God.
32. Their enemies, corrupt as Sodom and Gomorrah,are like vines that bear bitter and poisonous grapes,
33. like wine made from the venom of snakes.