6. When they flee from the devastation,Egypt will gather them, Memphis will bury them.Weeds will overgrow their silver treasures,and thorns, their tents.
7. They have come, the days of punishment!they have come, the days of recompense!Let Israel know it!“The prophet is a fool,the man of the spirit is mad!”Because your iniquity is great,great, too, is your hostility.
8. The watchman of Ephraim, the people of my God, is the prophet;yet a fowler’s snare is on all his ways,hostility in the house of his God.
9. They have sunk to the depths of corruption,as in the days of Gibeah; God will remember their iniquityand punish their sins.
10. Like grapes in the desert,I found Israel;Like the first fruits of the fig tree, its first to ripen,I looked on your ancestors.But when they came to Baal-peor and consecrated themselves to the Shameful One,they became as abhorrent as the thing they loved.
11. Ephraim is like a bird:their glory flies away—no birth, no pregnancy, no conception.
12. Even though they bring up their children,I will make them childless, until no one is left.Indeed, woe to themwhen I turn away from them!
13. Ephraim, as I saw, was a treeplanted in a meadow;But now Ephraim will bring outhis children to the slaughterer!
14. Give them, Lord!give them what?Give them a miscarrying womb,and dry breasts!
15. All their misfortune began in Gilgal;yes, there I rejected them.Because of their wicked deedsI will drive them out of my house.I will love them no longer;all their princes are rebels.