Hosea 9

Days of Punishment Have Come

¹Do not be glad, O Israel, with rejoicing like the peoples![#9:1 Lit to]

For you have played the harlot, forsaking your God.

You have loved harlots’ earnings on every threshing floor.

²Threshing floor and wine press will not feed them,

And the new wine will deceive them.

³They will not remain in the land of Yahweh,

But Ephraim will return to Egypt,

And in Assyria they will eat unclean food .

⁴They will not pour out drink offerings of wine to Yahweh;

Their sacrifices will not please Him.

Their bread will be like mourners’ bread;

All who eat of it will be defiled,

For their bread will be for themselves alone ;

It will not enter the house of Yahweh.

⁵What will you do on the day of the appointed festival

And on the day of the feast of Yahweh?

⁶For behold, they will go because of destruction;

Egypt will gather them up; Memphis will bury them.

Weeds will possess their desirable items of silver;

Thorns will be in their tents.

⁷¶The days of punishment have come;

The days of recompense have come;

Let Israel know this !

The prophet is an ignorant fool,

The inspired man has madness,

Because of the abundance of your iniquity

And because your hostility has abounded.

⁸Ephraim was a watchman with my God, a prophet;

Yet the snare of a bird catcher is in all his ways,

And there is only hostility in the house of his God.

⁹They have dug deep in corruption[#9:9 Lit they have corrupted]

As in the days of Gibeah;

He will remember their iniquity;

He will punish their sins.

Grapes in the Wilderness

¹⁰¶I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness;

I saw your fathers as the earliest fruit on the fig tree in its first season .

But they came to Baal-peor and devoted themselves to shame,

And they became as detestable as that which they loved.

¹¹As for Ephraim, their glory will fly away like a bird—

No birth, no pregnancy, and no conception!

¹²Though they bring up their children,

Yet I will bereave them until not a man is left.

Surely, woe to them indeed when I depart from them!

¹³Ephraim, as I have seen,

Is planted in a pasture like Tyre;

But Ephraim will bring out his children for killing.

¹⁴Give them, O Yahweh—what will You give?

Give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts.

¹⁵¶All their evil is at Gilgal;

Indeed, I came to hate them there!

Because of the evil of their deeds

I will drive them out of My house!

I will love them no more;

All their princes are rebels.

¹⁶Ephraim is stricken; their root is dried up;

They will bear no fruit.

Even though they bear children,

I will put to death the desirable ones of their womb.

¹⁷My God will despise them

Because they have not listened to Him;

And they will be those who flee among the nations.