Study Desk

For when you offer your gifts and make your sons pass through the fire, you defile yourselves with all your idols, even to this day. So shall I be inquired of by you, O house of Israel? As I live," says the Lord GOD, "I will not be inquired of by you.

"As for you, O house of Israel," thus says the Lord GOD: "Go, serve every one of you his idols--and hereafter--if you will not obey Me; but profane My holy name no more with your gifts and your idols.

For on My holy mountain, on the mountain height of Israel," says the Lord GOD, "there all the house of Israel, all of them in the land, shall serve Me; there I will accept them, and there I will require your offerings and the firstfruits of your sacrifices, together with all your holy things.

Then you shall know that I am the LORD, when I bring you into the land of Israel, into the country for which I raised My hand in an oath to give to your fathers.

Then you shall know that I am the LORD, when I have dealt with you for My name's sake, not according to your wicked ways nor according to your corrupt doings, O house of Israel," says the Lord GOD."'

"Cry and wail, son of man; For it will be against My people, Against all the princes of Israel. Terrors including the sword will be against My people; Therefore strike your thigh.

I have set the point of the sword against all their gates, That the heart may melt and many may stumble. Ah! It is made bright; It is grasped for slaughter:

"And son of man, appoint for yourself two ways for the sword of the king of Babylon to go; both of them shall go from the same land. Make a sign; put it at the head of the road to the city.

Appoint a road for the sword to go to Rabbah of the Ammonites, and to Judah, into fortified Jerusalem.

For the king of Babylon stands at the parting of the road, at the fork of the two roads, to use divination: he shakes the arrows, he consults the images, he looks at the liver.

In his right hand is the divination for Jerusalem: to set up battering rams, to call for a slaughter, to lift the voice with shouting, to set battering rams against the gates, to heap up a siege mound, and to build a wall.

"And you, son of man, prophesy and say, "Thus says the Lord GOD concerning the Ammonites and concerning their reproach,' and say: "A sword, a sword is drawn, Polished for slaughter, For consuming, for flashing--

While they see false visions for you, While they divine a lie to you, To bring you on the necks of the wicked, the slain Whose day has come, Whose iniquity shall end.

You shall be fuel for the fire; Your blood shall be in the midst of the land. You shall not be remembered, For I the LORD have spoken."'

Her prophets plastered them with untempered mortar, seeing false visions, and divining lies for them, saying, "Thus says the Lord GOD,' when the LORD had not spoken.

So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall, and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found no one.

Their names: Oholah [fn] the elder and Oholibah [fn] her sister;They were Mine,And they bore sons and daughters.As for their names,Samaria is Oholah, and Jerusalem is Oholibah.

"Oholah played the harlot even though she was Mine; And she lusted for her lovers, the neighboring Assyrians,

Thus she committed her harlotry with them, All of them choice men of Assyria; And with all for whom she lusted, With all their idols, she defiled herself.

She has never given up her harlotry brought from Egypt, For in her youth they had lain with her, Pressed her virgin bosom, And poured out their immorality upon her.