Covenant Violations (Prophetic Indictments)

1And God spoke all these words: 2"I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. 3You shall have no other gods before Me. 4You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in the heavens above, on the earth below, or in the waters beneath. 5You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on their children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, 6but showing loving devotion to a thousand generations of those who love Me and keep My commandments. 7You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not leave anyone unpunished who takes His name in vain. 8Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God, on which you must not do any work—neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant or livestock, nor the foreigner within your gates. 11For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them, but on the seventh day He rested. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and set it apart as holy. 12Honor your father and mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you. 13You shall not murder. 14You shall not commit adultery. 15You shall not steal. 16You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. 17You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, or his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor."

26‘Cursed is he who does not put the words of this law into practice.’ And let all the people say, ‘Amen!’

15If, however, you do not obey the LORD your God by carefully following all His commandments and statutes I am giving you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you: 16You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country. 17Your basket and kneading bowl will be cursed. 18The fruit of your womb will be cursed, as well as the produce of your land, the calves of your herds, and the lambs of your flocks. 19You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out. 20The LORD will send curses upon you, confusion and reproof in all to which you put your hand, until you are destroyed and quickly perish because of the wickedness you have committed in forsaking Him. 21The LORD will make the plague cling to you until He has exterminated you from the land that you are entering to possess. 22The LORD will strike you with wasting disease, with fever and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, and with blight and mildew; these will pursue you until you perish. 23The sky over your head will be bronze, and the earth beneath you iron. 24The LORD will turn the rain of your land into dust and powder; it will descend on you from the sky until you are destroyed. 25The LORD will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will march out against them in one direction but flee from them in seven. You will be an object of horror to all the kingdoms of the earth. 26Your corpses will be food for all the birds of the air and beasts of the earth, with no one to scare them away. 27The LORD will afflict you with the boils of Egypt, with tumors and scabs and itch from which you cannot be cured. 28The LORD will afflict you with madness, blindness, and confusion of mind, 29and at noon you will grope about like a blind man in the darkness. You will not prosper in your ways. Day after day you will be oppressed and plundered, with no one to save you. 30You will be pledged in marriage to a woman, but another man will violate her. You will build a house but will not live in it. You will plant a vineyard but will not enjoy its fruit. 31Your ox will be slaughtered before your eyes, but you will not eat any of it. Your donkey will be taken away and not returned to you. Your flock will be given to your enemies, and no one will save you. 32Your sons and daughters will be given to another nation, while your eyes grow weary looking for them day after day, with no power in your hand. 33A people you do not know will eat the produce of your land and of all your toil. All your days you will be oppressed and crushed. 34You will be driven mad by the sights you see. 35The LORD will afflict you with painful, incurable boils on your knees and thighs, from the soles of your feet to the top of your head. 36The LORD will bring you and the king you appoint to a nation neither you nor your fathers have known, and there you will worship other gods—gods of wood and stone. 37You will become an object of horror, scorn, and ridicule among all the nations to which the LORD will drive you. 38You will sow much seed in the field but harvest little, because the locusts will consume it. 39You will plant and cultivate vineyards, but will neither drink the wine nor gather the grapes, because worms will eat them. 40You will have olive trees throughout your territory but will never anoint yourself with oil, because the olives will drop off. 41You will father sons and daughters, but they will not remain yours, because they will go into captivity. 42Swarms of locusts will consume all your trees and the produce of your land. 43The foreigner living among you will rise higher and higher above you, while you sink down lower and lower. 44He will lend to you, but you will not lend to him. He will be the head, and you will be the tail. 45All these curses will come upon you. They will pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed, since you did not obey the LORD your God and keep the commandments and statutes He gave you. 46These curses will be a sign and a wonder upon you and your descendants forever. 47Because you did not serve the LORD your God with joy and gladness of heart in all your abundance, 48you will serve your enemies the LORD will send against you in famine, thirst, nakedness, and destitution. He will place an iron yoke on your neck until He has destroyed you. 49The LORD will bring a nation from afar, from the ends of the earth, to swoop down upon you like an eagle—a nation whose language you will not understand, 50a ruthless nation with no respect for the old and no pity for the young. 51They will eat the offspring of your livestock and the produce of your land until you are destroyed. They will leave you no grain or new wine or oil, no calves of your herds or lambs of your flocks, until they have caused you to perish. 52They will besiege all the cities throughout your land, until the high and fortified walls in which you trust have fallen. They will besiege all your cities throughout the land that the LORD your God has given you. 53Then you will eat the fruit of your womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters whom the LORD your God has given you, in the siege and distress that your enemy will inflict on you. 54The most gentle and refined man among you will begrudge his brother, the wife he embraces, and the rest of his children who have survived, 55refusing to share with any of them the flesh of his children he will eat because he has nothing left in the siege and distress that your enemy will inflict on you within all your gates. 56The most gentle and refined woman among you, so gentle and refined she would not venture to set the sole of her foot on the ground, will begrudge the husband she embraces and her son and daughter 57the afterbirth that comes from between her legs and the children she bears, because she will secretly eat them for lack of anything else in the siege and distress that your enemy will inflict on you within your gates. 58If you are not careful to observe all the words of this law which are written in this book, that you may fear this glorious and awesome name—the LORD your God— 59He will bring upon you and your descendants extraordinary disasters, severe and lasting plagues, and terrible and chronic sicknesses. 60He will afflict you again with all the diseases you dreaded in Egypt, and they will cling to you. 61The LORD will also bring upon you every sickness and plague not recorded in this Book of the Law, until you are destroyed. 62You who were as numerous as the stars in the sky will be left few in number, because you would not obey the voice of the LORD your God. 63Just as it pleased the LORD to make you prosper and multiply, so also it will please Him to annihilate you and destroy you. And you will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess. 64Then the LORD will scatter you among all the nations, from one end of the earth to the other, and there you will worship other gods, gods of wood and stone, which neither you nor your fathers have known. 65Among those nations you will find no repose, not even a resting place for the sole of your foot. There the LORD will give you a trembling heart, failing eyes, and a despairing soul. 66So your life will hang in doubt before you, and you will be afraid night and day, never certain of survival. 67In the morning you will say, ‘If only it were evening!’ and in the evening you will say, ‘If only it were morning!’—because of the dread in your hearts of the terrifying sights you will see. 68The LORD will return you to Egypt in ships by a route that I said you should never see again. There you will sell yourselves to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no one will buy you.”

1Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak; hear, O earth, the words of my mouth. 2Let my teaching fall like rain and my speech settle like dew, like gentle rain on new grass, like showers on tender plants. 3For I will proclaim the name of the LORD. Ascribe greatness to our God! 4He is the Rock, His work is perfect; all His ways are just. A God of faithfulness without injustice, righteous and upright is He. 5His people have acted corruptly toward Him; the spot on them is not that of His children, but of a perverse and crooked generation. 6Is this how you repay the LORD, O foolish and senseless people? Is He not your Father and Creator? Has He not made you and established you? 7Remember the days of old; consider the years long past. Ask your father, and he will tell you, your elders, and they will inform you. 8When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when He divided the sons of man, He set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. 9But the LORD’s portion is His people, Jacob His allotted inheritance. 10He found him in a desert land, in a barren, howling wilderness; He surrounded him, He instructed him, He guarded him as the apple of His eye. 11As an eagle stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, He spread His wings to catch them and carried them on His pinions. 12The LORD alone led him, and no foreign god was with him. 13He made him ride on the heights of the land and fed him the produce of the field. He nourished him with honey from the rock and oil from the flinty crag, 14with curds from the herd and milk from the flock, with the fat of lambs, with rams from Bashan, and goats, with the choicest grains of wheat. From the juice of the finest grapes you drank the wine. 15But Jeshurun grew fat and kicked—becoming fat, bloated, and gorged. He abandoned the God who made him and scorned the Rock of his salvation. 16They provoked His jealousy with foreign gods; they enraged Him with abominations. 17They sacrificed to demons, not to God, to gods they had not known, to newly arrived gods, which your fathers did not fear. 18You ignored the Rock who brought you forth; you forgot the God who gave you birth. 19When the LORD saw this, He rejected them, provoked to anger by His sons and daughters. 20He said: “I will hide My face from them; I will see what will be their end. For they are a perverse generation—children of unfaithfulness. 21They have provoked My jealousy by that which is not God; they have enraged Me with their worthless idols. So I will make them jealous by those who are not a people; I will make them angry by a nation without understanding. 22For a fire has been kindled by My anger, and it burns to the depths of Sheol; it consumes the earth and its produce, and scorches the foundations of the mountains. 23I will heap disasters upon them; I will spend My arrows against them. 24They will be wasted from hunger and ravaged by pestilence and bitter plague; I will send the fangs of wild beasts against them, with the venom of vipers that slither in the dust. 25Outside, the sword will take their children, and inside, terror will strike the young man and the young woman, the infant and the gray-haired man. 26I would have said that I would cut them to pieces and blot out their memory from mankind, 27if I had not dreaded the taunt of the enemy, lest their adversaries misunderstand and say: ‘Our own hand has prevailed; it was not the LORD who did all this.’” 28Israel is a nation devoid of counsel, with no understanding among them. 29If only they were wise, they would understand it; they would comprehend their fate. 30How could one man pursue a thousand, or two put ten thousand to flight, unless their Rock had sold them, unless the LORD had given them up? 31For their rock is not like our Rock, even our enemies concede. 32But their vine is from the vine of Sodom and from the fields of Gomorrah. Their grapes are poisonous; their clusters are bitter. 33Their wine is the venom of serpents, the deadly poison of cobras. 34“Have I not stored up these things, sealed up within My vaults? 35Vengeance is Mine; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; for their day of disaster is near, and their doom is coming quickly." 36For the LORD will vindicate His people and have compassion on His servants when He sees that their strength is gone and no one remains, slave or free. 37He will say: “Where are their gods, the rock in which they took refuge, 38which ate the fat of their sacrifices and drank the wine of their drink offerings? Let them rise up and help you; let them give you shelter! 39See now that I am He; there is no God besides Me. I bring death and I give life; I wound and I heal, and there is no one who can deliver from My hand. 40For I lift up My hand to heaven and declare: As surely as I live forever, 41when I sharpen My flashing sword, and My hand grasps it in judgment, I will take vengeance on My adversaries and repay those who hate Me. 42I will make My arrows drunk with blood, while My sword devours flesh—the blood of the slain and captives, the heads of the enemy leaders.” 43Rejoice, O heavens, with Him, and let all God’s angels worship Him. Rejoice, O nations, with His people; for He will avenge the blood of His children. He will take vengeance on His adversaries and repay those who hate Him; He will cleanse His land and His people.

1Hear the word of the LORD, O children of Israel, for the LORD has a case against the people of the land: “There is no truth, no loving devotion, and no knowledge of God in the land! 2Cursing and lying, murder and stealing, and adultery are rampant; one act of bloodshed follows another. 3Therefore the land mourns, and all who dwell in it will waste away with the beasts of the field and the birds of the air; even the fish of the sea disappear.

1Hear now what the LORD says: “Arise, plead your case before the mountains, and let the hills hear your voice. 2Hear, O mountains, the LORD’s indictment, you enduring foundations of the earth. For the LORD has a case against His people, and He will argue it against Israel: 3‘My people, what have I done to you? Testify against Me how I have wearied you! 4For I brought you up from the land of Egypt and redeemed you from the house of slavery. I sent Moses before you, as well as Aaron and Miriam. 5My people, remember what Balak king of Moab counseled and what Balaam son of Beor answered. Remember your journey from Shittim to Gilgal, so that you may acknowledge the righteousness of the LORD.’” 6With what shall I come before the LORD when I bow before the God on high? Should I come to Him with burnt offerings, with year-old calves? 7Would the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I present my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? 8He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?

5For if you really correct your ways and deeds, if you act justly toward one another, 6if you no longer oppress the foreigner and the fatherless and the widow, and if you no longer shed innocent blood in this place or follow other gods to your own harm, 7then I will let you live in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers forever and ever. 8But look, you keep trusting in deceptive words to no avail. 9Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal, and follow other gods that you have not known, 10and then come and stand before Me in this house, which bears My Name, and say, ‘We are delivered, so we can continue with all these abominations’? 11Has this house, which bears My Name, become a den of robbers in your sight? Yes, I too have seen it, declares the LORD.

1Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“As for you, son of man, will you judge her? Will you pass judgment on the city of bloodshed? Then confront her with all her abominations 3and tell her that this is what the Lord GOD says: ‘O city who brings her own doom by shedding blood within her walls and making idols to defile herself, 4you are guilty of the blood you have shed, and you are defiled by the idols you have made. You have brought your days to a close and have come to the end of your years. Therefore I have made you a reproach to the nations and a mockery to all the lands. 5Those near and far will mock you, O infamous city, full of turmoil. 6See how every prince of Israel within you has used his power to shed blood. 7Father and mother are treated with contempt. Within your walls the foreign resident is exploited, the fatherless and the widow are oppressed. 8You have despised My holy things and profaned My Sabbaths. 9Among you are slanderous men bent on bloodshed; within you are those who eat on the mountain shrines and commit acts of indecency. 10In you they have uncovered the nakedness of their fathers; in you they violate women during their menstrual impurity. 11One man commits an abomination with his neighbor’s wife; another wickedly defiles his daughter-in-law; and yet another violates his sister, his own father’s daughter. 12In you they take bribes to shed blood. You engage in usury, take excess interest, and extort your neighbors. But Me you have forgotten, declares the Lord GOD.

11All Israel has transgressed Your law and turned away, refusing to obey Your voice; so the oath and the curse written in the Law of Moses the servant of God has been poured out on us, because we have sinned against You. 12You have carried out the words spoken against us and against our rulers by bringing upon us a great disaster. For under all of heaven, nothing has ever been done like what has been done to Jerusalem. 13Just as it is written in the Law of Moses, all this disaster has come upon us, yet we have not sought the favor of the LORD our God by turning from our iniquities and giving attention to Your truth. 14Therefore the LORD has kept the calamity in store and brought it upon us. For the LORD our God is righteous in all He does; yet we have not obeyed His voice.

7All this happened because the people of Israel had sinned against the LORD their God, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They had worshiped other gods 8and walked in the customs of the nations that the LORD had driven out before the Israelites, as well as in the practices introduced by the kings of Israel. 9The Israelites secretly did things against the LORD their God that were not right. From watchtower to fortified city, they built high places in all their cities. 10They set up for themselves sacred pillars and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every green tree. 11They burned incense on all the high places like the nations that the LORD had driven out before them. They did wicked things, provoking the LORD to anger. 12They served idols, although the LORD had told them, “You shall not do this thing.” 13Yet through all His prophets and seers, the LORD warned Israel and Judah, saying, “Turn from your wicked ways and keep My commandments and statutes, according to the entire Law that I commanded your fathers and delivered to you through My servants the prophets.” 14But they would not listen, and they stiffened their necks like their fathers, who did not believe the LORD their God. 15They rejected His statutes and the covenant He had made with their fathers, as well as the decrees He had given them. They pursued worthless idols and themselves became worthless, going after the surrounding nations that the LORD had commanded them not to imitate. 16They abandoned all the commandments of the LORD their God and made for themselves two cast idols of calves and an Asherah pole. They bowed down to all the host of heaven and served Baal. 17They sacrificed their sons and daughters in the fire and practiced divination and soothsaying. They devoted themselves to doing evil in the sight of the LORD, provoking Him to anger. 18So the LORD was very angry with Israel, and He removed them from His presence. Only the tribe of Judah remained, 19and even Judah did not keep the commandments of the LORD their God, but lived according to the customs Israel had introduced. 20So the LORD rejected all the descendants of Israel. He afflicted them and delivered them into the hands of plunderers, until He had banished them from His presence. 21When the LORD had torn Israel away from the house of David, they made Jeroboam son of Nebat king, and Jeroboam led Israel away from following the LORD and caused them to commit a great sin. 22The Israelites persisted in all the sins that Jeroboam had committed and did not turn away from them. 23Finally, the LORD removed Israel from His presence, as He had declared through all His servants the prophets. So Israel was exiled from their homeland into Assyria, where they are to this day.

31Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. 32It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant they broke, though I was a husband to them," declares the LORD. 33"But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD. I will put My law in their minds and inscribe it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they will be My people. 34No longer will each man teach his neighbor or his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,' because they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquities and will remember their sins no more."

25I will also sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. I will cleanse you from all your impurities and all your idols.|||||| | IP¹ | IP² | C | TOSK | TT¹ | TT² | TT³ | TT⁴ | TT⁵ | TT⁶ | LT | ATN 26I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27And I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes and to carefully observe My ordinances.||| | IP¹ | IP² | IP³ | C | TOSK | TT¹ | TT² | TT³ | TT⁴ | TT⁵ | ATN